To what do you attribute your good feelings or more hazardous feelings to on this morning of your Life? What holds up your darkness? What holds up your brightness, do you think?
My answer is that your dear feelings are to be attributed to you, dear one, and to no one else. Your feelings are your Beauty, or they are your ugly. Otherwise, who convinces you that you are to think one way and not another?
You may say in protest: “God, if someone hits me, he hit me. I didn’t hit him. How can You possibly say that someone who hit me is not responsible for how I feel?”
I don’t say he didn’t hit you. He was the impetus. He offended you. What I say and say again and again is -- you are responsible for how you feel right now. You are responsible for your reactions. No matter all the excuses -- if someone never liked you, if someone mistreated you, no matter what -- you still don’t have to live your life building a case against him.
If you once had a teacher who didn’t value you, how do you justify yourself for hanging onto unholy resentment and exonerating yourself from responsibility for your feelings now?
This is really a good thing that I am telling you, for, whatever despair you may be feeling, now, at this very moment, you are free to change your beliefs and your subsequent feelings. If you are not responsible, what could you ever do to divert your feelings? What good is there in maintaining hardened feelings and such ways of thinking? What good can come from being attached to old hard feelings? If you feel bitter, what good is it for you to decide you can only be bitter as if you have to be stuck? Your mind entraps you, not your circumstances.
There are people who have held grudges until the day they die. They seem to consider themselves wonderful to hold on so tight. What good can it be to hold a grudge? No one has to hold a grudge no matter how unfair a situation may have been. Even if a court of law finds the murderer of your loved one, for instance, guilty of the act, it is still you who is responsible for your holding on or your letting go whatever it may be which is, after all, your venom.
Which way are YOU better off? Whom do you punish when you pile on hard feelings to your wounded heart? It is you who keeps twisting the knife in your own heart. Who do you think gets hurt the most? Negative feelings hold no virtue for you.
There are remarkable instances where people give up their hard feelings. In some cases, not only have some let go of their vengeance but also have come to rally on behalf of the one who stole their beloved’s life away. At the very least, everyone can let go of his or her claim to vengeance and interminable heartache.
At some point, you have to let yourself free. Let yourself free now. Whether an offense occurred yesterday, two years ago, or fifty years ago, give it up now. I don’t say this is easy to do. I say that you can do it. I say you must do it.
It is not for you to act as a court of law. Your final say is not needed. Do you favor holding on or to letting go? Does it make you somehow wonderful to maintain fierce opposite of love?
You have to change your direction.
You may even disregard some people for no reason but that you don’t like them. They get under your skin or something. Where did you get the idea that others are obliged to put up with your disliking them? There is always a time to stop disliking anyone you don’t like or any list of people you don’t like for whatever reason or no reason at all.
When is it long enough anyway to get over old pain? Dear Holders of Pain, it is never too short.