One day a professor holding a bottle of water, asked his students how much they think the bottle of water weighed?
500 grams shouted one student, 600 another from the back.
The professor looked at them and said, “until we weight the bottle, we wouldn’t know”. Then he said “imagine I hold this bottle of water for a few minutes, what do you think will happen?” One of the students shouted, Nothing! He said “what if I hold it a little bit longer, lets say for a few hours” The students said “your arm would start to hurt” Then he said, “what if I held this bottle for 24 hours?” The students said “your arm would probably be in a lot of pain! Extreme pain!”
The professor then said, “notice the weight of the bottle never changed during that time at all. The only thing that changed was how long you were holding it”
The lesson to the students was that this bottle represents our challenges, our problems, our worries, our anxieties about uncertainty. The longer that we hold them, the more pain they can do to us.
One of the most moving, and powerful quotes from Nelson Mandela.
“When I was walking out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew that if I didn’t leave behind my bitterness and hatred, id still be in prison”
We pollute our consciousness when we allow envy and anger to enter the inner core of our minds, bringing in negativity, injecting anxiety and uncertainty. That’s why Gandhi said:
“Ill never let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet”
Often, we see that it’s our own very shoes that are causing the dirt. Forgiveness, and letting go, and the ability to rise above the challenges that have been caused by others in our life is such an important ability because we need to learn to accept apologies that we never received. I believe that we cant fix ourselves by breaking someone else.
It’s like the Buddha said:
Resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die
When we recognize that actually by holding any negative feelings towards another individual only harms the way we think. That’s when we’ll truly be able to forgive, move on, and let go and realize that the internal healing is what lets us take care of the external circumstances.
This is NOT easy at all because we who’ve been caused pain, sometimes to extreme lengths, sometimes our hearts have ben broken, sometimes our trust has been misused. Sometimes we’ve been exploited, sometimes our loyalty has been tested.
Forgiveness doesn’t excuse the behavior, it prevents the behavior from negatively affecting us. Our ego wants us to put others in their place. Instead we should try to pur ourselves in their place.
“Seek to understand before being understood.”
