True forgiveness heals

Holding a grudge is like giving somebody permission to live inside your head rent-free. Also it is very easy to use the betrayals, injustices, abuse, abandonment and hurts committed against you as the justification for everything else that is wrong in your life. Often when we find ourselves stuck it is easy to retreat behind blame and see ourselves as victims which prevents us from moving forward. Restarting smart and really taking up the opportunity of a second chance starts with embracing forgiveness, i.e. looking inwards and taking complete responsibility for your experiences without blaming or condemning yourself or others. Forgiveness is the gateway to loving and accepting your true self, the You that you were created to be.

It's a common mistake to believe that in order to forgive someone or even yourself requires you to take some kind of dramatic action on your part and/or the surrendering of your beliefs and values. In actual fact forgiveness is effortless because it is an act of opening and trusting that the universe will bring what is required for you to heal. Perhaps it is because of our great advancements that we believe that we are instrumental in all processes and nothing can happen without our deliberate intervention. However, the universe runs perfectly well without us and brings forgiveness where it is needed. The only part we have to play is to provide the right conditions, i.e. to be open to the magic...

Last year I decided I would grow lots of vegetables in my garden. Now I have to tell you something about my garden in order for you to understand what a monumental decision this was. My garden is a lazy person's dream! If you are the sort of gardener who wants all the fringe benefits of a garden, i.e, somewhere pleasant to sit out when the sun is shining, an extra room to escape to win your house seems more full than usual or the perfect place to burn food on a sunny day without setting the rest of the house on fire a.k.a. a barbecue; then my garden is for you. It requires little or no maintenance. I have slow-growing grass (which means I can get away with cutting it once a month even if it rains a lot. For the non gardeners reading this: the more it rains the faster your grass grows); borders that are full of shrubs and covered with decorative slate to suppress the weeds and large areas of decking and paved  patio. The upside is that I don't have to do much gardening. The downside; I have very little soil plant things in. As I had decided to grow crops I had to get lots of planters which I put on  my patio and on the decking. To maximise the growing space available I decided to "go up" and so I also purchased a number of hanging planters so that I could cultivate the available airspace too.

Having laid out the ground  I duly sowed my crops and gave them lots of care and attention and as a consequence in the autumn I harvest a reasonably sized bounty – not quite enough to supply the local farmers market, but I was happy. This year I returned to type and decided to go with the lazy gardener persona and the minimalist approach, i.e. leave it to nature and mow the lawn infrequently. To my surprise, I noticed a tomato plant growing in a pot. I hadn't planted it there, indeed I had planted anything anywhere! What had happened was nature had stepped in. the tomate had self seeded from one of the hanging planters immediately above the pot, which last year grew small cherry tomatoes.

Whlist most people would have been elated; the lazy gardener in me only saw more hard work. "Well", I thought  "I didn't plant it  so I'm not going to look after it!"   I didn't do anything at all to the maveric tomatoe plant.. My husband, who takes pity on all the container plants because they don't have access to hidden supplies of water deep underground, included the  unplanned offspring in his daily watering cycle. Apart from this,  the tomatoe was left to its own devices. Despite my lack of interest the tomato plant grew and produced a healthy crop of cherry tomatoes. It had all it needed: water, soil and the intention to grow.

Forgiveness is like this. As I said earlier it is a common misconception that in order to forgive you have to do something elaborate, or make a big gesture, like I had done the previous year with my crops. When actually all that is required is the seed of the intention to forgive and the soil, i.e. the openness to the idea of forgiveness, held within your being. (I could say your heart but I find that it is a whole-body process. The heart has long been used as a metaphor for the centre of our being, however, more and more evidence is emerging to demonstrate that our thoughts and feelings are whole-body processes rather than being located in either our heads or our “hearts“).

Once you open to the idea that forgivenesss is a process and you plant  the intention;the universe, like nature, simply allows it to grow. Imagine that your forgiveness is a tiny seed that you have planted in a pot of soil. Each day you water it and nothing happens there is no movement, no noticeable change yet beneath the earth there is activity. Then suddenly without any help, two tiny leaves appear breaking through the soil.

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