I know for myself, I don’t have the luxury of carrying around resentments. Those resentments end up consuming me. They become larger than the actual issue that sparked the resentment, and, really, all I’m really doing by carrying around my anger or hate around is I’m giving the person it’s directed to all my power. Hate does wear me down, I know, because I used to carry a lot of it around. I was always the victim, nothing was every my fault, and when things went wrong, or someone hurt me, all of my power went into that hate, and I would set out to hurt that person as much as I felt I had been hurt. The only problem is, I was only hurting myself over and over, and the other person was walking around scot free. We only hurt ourselves when we carry around hate, something I had to learn on this path if I was to live a healthy life.
A resentment, they say, is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. You can wait all you like, but the only person you’re killing is yourself. Letting our hate go goes back to a few topics I’ve written about before. One, taking responsibility for our part. Typically, we always have one. Now, that doesn’t mean someone shouldn’t take responsibility for their actions, but we have to look at what our actions where in the offending situation because we may have been able to prevent getting ourselves there in the first place, or even, could have made choices that would have led to a different outcome. Now, there are times when we do what we can and the result is not what we would have wanted, or, someone does do something that is meant to hurt or harm us, and our part may only really be that we shouldn’t have trusted them, and, knowing what we know now, we won’t in the future. But even when we have been wronged carrying that anger around only now harms us. Which leads us to acceptance. Yes, that can be a hard pill to swallow, but it truly is our only freedom from resentment and anger. I’ve mentioned this many times before, all the “bad things” really are are information. We place value on them as to how bad they are, but really, if we only look at them as information to help us in the future, we take their power away. It is valid to be frustrated, or disappointed in the outcome, but it’s when we dwell on the circumstances that we start to get into trouble. Let yourself feel, but then learn to love on. Talking about how you feel often is the first step to releasing those feelings, and to getting on a path of letting go, or even, forgiveness, even if it’s just in yourself for engaging with the person in the first place. But, give yourself a time limit to move on, to get yourself moving forward and not getting stuck in the past.
We as SLAYERS learn from our past and continue our journey forward. Sometimes, those bumps in the road, are harder to recover from than others, but we keep trudging forward. In the times when we struggle, we reach out, we share, we write, we do what we need to do to let go what has happened so we can get back to being our best selves, make the best decisions for ourselves in each given moment. And, when we’re really hitting our stride, we may even thank those people who we would consider our enemies, because they made it possible to learn these skills, and learn that we are bigger than what happens to us, we are here to learn, we are here to shine our light, we are here to find our purpose and to share what makes us uniquely us, we don’t have time to muddy that up with hate for something we no longer have control over, what we have control over is the here and now, and here and now, we are strong. SLAY on!
SLAY OF THE DAY: Do you hold on to resentments from your past? How does this help you? How does this hurt you? What is something you are holding onto that holds you back? Why can’t you let it go? Why should you let it go? What can you do to let it go? What can you do differently in a situation like that next time so you don’t get a resentment? What choices can you make moving forward to keep yourself from having experiences like the one that you resent? I challenge you SLAYER this week to let go of something you are holding onto, to talk about it, to let it out, and let it go. You don’t need it. You’ve learned from it. You’ve had the experience. Now cut the cord that holds you to it and set yourself free.
S – self L – love A – appreciate Y – you
State Of Slay™ 