Resent, Relent, Relax

Resent, Relent, Relax

Here’s a fun little thing to try: Make a fist and squeeze it all the way up your arm, into your shoulder and neck and face. Tight as you can. Hold it, hold it, hold it...

Let go!

Ahh. Isn’t that a nice feeling? All that release, all that energy flowing through, no effort on your part.

Resentment to forgiveness in 30 seconds flat. Now, granted, that’s just a little isometric exercise, but it does illustrate the difference nicely.

Resentment, the re-feeling of perceived disappointments, betrayal, loss, and so on, just to make ourselves feel bad. (I knew a woman who suddenly stopped speaking to me, then started again some 3 years later. She had harbored her grudge, nursed it, cherished it, and I never had a clue why. Weird.)

When we are full of resentments, we are all clamped down, clenched up, tight, and seized up. There isn’t much room left over for the nice stuff. Especially since resentments want to be nursed, petted and tickled and told how great they are a lot.

Just one problem. We can’t really feel joy when we are all grudgeful, or compassion, or even self-love. So it simply makes things worse. And when we have that mindset going, it’s easy to find more and more things to resent.

So we let them go, we forgive. All that means, is we close the harbor to our resentments, we stop it when we find ourselves thinking about them.

When I was working on my biggest pile of resentments, I found something that worked really well for me. Maybe it will work well for you, too.

Every time I noticed that I was rehearsing my resentments toward this person, I would stop myself, relax and breathe, and think of something I appreciated her for, something I had learned from her, some reason my life was better for her having been in it. I had known her for a long time, so there was a lot of that sort of thing. I practiced it often enough that it’s become automatic now. The resentful thought leads instantly to appreciation and compassion.

Wahoo! That’s the way I like it!

Sometimes the person we need to forgive is our own self. When I notice me being angry at me for not having done, or for having done, something, I put my hand on my heart, relax and breathe, and apologize to myself with love and compassion. I know that, at any given moment, I am making the best decision I can under the present circumstances. I may decide in hindsight that it was the wrong decision. So then I fix it as best I can, and forgive me for screwing up, let it go, and get on with all the fun stuff there is to do out there.

How have I changed from offering safe harbor to grudges and old scores, to opening my heart to the gifts?