How to forgive someone who has hurt you in 15 steps

Forgiving others is essential for spiritual growth. Your experience of someone who
has hurt you, while painful, is now nothing more that a thought or feeling that you
carry around. These thoughts of resentment, anger, and hatred represent slow, debilitating energies that will dis-empower you if you continue to let these thoughts occupy space in your head. If
you could release them, you would know more peace.

Below I share how to forgive someone who has hurt you in 15 steps:

Step 1: Move On to the Next Act
Your past history and all of your hurts are no longer here in your physical reality. Don’t allow them to be here in your mind, muddying your present moments. Your life is like a play with several acts. Some of
the characters who enter have short roles to play, others, much larger. Some are
villains and others are good guys. But all of them are necessary, otherwise theywouldn’t be in the play.Embrace them all, and move on to the next act.

Step 2: Reconnect to Spirit
Make a new agreement with yourself to always stay connected to Spirit even when
it seems to be the most difficult thing to do. If you do this, you will allow whatever
degree of perfect harmony that your body was designed for to proliferate. Turn your
hurts over to God, and allow Spirit to flow through you.
Your new agreement with reality in which you’ve blended your physical self and your personality with your spiritual
God-connected self will begin to radiate a higher energy of love and light. Wherever
you go, others will experience the glow of your God consciousness, and disharmony and disorder and all manner of problems
simply will not flourish in your presence. Become “an instrument of thy peace,” as
St. Francis desires in the first line of his famous prayer.

Step 3: Don’t Go to Sleep Angry
Each night as I drift off to sleep, i adamantly refuse to use this precious time to review anything that I do not want to be reinforced in the hours of being immersed in my subconscious mind. I choose to impress upon my subconscious mind my
conception of myself as a Divine creator in alignment with the one mind. I reiterate my
I ams , which I have placed in my imagination, and I remember that my slumber will be dominated by my last waking concept of myself. I am
peaceful, I am content, I am love, and I attract only to myself those who are in
alignment with my highest ideals of myself. This is my nightly ritual, always
eschewing any temptation to go over any fear of unpleasantness that my ego might be asking me to review. I assume the feeling in my body of those Inam statements already fulfilled, and I know
that I’m allowing myself to be programmed while asleep, for the next day I rise
knowing that I am a free agent.
In sleep man impresses
theb subconscious
mind with his conception of
himself.

Step 4: Switch the Focus from
Blaming Others to Understanding
Yourself
Whenever you’re upset over the conduct of
others, take the focus off those you’re
holding responsible for your inner
distress. Shift your mental energy to
allowing yourself to be with whatever
you’re feeling — let the experience be as it
may, without blaming others for your
feelings. Don’t blame yourself either! Just
allow the experience to unfold and tell
yourself that no one has the power to
make you uneasy without your consent,
and that you’re unwilling to grant that
authority to this person right now.
Tell yourself that you are willing to freely
experience your emotions without
calling them “wrong” or needing to chase
them away. In this way, you’ve made a
shift to self-mastery. It’s important to
bypass blame, and even to bypass your
desire to understand the other person;
instead, focus on understanding yourself.
By taking responsibility for how you
choose to respond to anything or anyone,
you’re aligning yourself with the beautiful
dance of life. By changing the way
you choose to perceive the power that
others have over you and you will see a
bright new world of unlimited potential for
yourself and you will know instantly how
to forgive and let go of anything.

Step 5: Avoid Telling People What to
Do
Avoid thoughts and activities that involve
telling people who are perfectly capable of
making their own choices what to do.
In your family, remember that you do not
own anyone. The poet Kahlil Gibran
reminds you:
Your children
are not your
children. They
are the sons and
daughters of
Life’s longing
for itself. They
come through
you but not from
you . . .
This is always true. In fact, disregard any
inclination to dominate in all of your
relationships. Listen rather than expound.
Pay attention to yourself when you’re
having judgmental opinions and see where
self-attention takes you. When you replace
an ownership mentality with one of
allowing, you’ll begin to see the true
unfolding of the Tao in yourself and other
people. From that moment on, you’ll be
free of frustration with those who don’t
behave according to your ego-dominated
expectations.

Step 6: Learn to Let Go and Be Like
Water
Rather than attempting to dominate with
your forcefulness, be like water: flow
everywhere there’s an opening. Soften
your hard edges by being more tolerant of
contrary opinions. Interfere less, and
substitute listening for directing and
telling. When someone offers you their
viewpoint, try responding with: “I’ve never
considered that before—thank you. I’ll give
it some thought.”
When you give
up interfering,
and opt instead
to stream like
water—gently,
softly, and
unobtrusively—
you become
forgiveness
itself.
Picture yourself as having the same
qualities as water. Allow your soft, weak,
yielding, fluid self to enter places where
you previously were excluded because
of your inclination to be solid and hard.
Flow softly into the lives of those with
whom you feel conflicted: Picture yourself
entering their private inner selves, seeing
perhaps for the first time what
they’re experiencing. Keep this image of
yourself as gently coursing water, and
watch how your relationships change.

Step 7: Take Responsibility for Your
Part
Removing blame means never
assigning responsibility to anyone else for
what you’re experiencing. It means that
you’re willing to say, “I may not
understand why I feel this way, why I have
this illness, why I’ve been victimized,
or why I had this accident, but I’m willing
to say without any guilt or resentment that
I own it. I live with, and I am responsible
for, having it in my life.”
If you take responsibility for having the
experience, then at least you have
a chance to also take responsibility for
removing it or learning from it. If you’re in
some small (perhaps unknown) way
responsible for that migraine headache or
that depressed feeling, then you can go to
work to remove it or discover what its
message is for you. If, on the other
hand, someone or something else is
responsible in your mind, then of course
you’ll have to wait until they change for
you to get better. And that is unlikely to
occur. So you go home with nothing and
are left with nothing when peace is really
on the other side of the coin.

Step 8: Let Go of Resentments
What causes annoyance and anger after a
dispute? The generic response would be a
laundry list detailing why the other person
was wrong and how illogically and
unreasonably they behaved, concluding
with something like, “I have a right to be
upset when my [daughter, mother-in-
law, ex-husband, boss, or whomever
you’re thinking of] speaks to me that
way!”
But if you’re interested in living a Tao-
filled life, it’s imperative that you reverse
this kind of thinking. Resentments don’t
come from the conduct of the other party
in an altercation—no, they survive and
thrive because you’re unwilling to end that
altercation with an offering of kindness,
love, and authentic forgiveness. As Lao-
Tzu says:
Someone must
risk
returning injury
with kindness,
or hostility will
never turn to
goodwill. —
Lao-Tzu
So when all of the yelling, screaming, and
threatening words have been expressed,
the time for calm has arrived. Remember
that no storm lasts forever, and that hidden
within are always seeds of
tranquility. There is a time for hostility and
a time for peace.

Step 9: Be Kind Instead of Right
There is a Chinese proverb, If you’re going
to pursue revenge, you’d better dig
two graves , which is saying to me:
your resentments will destroy you.
The world is just the way it is. The people
who are behaving “badly” in the world are
doing what they’re supposed to be doing.
You can process it in any way that you
choose. If you’re filled with anger about all
of those “problems,” you are one more
person who contributes to the pollution of
anger. Instead, remember that
you have no need to make others wrong
or to retaliate when you’ve been wronged.
Imagine if someone says something to you
that you find offensive, and rather than
opting for resentment, you learn
to depersonalize what you’ve just heard
and respond with kindness. You are willing
to freely send the higher, faster energies of
love, peace, joy, forgiveness, and
kindness as your response to whatever
comes your way. You do this for yourself.
You would rather be kind than right.

Step 10: Practice Giving
In the midst of arguments or
disagreements, practice giving rather than
taking before you exit. Giving
involves leaving the ego behind. While it
wants to win and show its superiority by
being contrary and disrespectful, your Tao
nature wants to be at peace and live in
harmony. You can reduce your quarreling
time to almost zero if you practice this
procedure:
Wherever you are, whenever you feel
strong emotions stirring in you and you
notice yourself feeling the need to “be
right,” silently recite the following words
from the Prayer of Saint Francis :
Where there is
injury, [let me
bring] pardon.
Be a giver of forgiveness as he teaches:
Bring love to hate, light to darkness, and
pardon to injury. Read these words daily,
for they’ll help you overcome your ego’s
demands and know the fullness of life.

Step 11: Stop Looking for Occasions
to Be Offended
When you live at or below ordinary
levels of awareness, you spend a great
deal of time and energy finding
opportunities to be offended. A news
report, a rude stranger, someone
cursing, a sneeze, a black cloud —just
about anything will do if you’re looking for
an occasion to be offended. Become a
person who refuses to be offended by any
one, any thing, or any set
of circumstances.
If you have enough faith in your own
beliefs, you’ll find that it’s impossible to
be offended by the beliefs and conduct of
others.
Not being offended is a way of saying, “I
have control over how I’m going to feel,
and I choose to feel peaceful regardless of
what I observe going on. When you feel
offended, you’re practicing judgment. You
judge someone else to be stupid,
insensitive, rude, arrogant, inconsiderate,
or foolish, and then you find yourself upset
and offended by their conduct. What you
may not realize is that when you judge
another person, you do not define them.
You define yourself as someone
who needs to judge others.

Step 12: Don’t Live In the Past – Be Present
When we find it difficult to forgive, often it is because we are not living in the present,
and instead, we assign more importance to the past. We assign a good portion of our
energy and attention lamenting the good old days that are gone forever as the reason why we can’t be happy and fulfilled today. “Everything has changed,” “No one respects anyone else like they used to…” This is assigning responsibility to the past for why you can’t
be happy today. It’s doubtful that other creatures waste the present moment in thoughts of
past and future. A beaver only does beaver, and he does it right in the moment. He doesn’t spend his days ruminating over the fact that his beaver siblings received more attention, or his
father beaver ran off with a younger beaver when he was growing up. He’s always in
the now. We can learn much from God’s creatures about enjoying the present moment rather than using it upvconsumed with anger over the past or worry about the future. Practice living in the moment by appreciating the beauty around you now.

Step 13: Embrace Your Dark Times
In a universe that’s an intelligent system with a divine creative force supporting it, there simply can be no accidents. As tough as it is
to acknowledge, you had to go through what you went through in order to get to where you are today, and the evidence is
that you did. Every spiritual advance that you will make in your life will very likely be preceded by some kind of fall or seeming disaster. Those dark times, accidents, tough episodes, break ups, periods of impoverishment, illnesses,
abuses, and broken dreams were all in order. They happened, so you can
assume they had to and you can’t unhappen them.
Embrace them from that perspective, and then understand them, accept them, honor them, and finally transform them.

Step 14: Refrain from Judgement

When you stop judging and
simply become an observer, you will know inner peace. With that sense of inner peace, you’ll find yourself happier and free
of the negative energy of resentment. A bonus is that you’ll find that others are much more attracted to you. A peaceful person attracts peaceful energy.

If I’m to be a being of love living from my highest self, that means that love is all Ibhave inside of me and all that I have
to give away. If someone I love chooses to be something other than what my ego would prefer, I must send them the ingredients of my highest self, which is God, and God is love.
My criticism and condemnation of the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of others-regardless of how right and moral my
human self convinces me it is—is a stepbaway from God-realization. And it is God-
consciousness that allows for my wishes to be fulfilled, as long as they are aligned with my Source of being. I can come up with a long list of reasons why I should be judgmental and condemnatory toward
another of God’s children and why, damn it, I am right. Yet if I want to perfect my
own world—and I so want to do so—then I must substitute love for these judgments.

Step 15: Send Love

steadfast—which means that we never slip in our abstention of thoughts of harmvdirected toward others—then all living
creatures cease to feel enmity in our presence.

Now I know that we are all human: you, me, all of us. We do occasionally slip and
retreat from our highest self into judgment, criticism, and condemnation, but this is
not a rationale for choosing to practice that kind of interaction. I can only tell you that when I finally got it, and I sent only love to another of God’s children whom I had been judging and criticizing, I
got the immediate result of inner contentment.

I urge you to send love in place of those judgments and criticisms to others when
you feel they impede your joy and happiness, and hold them in that place of love. Notice that if you stay steadfast,
when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change .

A Meditation to End on Love
Picture yourself at the termination of a quarrel or major dispute. Rather than
reacting with old patterns of residual anger, revenge, and hurt, visualize offering kindness, love, and forgiveness.

Do this right now by sending out these “true virtue” thoughts to any resentments you’re currently carrying.

Make this your standard response to any future altercations: I end on love, no
matter what!