Forgiving isn't something you do for someone else. It's something you do for yourself. It's saying, 'You're not important enough to have a stranglehold on me.' It's saying, 'You don't get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.

To forgive is to put oneself in a larger gravitational field of experience than the one that first seemed to hurt us. We reimagine ourselves in the light of our maturity and we reimagine the past in the light of our new identity, we allow ourselves to be gifted by a story larger than the story that first hurt us and left us bereft.

To forgive is to put oneself in a larger gravitational field of experience than the one that first seemed to hurt us. We reimagine ourselves in the light of our maturity and we reimagine the past in the light of our new identity; we allow ourselves to be gifted by a story larger than the story that first hurt us and left us bereft.

When you forgive, somewhere you sacrifice a part of your own existence, your respect, your dignity, yourself.

Forgiveness isn't telling someone
it was okay to hurt you.
It's telling yourself
it’s okay to stop hurting.
It doesn’t mean you have
to trust them again.
It means you can learn
to trust yourself again.
It doesn’t mean you have to give
them a free pass back into your life.
It means you are free to
take your life back again.
Forgiveness is simply
emptying your past of its power
to empty your present of its peace.

Sometimes forgiving yourself takes the form of you telling the story as you experienced it, not as someone else wrote it. Instead of “He first did this, then this, then that,” you are saying “I did, I felt, I…” And this is not to lay blame on you…it’s to make you the narrator of your own story.

Forgive yourself.

To forgive is merely to remember only the loving thoughts you gave in the past, and those that were given you. All the rest must be forgotten. Forgiveness is a selective remembering, based not on your selection.

Forgiveness means letting go of the past.

Forgiveness is all about taking care of you, not the person you need to forgive. It’s about putting your desire to feel good before your desire to be right. It’s about taking responsibility for your own happiness instead of pretending it’s in somebody else’s hands. It’s about owning your power by giving all your anger, resentment, and hurt the heave-ho.

forgiveness is how we unchain ourselves from the past.

The selfish reason to forgive is so that you can move on with the rest of your life (but you can’t fake it or rush it).

You will forgive because you love yourself so much that you don’t want to keep hurting yourself for whatever happened. Whatever happened is done and cannot be changed. And we have to accept that and keep going with our life. — Don Miguel Ruiz

Forgiveness does not mean condoning or agreeing with a horrendous act. It is a decision to no longer attack one’s self.