Oct 144 min read

National Day of Forgiveness

Origins of the National Day of Forgiveness

The National Day of Forgiveness was first founded in 2021 by National Day Calendar and Melissa Reese. It was created to encourage people to make healthier choices and forgive others who have wronged them.

What are the benefits of forgiving someone?

Researchers at Johns Hopkins state that forgiving someone benefits your overall health, since holding onto the bitterness of the problem puts your body into stress, activating the fight or flight response, which ends up increasing your risk of having health issues such as depression, heart disease, and diabetes later in life.

Basically, it’s just like Budha said, “Forgive others not because they deserve forgiveness, but because you deserve peace.”

What are the steps to forgiveness?

Understand forgiveness

I know this statement might sound confusing, so let me elaborate. Forgiveness isn’t about “forgetting” the incident ever happened, or just “letting it slide,” but rather, it’s about acknowledging what happened and moving on from it. It’s about having mercy for those who have wronged us, even if they don’t seem apologetic, because in the end,

holding on to that bitterness harms you more than them.

Become accustomed to forgiving

To learn to forgive, you first need to positively alter your inner world, your perspective. For example, even if you’re deeply hurt because someone treated you badly, don’t talk bad about them, if you have nothing nice to say about that person, it’s better to not say anything at all, since it only poisons you further.

Address the pain and where it comes from

Be mindful. Stop and consider who and how they have hurt you. This helps to evaluate if they really hurt you, since not everything you suffer is unjust. For example, you don’t have to forgive someone because they are imperfect and have caused you a small inconvenience, remember, nobody’s perfect.

There are many forms of emotional pain, which include anxiety, depression, extreme level of anger, lack of trust, self-loathing, and others. However, all of these pains can be addressed by forgiveness, if you forgive, you let go of all the negative emotions that came with the event, you release yourself from that stress.

Train your empathy

Scientists have researched what happens when someone imagines forgiving someone, and they found that the part that is activated in the brain during that time is responsible for empathy, which tells us that empathy is a big step in the process. For example, if you imagine some of the details of their life, and what they felt like, you are able to see what wounds they carry, and what issues were created by that, which helps you see why they hurt you.

Assess the impacts of your suffering

When you go through an unpleasant experience that makes you suffer a great deal, it is important that you find meaning in that suffering. By this, I don’t mean you should find goodness in someone’s bad actions, or look to suffering to gain wisdom and grow. It means that you need to assess how that suffering has changed you, maybe it changed your perspective, maybe it made you set goals, or maybe it made you stronger and braver.

When you struggle with forgiveness, call for other strengths

When someone deeply hurts you, it can prove to be a challenge to forgive, and that’s okay. Not everyone who has hurt you is easy to forgive, maybe it just makes you angry to think about it. A way you could go about it is surrounding yourself with more positive people who help you and give you the time to heal, then you can try again. However, if forgiving is still proving to be a challenge, you can try forgiving someone who hurt you in a lesser way, something you’re hurt about, but they didn’t wrong you nearly as bad.

Forgive yourself

When someone wrongs us, we tend to be harder on ourselves than the people who hurt us. If this continues, you might feel unloved, even if you have people who love you. To solve this, you need to forgive yourself first, give yourself some peace. In short, soften your heart for yourself.

Develop a forgiving heart

When a person overcomes their suffering, they gain a more mature understanding of being humble and courageous. You might want to create a more forgiving environment in your home, workplace, etc. Though some believe that loving someone who has harmed you isn’t possible, Robert Enright found that people who have already forgiven that person might open their heart.