Perhaps you are thinking, "Well, it's easy to say we should forgive. I have tried, but I cannot do it."
You have all these reasons, all these justifications why you cannot forgive. But this is not the truth. The truth is that you cannot forgive because you learned not to forgive, because you practiced not to forgive, because you mastered not to forgive.
There was a time when we were children when forgiveness was our instinct. Before we caught the mental disease, it was effortless and natural to forgive. We used to forgive others almost right away. If you see two children playing together, and they start to fight and hit each other, the children cry and run to their mothers. "Hey, she hit me!" One mother goes to talk with the other mother. The two mothers have a big fight, and five minutes later the two children are playing together again as if nothing happened. Now the mothers hate each other for the rest of their lives.
It is not that we need to learn forgiveness, because we are born with the capacity for forgiveness. But guess what happened? We learned the opposite behavior, and we practiced the opposite behavior, and now forgiveness is very difficult. Whoever does something to us, forget it, that's it, she is out of our life. It becomes a war of pride. Why? Because our personal importance grows when we don't forgive. It makes our opinion more important when we can say, "Whatever she does, I will not forgive her. What she did is unforgivable."
The real problem is pride. Because of pride, because of honor, we add more fire to the injustice to remind ourselves that we cannot forgive. Guess who is going to suffer and accumulate more and more emotional poison? We are going to suffer for all kinds of things people do around us, even though they have nothing to do with us.
We also learn to suffer just to punish whoever abused us. We behave like a little child having a tantrum, just asking for attention. I'm hurting myself just to say, "Look at what I am doing because of you." It's a big joke, but that's exactly what we do. What we really want to say is, "God, forgive me," but we will not say a word until God comes and asks us for forgiveness first. Many times we don't even know why we are so upset with our parents, our friends, our mate.
We are upset, and if for some reason the other person asks us for forgiveness, right away we start to cry and say, "Oh no, you forgive me."
Go and find the little child in the corner having a tantrum. Take your pride and put it in the trash. You don't need it. Just let go of the personal importance and ask for forgiveness. Forgive others, and you will see miracles start to happen in your life.
First, make a list of everyone you believe you need to ask for forgiveness. Then ask them for forgiveness. Even if there is not enough time to call everyone, ask for their forgiveness in your prayers and through your dreams. Second, make a list of all the people who hurt you, all the people you need to forgive. Start with your parents, your brothers and sisters, your children, your spouse, your friends, your lover, your cat, your dog, your government, and God.
Now, you are going to forgive others by knowing that whatever anyone did to you had nothing to do with you. Everyone dreams her own dream, remember? The words and actions that hurt you are merely a reaction to the demons in that person's own mind. She is dreaming in hell, and you are a secondary character in her dream. Nothing anyone does is because of you. Once you have this awareness, and you do not take it personally, compassion and understanding will lead you to forgiveness.
Start working on forgiveness; start practicing forgiveness. It will be difficult at first, but then it just becomes a habit. The only way to recover forgiveness is to practice again. You practice and practice, until in the end you see if you can forgive yourself. At a certain point, you find that you must forgive yourself for all those wounds and all that poison you created for yourself in your own dream. When you forgive yourself, self-acceptance begins and self-love grows. That is the supreme forgiveness – when you finally forgive yourself.
Create an act of power and forgive yourself for everything you have done in your whole life. And if you believe in past lives, forgive everything you believe you did in all of your past lives. The concept of karma is true only because we believe it is true. Because of our beliefs about being good and bad, we feel ashamed about what we believe is bad. We find ourselves guilty, we believe we deserve to be punished, and we punish ourselves. We have the belief that what we create is so dirty that it needs to be cleaned. And just because you believe it, then, "Thy will be done." It is real for you. You create your karma, and you have to pay for it. That is how powerful you are. To break old karma is simple. You just stop that belief by refusing to believe it, and the karma is gone. You don't need to suffer, you don't need to pay anything; it is over. If you can forgive yourself, the karma is gone just like that. From this point on, you can start all over again. Then life becomes easy, because forgiveness is the only way to clean the emotional wounds. Forgiveness is the only way to heal them.
Once we have cleaned the wounds, we are going to use a powerful medicine to accelerate the process of healing. Of course, the medicine also comes from the same great Master: It is Love. Love is the medicine that accelerates the process of healing. There is no other medicine but unconditional love. Not: I love you or I love myself if. There is no if. There is no justification. There is no explanation. It is just to love. Love yourself, love your neighbor, and love your enemies. This is simple, common sense, but we cannot love others until we love ourselves. That is why we must begin with self-love.
There are millions of ways to express your happiness, but there is only one way to really be happy, and that is to love. There is no other way. You cannot be happy if you don't love yourself. That is a fact. If you don't love yourself, you don't have any opportunity to be happy. You cannot share what you do not have. If you do not love yourself, you cannot love anyone else either. But you can have a need for love, and if there's someone who needs you, that's what humans call love. That is not love. That is possessiveness, that is selfishness, that is control with no respect. Don't lie to yourself; that is not love.
Love coming out of you is the only way to be happy. Unconditional love for yourself. Complete surrender to that love for yourself. You no longer resist life. You no longer reject yourself. You no longer carry all that blame and guilt. You just accept who you are, and accept everyone else the way he or she is. You have the right to love, to smile, to be happy, to share your love, and to not be afraid to receive it also.
That is the healing. Three simple points: the truth, forgiveness, and self-love. With these three points, the whole world will heal and will no longer be a mental hospital.
These three keys to heal the mind were given to us by Jesus, but he is not the only one who taught us how to heal. Buddha did the same; Krishna did the same. Many other Masters came to the same conclusions and gave us these same lessons. All around the world, from Japan to Mexico to Peru to Egypt to Greece, there were humans who were healed. They saw that the disease is in the human mind, and they used these three methods: the truth, forgiveness, and self-love. If we can see our state of mind as a disease, we find there is a cure. We don't have to suffer any longer; if we are aware that our mind is sick, that our emotional body is wounded, we can also heal.
Just imagine if all humans could start being truthful with themselves, start forgiving everyone, and start loving everyone. If all humans loved in this way, they would no longer be selfish; they would be open to give and receive, and they would no longer judge each other. Gossiping would be over, and the emotional poison would simply dissolve.