If you cannot at this moment find it your heart to forgive, don't force it. Just let go of it. Forgiveness is not something you do.

In the case of a girlfriend or boyfriend or husband or wife who has left you and chosen another, your heart hurts on many levels, and your hurts go deep.

But even a small thing can harden your heart — even a stranger, a salesperson perhaps, is rude or indifferent to you, and you stand helplessly by.

When you feel angry with someone, they have become like the posters that are used at target practice. It is really a poster copy of the person that you are shooting at. You are not seeing the real person, and you are not seeing him or her through the eyes of compassion. You are seeing yourself with great compassion however. Even pity. And you have made a god of the other person, it would seem, because you entitle him to the power to make you glower, to tighten your heart, to lower your vibration and to give you indigestion.

Do not covet is fine to say. Certainly, it is good advice. But it misses the issue. Only from sense of lack does covetousness arise.

When sense of lack is replaced with awareness of plenty, covetousness is replaced with generosity. Needing and giving are but two sides of the same coin. You may need to be instructed in awareness of the wealth that is yours.

Who would grab when he sees there is enough to go around? When he sees abundance spilling over, what would he feel denied about? What would he possibly want to draw to himself and not to another?

Forgiving is the same as letting go.

Unforgiving is the same as holding on.

When you hold on, you stagnate your energy. You create short-circuits within yourself. You punish yourself and call it virtue.

Do not keep ideas from the bitter past. Do not retain bitterness nor self-righteousness.

It is not up to you to forgive someone else. They do not need your dispensation. It is up to you to not harbor their mischief in the first place. When you judge, you sentence yourself.

When you have misgivings, when you have twinges of regret, the thing to do is to let the whole thing go and never let what caused the misgivings to happen again. You told a lie, perhaps, that hurt someone's heart and yours. It may have been years ago, and still it bothers you. This regret is like a splinter. As with all splinters, you must remove it.

Perhaps you were cowardly once. Be brave now. Part of being brave is to let past errors go. Otherwise, you keep injuring yourself.

It is its own unique suffering when you have hurt the heart of one whose heart you would never want to hurt. You didn’t mean to. You would never want to. Only you were careless in your speech, and now you reap the hurt in your own heart. This hurt goes deeper than the hurt you sowed because you cannot undo it.

All kinds of hurt have to be let go of. There is no blessing in them, except that you take heed the next time and find a way to express yourself without hurting any soul on Earth. The dictum to harm no other creature goes beyond physical injury.