Forgiveness: Choosing to Overcome Anger and Resentment

Feeling angry or resentful is a decision one makes, and individuals can use particular techniques to aid in their forgiveness.

Hatred never ceases through hatred, but through love alone is healed.

This is an eternal law.

The Buddha

When we interact with other people, we judge our experiences with them as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.

The people we judge to be pleasant and agreeable become friends and lovers.

The people who we find neutral fade from our minds.

The people we judge to be unpleasant and negative become enemies who are put into the mental dungeons in our minds.

The categories are flexible, and people move in and out of favor, but once they are thrown into our dungeons, it becomes difficult for them to escape.

Anger creates the dungeons in our minds. The bars enclosing our enemies there are made solid by resentment, the act of keeping anger alive by not forgetting our anger and not forgiving our enemies.

If we sustain anger without forgetting it, we can enclose our enemies for as long as we live. However, sustaining anger…