What is Forgiveness?

Forgiveness means that you do not carry the baggage of an experience.

When you choose not to forgive, the experience that you do not forgive sticks with you.

When you choose not to forgive, it is like agreeing to wear dark, gruesome sunglasses that distort everything, and it is you who are focused every day to look at Life through those contaminated lenses because you have chosen to keep them. You wish everyone else to see the world that way because you wish to see the world that way, and it is indeed the world that you are looking at, but it is only you who sees it. You are looking through the lenses of your own contaminated love.

Forgiveness means that you do not hold others responsible for your experiences. If you do not hold yourself accountable for what you experience, you will hold someone else accountable, and if you are not satisfied with what you experience, you will seek to change it by manipulating that person. Complaining, for example, is exactly that dynamic of wanting someone to be responsible for what you experience and to fix something for you.

excerpt from The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav