Forgiveness
This is the third spring IHC has enjoyed. You will often hear terms like re-birth, new beginning, and fresh start this time of year. I believe what this is really about is forgiveness. How can you magically be re-born, or start fresh, without forgiveness as part of your life? The new start we talk about is nothing more than forgiving ourselves and others, letting go of the past and inviting a new perspective into our life.
Forgiveness is love. It is opening the heart to allow acceptance of love as well as the ability to give love without conditions. It can be difficult to describe forgiveness. Sometimes it’s best characterized as an emotion - that warm fuzzy feeling in our chest.
It may be easier to describe what forgiveness isn’t. It is not acceptance or justification of an outcome or a past situation. Forgiveness is not the avoidance of a person or situation. You do not have to like someone in order to forgive them, nor like them once you have forgiven them. Forgiveness is not limited to select circumstances.
Forgiveness is a process that may take a lifetime to complete. It is a decision to give unconditional love. Forgiveness comes from understanding more about oneself, the other individual, the situation, and above all, the lesson being learned through the experience. From forgiveness comes healing. Forgiveness allows love in your heart, and that allows you to give love without expectation.
We are working together on this earth to teach and learn more about love, to evolve. We are a team surrounded by our most endearing teammates and by those whose job it is to ensure we succeed. The difference is that the opposing team is also here to see that we succeed in our evolution.
The other team may decide to teach us love through forgiveness and tolerance. Our teammates may teach us through understanding and acceptance. Remember, we all have the same goal, to understand love. Now, understand that the individuals in your life who challenge you the most, who are the thorns in your side, were chosen. They were chosen by you and God to be here with you to help you understand every aspect of love.
How can you truly know something from just one aspect? Understanding love is the same as understanding anything else. For example, if you devote your life to understanding water, you need to know every aspect of water. You will need to know what it is made of, how it is created, and destroyed. You need to know about its many different forms (solid, liquid, and vapor), the properties of each form, and the conditions needed to enable the forms to exist. How can water be wasted and saved. I could go on for lifetimes!
Now you can begin to see that all emotion is rooted in love. We, as humans, must experience hate, anger, guilt and so on, to understand what love is not. Through this experience we can begin to understand love more completely.
Spring is rebirth. Spring is forgiveness; forgiveness of self and others. This allows more love into our lives. Love is what makes the world go around!
—James H. Schrenker, M.D., CMD
(This article was published in our 1st Qtr 2007 Newsletter)
Looking for an entertaining and informational speaker for your organization or event?
Dr. Schrenker’s Free Lectures include:
How to Live a Holistic Life, Rediscovering Dis-ease, Emotional Basis of Disease and The Energetics of Healing, Forgiveness, Stress 101 and many more.
To book Dr. Schrenker to lecture for your group, contact our clinic:
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