forgiveness and understanding

When I first read the title of this card, forgiveness and understanding, I thought, "hmmm. Should the words not be reversed? That you understanding something first before you forgive it?" And then I thought about it for a while and I thought, no, forgiveness is something that comes completely from the heart. It's nothing about condoning somebody's bad behaviour or letting them off the hook. That is not what forgiveness is about. And that's where I feel we, as humans, struggle so much with forgiveness. Because we've been taught that it's turning the other cheek, turning a blind eye to something. And that's not what forgiveness is about.

Forgiveness is about us. It's about leading a more peaceful life. Whenever you forgive someone for something they have done to you. It's not that you are letting them off the hook, it's not that you're condoning their behaviour, rather you're letting go of the hurtful feelings and emotions that have arisen within you, that that person has caused. You're letting those feelings go, you're releasing them from your body and from your energy.

Think about when somebody hurts you. They may hurt you accidentally and without even realising it. And they go about their life as usual, pick up the pieces and move on. They haven't even realised they've hurt you. And you're sitting there with that hurt. And that hurt is pulling you under and pulling you under and it's hanging over you like a really dark cloud for, perhaps, days, weeks, months, even years. That dark cloud is hanging over you. Meanwhile the person who hurt you accidentally, or however, has moved on with their life, is living their life, enjoying their life, and you're under this big dark cloud. Is that benefitting you? Of course not.

And if it's not benefitting you because it's lowering your vibration, it's making you focus on lower emotions. And then you, in turn, are not benefitting anyone around you because your lower emotions, if they don't impact others, they're going to be pushing others away. We want to live our life in a high vibration.

Forgiveness is one of the highest vibrational emotions you can reach. It's higher than love, it's higher than gratitude, it's even higher than joy and peace. Forgiveness is a short step away from enlightenment. So it is something that we should bring into our life and into our practice every day because it raises our vibration, brings us closer to our soul.

Forgiveness and understanding, understanding and forgiveness. At first, as I said, I thought the words were round the wrong way, that you should step into somebody's shoes and understand the reason why they did something to you so you can forgive. But the words are round the right way. Because first you should forgive. Your automatic reaction to no matter what happens to you should be forgiveness, letting go, not letting that heavy energy pull you under. Let it go. And then you can understand, perhaps, why the person hurt you. Perhaps they have different points of view from you and that's perfectly fine. Perhaps they see the world in a different way and that's perfectly fine. We are all entitled to our own opinion and how we see things.

However, it is important that you forgive first before you understand and not the other way because if you try to understand first, it may stop you reaching that point of forgiveness.

If we look at the card, we have an angel on the card, an angel with beautiful golden hair and dressed in a beautiful golden dress. Gold, for me, is the colour of success and prosperity. And if you think of prosperity, when you have prosperity you have abundance. Whenever you work with forgiveness and you raise your vibration super high, you're filling your life with abundance because when you're in a high vibration, you attract similar high vibrations to you. And so, you attract beautiful things into your life. Your life becomes abundant, your life becomes prosperous, it becomes great.

The colour orange on her wings. Wings lift us up. Forgiveness lifts our energy up. And orange relates to spiritual growth. Like I said, forgiveness is one of the highest emotions you can experience, next to enlightenment. And when we are spiritually growing, we are rising through the emotional scale, we are raising our energy, our vibration to one that is in tune with our pure soul. And our pure soul is part of the Universe, part of the Divine. So we are growing spiritually as well.

In the background there's a very dark blue and dark blue, for me, is the colour of strength. It's saying to me that you need to be strong to forgive. It's far too easy not to when we are brought up to hold grudges, when we are brought up to "forgive and not forget". So it's far too easy as human beings not to forgive. You need to be strong to forgive. You need to understand what true forgiveness means and the joy and the peace that it brings into your life in order to forgive.

And, in itself, forgiveness brings great strength to you. It brings great strength to your whole being.

Finally, at the front, she's got her hand on her heart and she's holding a staff. The staff reminds me of the kind of staff in olden years that a shepherd would carry, a shepherd who guides his flock, a shepherd who looks after his sheep. She's holding the staff as if to say, by my act of forgiveness, I am showing others around me what forgiveness does and how it can positively impact your life.

Someone who forgives is someone who you look up to because you see the brightness in their eyes, you see the life in their soul. And they are someone to be admired because they do forgive, they do let go, they don't let heavy memories and emotions weigh down on them, they let them go. So they are like a guiding light.

Her hand is on her heart. When we talk about higher emotions and higher emotional vibrations we're talking about our heart. Lower emotions are very constrictive. They make our heart contract. With emotions like sorrow, shame. guilt, fear, grief, our heart contracts. But whenever you start moving to emotions that are much higher and have a higher vibrational energy, your heart starts to expand, your heart starts to open, you move our of the anger and the thoughts in your head, thoughts of revenge, of not forgetting, and you move into your heart. And you see goodness in everyone.

You see that that person who hurt you unintentionally didn't actually mean to hurt you. That if somebody did hurt you intentionally, that perhaps it was a frustration or perhaps it was because of another reason. You start to understand better because you've moved into your heart space, the place of love.

This card is all about forgiveness and understanding. Forgiving those who don't see the same point of view as you. Forgiving those who may have mistreated you or wronged you in the past. Moving on with your life and raising your vibration so you can live in a higher vibration, a vibration that is much more closely connected with love than it is connected with pain.

Work on forgiveness. Ask the angels to come in and help you to work on forgiveness, to fill your heart with forgiveness and, therefore, raise your energy to a much, much higher and expansive vibration.

Reference: This beautiful card is from The Angel Guide Oracle by Kyle Gray, artwork by Jennifer Hawkyard