Commentary on FORGIVENESS from the book, "One Day My Soul Just Opened Up: 40 Days and 40 Nights Toward Spiritual Strength and Personal Growth by Iyanla Vanzant

Most people believe that when you forgive someone, you are doing something for them. The truth is, when you forgive, you are doing it for yourself. As it relates to forgiveness, you must give up what you do not want in order to make room for what you do want. You must give up pain, anger, resentment, and fear in order to experience goodness, joy, peace, and love. For some reason, we believe that if we forgive someone they might get to the good stuff before we do. Offering another the forgiveness they need strengthens the spiritual nature in you. It is this nature and your consciousness of this nature that reaps you the benefits of life. When you withhold forgiveness or love from anyone, for any reason, it diminishes your awareness of the abundance of good in life. You are stuck in so much old stuff, new stuff has no way of getting to you. In essence, the good that you withhold from others will be withheld from you.

As long as you hold on to the belief that anyone on earth can do anything to you, you will be unable to forgive. People cannot change who you are and what you were born to be. They can create obstacles in your path. They can do things that make you believe you are other than what you are, but people cannot change, alter, or in any way hinder the truth of your being. The truth is you are divine. The truth is that the divine source of life made you perfect and complete, and nothing anyone does can change that. The truth is we all forget that we are divine and act out of our human fears, beliefs, and perceptions. In doing so, we offend one another's sensibilities, we ignore one another's boundaries, we lash out, strike out, and in other uncompassionate ways dump our pain on one another. It does not change who we are. It makes us believe we are less than we are. This makes us mad, and in holding on to our madness, we refuse to forgive.

There is no one who does not make mistakes. Mistakes are a way of human life. We mistake what we see for the truth. We do not realize that there is always more to life than we can see and that the truth is not always visible to the naked eye. We mistake what we know for all there is. What we do not realize is, we don't always know the whole story. At any given time in your life, there are characters, plots, and story lines that have not yet been presented. When you do not know the whole story, almost any conclusion you draw will be a mistaken conclusion. We mistake our experiences, particularly bad experiences, to be indications of who we are and what we deserve. Even when we know we deserve better, we mistake our experiences for the obstacles that can keep us from experiencing more. Sometimes, we make the mistake of thinking that other people have the power to control or alter our destiny. It is our beliefs, mistaken and otherwise, that ultimately determine what we will do or be in life, not another person.

If we did not make mistakes we would not learn what works and what does not work. Each time we make a mistake we are provided with an opportunity to be corrected. The divine spirit of life is self-correcting. It will show us our mistakes in the form of the pain and suffering that we endure. It will show us our mistakes through mental unrest and emotional dissatisfaction. Unfortunately, when we encounter the results of our mistaken beliefs, choices, and perceptions, we blame other people. We hold others accountable for what we think, feel, or believe. We believe our experiences make us who we are in life, and then we blame the players in our experiences. The biggest mistake we all make is believing that other people can hurt us. When we believe they have done so, we are unwilling to forgive them.

When being hurt and angry and believing you are less than you are does not get you what you want, it is time to forgive. When you cannot move beyond the memories of what someone else has done to you and those memories keep you hurt, angry, or in any way limited in life, it is time to forgive. When the only thing you remember about someone is what they did to you and not the fact that they are a human being prone to make mistakes, it is time to forgive. When you believe you know the whole story of why someone did what they did and believe that if they had done anything else, you would be different, it is time to forgive. If you don't like yourself, it is time to forgive. If there is anyone, anywhere on the planet you can honestly say that you do not love, it is time to forgive. If you are overweight, underweight, out of cash, in a bad relationship, working in an unfulfilling career, have corns on your little toes, have a cold or a toothache, there is somebody, somewhere you need to forgive. Start with yourself. Forgive yourself for believing that anyone who occupies the flesh form as a human being could in any way alter the truth of your being. Once you've done that it will be easy to forgive anyone for anything, particularly if you are holding them hostage for making human errors.

Copyright © 1998 by Iyanla Vanzant