Grudges, Part IV: Choosing to not suffer

Photo from here

Two descriptors that I think characterize the nature of grudge holding ("a persistent feeling of ill will or resentment resulting from a past insult or injury") are suffering, and narrowed vision. Let me take those two characteristics one by one.

The whole focus of a grudge is that you have been hurt, and you deliberately nurse that hurt. Think of the meaning of the word "nurse." A nursing baby draws life-giving nourishment from its mother. Similarly, a grudge draws in its nourishment because the person holding it is cradling it, feeding it, growing it by supplying it with their own life forces. Nursing a grudge means making that past insult or injury a part of yourself, making it an extension of you. 

But why do that? After all, the rehearsal of a past insult or injury only serves to extend it. If it's a small offense, it grows bigger. If it was a brief hurt, it only lengthens.

My husband and I walk and talk together several times a week, and he said something a week or so ago that startled me: "We all get hurt by others, but it is our choice whether or not to suffer."

We all get hurt by others, but it is our choice whether or not to suffer.

When we let go of harm that has done to us by someone else, we choose to not be harmed over and over and over again by that person. Every. Single. Time. We. Remember. We refuse to let them make us suffer. We move on, choose a different life. Instead of nursing a grudge and being repeatedly reinjured as we rehearse it, you and I have the power to chose freedom from that original injury done. Easier said than done, I know, but we DO have the choice.

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I was in Denver yesterday for a university alumni gathering, and I noticed and reveled in the big sky there. When you stand outside on the prairie with big huge fluffy clouds scudding across the blue, blue expanse of the heavens, it's a feeling all its own. Your heart grows bigger. You know in your bones your own little-but-free place in this universe. And yet anything is possible. 

That's how it feels to let go of a grudge. There's something about rehearsing a perceived injury that feels like dark, foreboding mountains closing in on all sides. Your inner gaze narrows, focuses on every tiny feature of that injury that you felt so keenly, and in that hyperfocus your vision is blocked from seeing other possibilities, from seeing the goodness of the great big universe around you that can diminish and even erase the size of that hurt that seemed so big.

Get rid of the closeup focus! Let the mountains flatten out and the sky become big and blue overhead, and let things take their rightful perspective for a wide-open life of freedom. Your freedom. You may have been injured, but you can choose not to suffer.

(to be continued)