💜Learning to Forgive Others

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SUMMARY 

When you can learn to forgive yourself it is some much easier to forgive others. In this video Jen shares her own person story and learnings on how to tap into forgiving others. 

Learning to Forgiving Others 

This is episode 28. In episode 27, I talked about forgiving ourselves and how important that is. Today I focus on forgiving others.

Once you get to a place where you can start practicing forgiving yourself for snapping at people or making decisions that you regret, life just feels a little slice easier. It can make a big difference. And then there comes a time where we want to embrace forgiving others.

When we can forgive ourselves, it's so much easier to open our hearts and forgive others. In my life, what has been difficult about MS for me is… that's interesting. I just heard and felt myself gulp. There's an emotion laying right here in my throat. So I'm just going to take a moment and welcome this emotion into my throat by breathing into my body. The emotion is sadness.

I’m simply allowing the sadness to be there. It’s because I'm going back to a moment in time when I was diagnosed and where I had a lot of attrition, a lot of attrition of friends in my life. Some people just could not show up for me at that time. I had been hanging out with them regularly and then they were gone.

It was a real sense of loss at the time. We'll talk about loss more in the next episode because I think it's a big, hot topic.

Right now I’ll address forgiving others.

I do believe that people show up in our lives for a reason. And sometimes they show up for a season (a short period of time). It took me quite a while to accept and appreciate this concept as I am a loyal friend.

Some friends just couldn't deal with my diagnosis for different reasons and that's okay. People leave our lives all the time.

It's hard, it's painful.

But when it all comes down to it, we can come to that place around forgiving others in our life that we love and care about. It makes a big difference because they cannot completely put themselves in our shoes.

They can try. Right?

We may have explained to a friend, parent or somebody else what’s happening in our life. How MS symptoms impact our lives and have changed us. What we need to become aware of is how they process and filter this information. Each person has a different way in which they filter information based on their own past experiences.

How we express ourselves will be interpreted differently depending on who we speak to.

This means how they receive the information from us is processed differently by each person based on their own life experience and triggers.

After I ended a toxic 14 year relationship. I started to rebuild my life and create new friendships.

One of my new friends was Sarah. After my diagnosis, Sarah would no longer come over to my place. She was upset about some of the choices I was making in my life. For some reason she was very triggered by my choices, even though they really had absolutely nothing to do with her.

I was writing her emails and doing everything I could to connect with her. Then I gave up. Six months later, I let go of the friendship with her. A year later, we met up. I gave her the floor to share her concerns with me while we sat at a local café.

Sarah had a long list of reasons as to why she didn’t want to spend time with me.

Each reason were choices I made to deal with my new life with MS. I was able to hear her because I was in a place of forgiveness and was ready to let go.

For some reason, she's was in pain. I didn't really know what was underneath it for her because I was a loyal friend. Yet, I was to forgiving her. With the forgiveness I experienced such a big wave of relief.

I realize she was not the type of friend that I wanted to have in my life. Coming to this conclusion, letting go and forgiving her felt empowering for me.

So I invite you to pick one person in your life. They could be a person that is still in your life that aggravates you. It could be someone that you lost as a friend because of being diagnosed with MS or someone who you know less well.

Then find a way in your heart to test drive the experience of forgiving that person in an open hearted way.

1. Breathe into your heart, invite forgiveness in and breathe out, letting go.

2. Keep breathing into your heart and sending love to the person. Send forgiveness to that person.

3. Wish them well. Say, “May you be well.”

4. If you have sadness arise. Acknowledge it. Breathe into the sadness in your body. Allow it to be with you.

5. Then go back to step number one and start again.

Jen DeTracey is the founder of Women Thriving with MS and a certified coach. Women Thriving with MS is an online community for women living with MS. You can join the private Women Thriving with MS Facebook group it's free and YouTube channel. Jen offers online courses, a membership and coaching.

Jen's been living with multiple sclerosis for over 11 years. She went through this process of surviving with MS to striving MS to thriving MS. She is a guide, coach and teacher who helps you move forward on your journey from surviving to thriving with MS.

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