DAY 15: Using Prayer And Meditation To Help Forgive
Every culture in the world has a tradition of prayer and/or meditation and for good reason. Both practices have a lot of benefits from clearing the mind and focusing your thoughts, to better health and increased happiness. That’s pretty powerful stuff and something we can and should use during our own journey of forgiveness. Both prayer and meditation can help you clear your head and let go of anger and pain. As we already discussed in previous posts, that’s a big part of forgiving. It puts you in the right frame of mind for the rest of your day, and allows you to invite peace and happiness into your heart.
Using Prayers For Forgiveness
A prayer is a conversation with God. It can be a plea for help, or it can be a way to share what’s going on in your life. A prayer can also be a formal recitation of words that you’ve known for a long time. The Lord’s Prayer is a great example. A formal prayer is a great way to start your conversation with God about forgiveness. The familiar words and phrases will help you calm your mind and be open for the conversation. Prayer can have a very calming and soothing effect on our mind.
All major world religions talk about forgiveness. It’s a core principle in almost all religious practices and you can find stories and prayers about forgiveness no matter what your faith. Find them and include them into your daily prayers.
Meditating On Forgiveness
Meditation is another great practice to get into. Like prayer, it will calm your mind. You can focus on forgiveness and help make it a subconscious habit. Meditation is also a great tool for working through and letting go of anger and resentment. Of course, there are some other great health benefits including lower heart rate and blood pressure. If you’ve ever been seething with anger, you know that calming your body and mind is the first step towards letting go of those negative feelings. Practicing meditation will help you get there.
Both meditation and prayer work best when you do them regularly. Make them part of your daily routine and for now focus both or either on forgiveness. Once you have gotten into the daily habit to forgive, you may choose to move on to other topics and thoughts. In either case, I encourage you to keep prayer and meditation in your life for the long run. Both your body and your mind will benefit from it.
ACTION FOR TODAY:
Make peace with what you can’t change.
By now, you should have an idea of which relationships can be mended and which cannot. Unfortunately, that’s just the way life goes, but to truly heal, we need to make peace with what we can’t change. Take the day to grieve in your own way, whether it’s sitting down and shedding some tears or binge watching your favorite series alone in your room. When you can’t change something, that means you’ve lost something. Maybe it was a friendship or the way a relationship used to be. No matter what it is, something changed, and it’s okay to let it out.
