BUT … how many people feel forgiveness is an obligation? We are told over an over, “Just forgive.” Which is usually interpreted as, “Just push that feeling away.” You can’t truly let go of something until you’ve welcomed it, and you can’t welcome anything if you feel you have to push it away to “forgive.”

A powerful example of where forgiveness has worked well is the documentary, “Forgiving Dr. Mengele”, which you can find anywhere online, Amazon, IMBD, etc. This film is about Eva Mozes Kor, who survived Auschwitz and the brutal clutches of Mengele, the Nazi doctor who performed experiments on Jewish twins. She and her twin survived, or we wouldn’t have this tale. I highly recommend it.

The most interesting part to me is when she tells of how she forgave the Nazis in order to heal herself, which worked. And as soon as she went public with her decision, many of the other survivors of these horrific camps became angry at her. It’s well worth seeing, just to watch Eva Mozes Kor’s amazingly strong spirit in action.
Kris Cahill´s last blog ..Becoming The Healing

Then sometimes you’ll blame yourself and other times you’ll blame others, but not all or none of the time for either. So once blame is assigned, I think the best thing is to just learn from it and move on.

I think this learning is at the root of forgiveness. People often say they forgive someone when they don’t, just so to “smoothen out the relationship”, which is a lie. The only way you can really forgive is if you see the other person genuinely learned from the offense and I think people can tell when it’s genuine and when it’s just pretension. Same is with forgiving yourself. You can’t really do it until you know that you’ve learned your lesson if there’s one to be learned.

Daniel Memenode´s last blog ..How can you be yourself without an ego?