Do you want to save yourself from a heart attack?
Do you want to protect yourself from cholesterol or weight loss and overcome BP, anxiety, stress, and depression?
Then there’s a simple solution for it if you believe it and practise it continuously.
The best way to overcome all ailments and live a happy and peaceful life is to forgive and forget. Yes! The Forgiving Heart and the Forgetting Mind are the two best gifts that you can give to yourself and others. Studies have found that the act of forgiveness can reap huge rewards for your health, lowering the risk of heart attack, controlling cholesterol levels, improving sleep, reducing pain, blood pressure, anxiety, depression, and stress, and helping you live a more satisfying life. In another study, a psychologist in Holland asked people to think about someone who had hurt, mistreated, or offended them. While they thought about this, she monitored their blood pressure, heart rate, facial muscle tension, and sweat gland activity. When people were reminded of their animosity their physiology totally changed. Their heartbeat increased and also their BP made them sweat badly.
Cortisol is a hormone that metabolises fat for a quick response to stress (and after the stress ends, deposits the fat back where it is easily accessible—around the waist). In an experiment, it was measured the levels of cortisol in the saliva of 39 people who rated their relationship as either terrific or terrible. Forgiveness isn’t just practised by saints, nor does it benefit only those who are forgiven. Instead, it has physical, mental, and spiritual benefits, and it can play an important role in the health of families, communities, and even nations, making the entire world a more peaceful place to live. Unfortunately, some people think forgiveness is a sign of weakness, submission, defeat, or insult. Forgiveness is more than lip service. It is a process in which you make a conscious decision to let go of negative emotions or feelings, whether the person deserves it or not. As you release the anger, resentment, and hostility, you begin to feel empathy, compassion, and sometimes even affection for the person who wronged you. If your forgiveness has not changed your relationship with the other person, that means you’ve not forgiven wholeheartedly, and even if your apology has not changed the person’s behaviour towards you, that shouldn’t make you disappointed.
On a daily basis, our brains are bombarded with too much information. Most of this information is more like noise that interferes with our decision-making and reduces the clarity of our thoughts. Forgetting helps to streamline our memory by eliminating useless details and generalising the concepts involved, which also helps to optimise future decision-making. Forgetting helps us to get rid of the wrong kinds of thoughts and actions and helps in optimum memory utilization. While the information is somewhere in your long-term memory, forgetting would provide immediate and welcome relief. We need to forget past experiences. Forget the bad done to you.
Depressing memories may hang over you like a blanket. If your past is dictating you then better resolve it rather than depositing it in the unconscious mind for future ailments. The advantage of forgetting about the past is that we forever stop defining ourselves by the past. When we define, we limit ourselves. We will always thrash ourselves with guilt, regret, sorrow, anger, and all the other emotions we have felt in the past. These emotions, when suppressed, release toxic and corrosive chemicals into the body that break it down and create diseases, such as cancer. We practice negative emotions through blaming and feeling victimised. We store and rewind hurtful words spoken by others towards us and programme our response to life accordingly. The best way is to move on and accept your dark emotions with your arms wide open, make peace with your past, live in the present moment, and prepare for the future.
