What Happens When We Truly Forgive? Peter Russell

“With forgiveness, the grip that we’re releasing is a mental one. We’re letting go of the judgments and grievances we are holding against a person, and our beliefs about how they should have behaved.” ~ Peter Russell

When we are hurt – or feel wronged in some way – it doesn’t simply end in that moment …

More often than not it continues: replayed in the mind … revisited in memory … turned over again and again – with “shoulda, woulda, coulda” …

The other person may no longer be there, and yet the experience seems to persist, as if still unfolding within us. What remains is not the event itself, but what we are holding on about it: judgments, reactions, and the sense of what should – or should not – have happened.

And in this holding, something begins to tighten. It is not that we cannot let go, but that the letting go is resisted … so the hurt continues.

The pain is no longer coming from the other, but from the way it continues to live within us.

Peter Russell posits that

“… our discomfort is coming, not from their actual behavior, but from how we’ve interpreted it—the story we are telling ourselves about what they’ve done…”

Once we see that it is us – our interpretation – something begins to shift … through clarity not effort. The holding onto is no longer sustained in the same way. The “original grip” starts to loosen …

… and something softens on its own.

And what if forgiveness is not an act at all?

But is something that becomes evident when the holding onto begins to fall away: nothing is pushed away … nothing is kept.

And perhaps in such “seeing,” something deeper is revealed – as suggested by Peter:

“True forgiveness comes when we recognize that deep down the other person was wanting exactly what we are wanting.”

Maybe this “recognition” is another “seed” of peace?