Our ability to be happy and successful, to have freedom and independence, depends on our ability to forgive. Our capacity to live a presperorous and abundant life, our willingness to allow ourselves to have what we need and attitude to what others have – especially if we don’t have it – are all also affected by our capacity to forgive. If we made a mistake in the past around money, maybe we did not handle it well, or spend it well. Or maybe we grew up in a poor family, then this can cause us to feel that we do not deserve certain kinds of prosperity so that if we do acquire some wealth of beneficial circumstances we somehow manage to sabotage ourselves and lose it, or somehow manage to make sure that we don’t to keep it.
It is important to realize that any aspect in life in which we have not forgiven ourselves harms not only us, it also harms those around us. This is true whether it is about love, friendships, work opportunities, or money. What we do not allow ourselves to have then; we do not have that to share.
If I made a big mistake with money and did not forgive myself for it, then I may be tempted to limit the flow of money into my life. I don’t want to make the same mistake again. I be unconsciously trying to limit the size of future mistakes I can make by limiting the amount of money I earn, or I may allow myself to earn it, but be resistant and fearful to enjoying it and finding any pleasure in having it. These restrictions I place on myself also affect those around me. It will affect my relationships, with family, with colleagues, with business associates and so on. I will be resisting the flow of abundance from myself to others.
In order to free up my energy around the issue I would need to forgive myself so that I can gain the wisdom and insight from the mistakes I made rather than being stuck in self judgment and self blame. When we forgive ourselves we learn from our mistakes rather than being frozen or traumatized by them. When we haven’t forgiven a situation the learning from that situation, in the form of the experiential nutrients which we can ingest from it, are unavailable to us as the experience is frozen solid. We then have numbness or trauma, and have lesions, or wounds, rather than useful lessons. If all we have learned from an experience is self judgement and self blame then we have not really integrated the experience, we are simply experiencing the pain of continuously trying to cauterize that experience.
As we forgive ourselves we allow what is useful from the experience to become available to us and we gain new insights and awareness from it. We then gain some ’altitude’ from it and our perspective in life becomes wider and broader. We then gain something from those experience which was not available to us till we forgave ourselves.
Another way forgiveness helps our ability to create more prosperity and abundance in our lives is to when we use it to forgive others – especially if we resent them for what they have.
Now we all want to create a healthy world where everyone gets a chance to flourish and people don’t taken advantage of by those who gain wealth in explosive ways. We all want to see an end to exploitation, especially the exploitation of poor and disadvantaged people, so that is not what I am referring to here. I referring to situations where our resentment, jealousy and envy of others is blocking us from creating the very thing we want that they already have.
If we resent someone for what they have it is far less likely that we will allow ourselves to ever have it. If we believe that they had to be ‘bad’, ‘greedy’, or ‘corrupt’ in order to get what they have, then we are less to allow ourselves in any way to “be like them” and have what they have… Also our feeling or focussed on bitterness and resentment and not on the type of creativity and insightful ideas which would allow us to create similar positive experience for ourselves
Of course, there are bad, corrupt, and greedy people who manage to accumulate a lot of material things. But, there are also good, honest, and generous people who manage to do that too. The issue is, to not have general attitude to a specific group of people and think of ‘them’ as all bad. Being envious or jealous of others just gets in the way of us getting our own needs met so there is no point harboring ill will against other people in this way. Besides, those who have what we want are those best placed to let us know how to get that same thing. They are not likely to want to help us if we are looking at them with a sour and disapproving face, or relating to them with a contemptuous attitude.
If you know someone in your neighborhood, or a colleague, or whoever, who is doing very well. Notice if any envy, or resentment arises in you. Then see if you can forgive them for whatever you feel ‘they’ are doing to you. Also see if you can forgive yourself if you feel guilty or ashamed for feeling that way about them.
The more we forgive others, and the more we forgive ourselves, for whatever reason, the more out whole attitude and perspective in life changes. It is like we gain altitude, and then have a broader and wider perspective that I mentioned earlier. When I came across a participant on one of my workshops a few weeks after it she told me, “The more I do The Four Steps to Forgiveness the more everything changes for the better… Not just the things I am working on forgiving… Everything is changing for the better…” She is absolutely right. That is how it works.
Forgive yourself and forgive others and your whole perspective on life becomes more abundant and more prosperous whether it is on the level of making a living, your relationships, your sense of purpose in life, or whatever. Every change for the better.
By William Fergus Martin
William is the Founder of The Global Forgiveness Initiative. His book Forgiveness is Power is published internationally and is available from leading bookstores. All proceeds from William’s books go towards promoting forgiveness. http://williamfergusmartin.com/ http://wfm-cn.com/ (chinese langauge site)