What is so hard about love? Why are you miserly about it? One would think that giving love costs you something when all the while it is the means of gain. Of course, sometimes love costs you a little ego. For a long time you have said you wanted to give up your ego. Then give it up.

Must you hold on to wrongs the way you do? Hold on to rights that strongly, and then you would be saying something.

I hear remarks about this one or that one, as if it mattered, as if it mattered more than love, mattered more than your love. As if a hurt matters more than everything else.

Someone gave you a dry crust of bread or a poisoned word or a thoughtless one. You picked it up, and you kept it close to you as if you depended on your accumulation of dry crusts and rancor. Throw them out. Go to the top floor and throw all past accumulation of wrongs out the window. Do it. Until you do, they taint your life and the lives of those around you.

Isn’t it a custom that if find a poison, you do not keep it where children can find it? Bitter words and thoughts are poison, and they have been flaunted them for all the children in the world to see. And you think you are justified. I tell you that you are not.

Find a dumpster somewhere big enough to hold your unkind thoughts and throw them in. Spit on your grudge.

Do not talk lovingly about love unless you are going to let go of past hurts. If you talk of love while rancor is in your heart, doesn’t that make you a hypocrite? And have you not accused others of being hypocrites? What you accuse others of, look to yourself. If anyone has indeed wronged you, you have wronged yourself more.

Let the song of your heart beat be: “Let go, let go.”

Pledge to yourself now:

“When I keep sense of wrong in my heart, I am the wrongdoer. From this day forth I will apologize to everyone who has wronged me. I will apologize for holding their mistake close to me as if it were truth. No longer will I accept offense into my Being. If I see offense, I will silently bless the one who gave it for pointing out something in me that I have preferred not to notice. I see it, and I realize my participation in the offense, and then I immediately dismiss it. I step on it like a burned-out cigarette butt on the sidewalk, and I walk away from it. I do not make it important. I do not pick it up and save it like a jewel to keep looking at. I leave it behind and I do not think about it any longer. I have bigger and better things to think about.

“I also forgive myself for having carried past offenses within me, and then complaining about them. If I cannot as yet erase a hurt from my heart, I promise myself I will not share it with anyone. If today I cannot uplift the world, I will at least not cast it down.

“I accept once and for all that I am responsible for my thoughts. I am responsible for any hurt I carry with me. I am responsible for having taken someone’s carelessness or ignorance to heart, and I pledge to not do this again, not even once more. If an arrow reaches me, dear God, I will simply pluck it out.”