What do you do when a Gun's pointed at you?

In the last blog we talked about three ways to climb the emotional ladder:

1)      What anyone says about you is none of your business

2)      Don’t take things personally

3)      Pray for someone that you fear, are upset with or angry with

These are very important tools to stay in a healthy space within yourself and make your interactions with other people much easier and pleasant.

Now I want to talk about the most important tool, which when used over and over again within situations that keep you in the lower rungs of the emotional ladder, will allow you to live at the peak of your existence here on the planet. What am I talking about? Well it is called forgiveness. 

Forgiveness is the most highly decorated tool that anyone can use and the most forgotten tool in our society.

There are two ways to use forgiveness; one is to forgive another and the other is to forgive you. When you hold a grudge or think of yourself as a victim you will find that you are wasting energy. You may think that you have been wronged and in turn have feelings of anger, irritation, frustration or sadness. The energy used to stay in these emotions is heavy and painful to you and you alone. 

You may spend time trying to talk to people you know about how you have been wronged, wanting them to join you and tell you that is not fair and take your side so that they can help you carry the burden. But even if they take your side it will not help you because they cannot remove the pain you are feeling. If you decide not to talk about it, and just hold onto being wronged silently, you will find yourself in the same trap of pain because you are sitting on a low emotional rung of the ladder, and thus living at a lower vibration. The irony is that this pain you feel is from a story…a story that you continue to tell yourself and re-live over and over again. It is based in the past, it’s not even happening anymore, but you continue to live it because you choose to live from that one moment in time. The longer you hold onto the wrong, the past, the story…the lower down the emotional ladder you go.

So how do you detach from the story and find yourself back in the present? I am going to tell you an intimate story about myself so that you can see how forgiveness has worked in my life. When I was about 6 years old my mother was dating a very dysfunctional man who had a lot of anger, a lot of the time. One night as I rode in the car with my mother we realized we were being followed. The car following us got in front of us and forced our car to stop by blocking the road. We knew it was him, and we knew we were alone in the woods, just our car and his. He came over to our car and by the look of things he was pretty drunk and very angry. The first thing he did was to take the keys out of the car and throw them into the woods. My mom told me to stay in the car as she got out to try to talk to him. He was violent with her and then he got back in his car and drove away. My mom went into the woods to look for the keys but could not find them. He came back again and proceeded to do the same thing to my mom and then left again. He returned yet a third time to find me and my mom looking for the keys in the woods. We both ran back to our car and before my mom could shut the door he stopped her and screamed at her.

This is the part in my ‘story’ that is really bad. There was a gun in our back seat (I believe it was a 22 that actually belonged to him that my mother didn’t even know was there) and he picked it up and pointed it at my mother and then at me. He was saying things like “What are you going to do Todd? You think you’re a man, so what are you going to do?” as I looked down the barrel. I began to cry hard and he kept up his remarks a little longer. He left again, and another car was driving past us and they stopped. We got in their car, and though he did come back, the person that picked us up drove away and we were finally free from the situation.

This story stayed with me and I lived with it for years to come. I would say that not until my early 30’s did I finally neutralize the story and find peace with it. The first step to finding peace was that I forgave him for his actions, deep within my heart and soul. I realized that he did not understand or know what he was doing to my mother and me. I meditated. I saw him in a bright light and connected with him spirit to spirit. I told him within my meditation “I forgive you and hope that you find peace in this life”. It turns out this was actually the easy part of my forgiveness.

My next act of forgiveness was to forgive myself.  I know I did nothing wrong within this story, for I was only a 6 year old child. But what I had to forgive myself for was holding onto the anger, sadness, pain, suffering and resentment I had towards this man. I had been holding onto these feelings, thereby keeping myself in a lower vibration, for over 25 years!

I realized that many of my experiences in life were based in this story. My feelings towards other people and myself were tainted by living in the past…in this story of fear and anger and victimization.  When I realized that I did not have to live in this story and forgave myself for not realizing it sooner, there was a shift in my energy that allowed me to live in a higher vibration, or on a higher rung of the emotional ladder. I found love and gratitude towards myself and towards him. Once I forgave myself for holding on to all that pain and all that time, peace has truly been my present.

This is not to say that once you find peace and forgiveness, your work is done. It is something that I must continually call upon, from the smallest grievance to something more profound for me, like the story I just shared with you. The littlest things can eat us up and lower our vibration. I try to have a deep appreciation for all that comes into my life, knowing that through forgiveness, I will find new ways to love others and myself.

Forgiveness is a blessing that anyone can give to another and in so doing, give it to themself. It is the gateway to fulfillment because when you stop living in the past, you are able to live in the present.  Ask yourself, who have you not forgiven? What story or stories are you holding on to?

Please leave comments or email me if you have questions. 

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todd@healingguy.com