The Healing Garden: A Place Of Peace

Gardening For The Soil Gardening For The Soul

Finding Solace In A Changing World

ISBN 0-9733085-0-8

By Gwen Nyhus Stewart

Chapter 3 Forgiveness

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In this chapter:

Ø Beliefs and Irrational Thinking

Ø What is Self-forgiveness?

Ø Exploring Self-forgiveness

Ø Practical Steps to Self-forgiveness

Ø Forgiveness of Others

Ø Practical Steps to Forgiveness of Others

Ø Self-appreciation

Ø What is Self-appreciation?

Ø What does Self-appreciation Mean?

Ø Practical Steps to Self-appreciation

Ø Remember

"The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong."

- Mahatma Gandhi

In our journey to inner peace and healing, both guilt and forgiveness of self and others have

a profound effect on this process. Guilt is defined as a feeling of culpability especially for imagined offences or from a sense of inadequacy; a self-reproach; and forgiveness as the act

of forgiving or the ceasing of feeling resentment against an offender. Guilt and lack of forgiveness of self and others burdens many people with the heavy weight of inappropriate shame and the destruction of deep-seated resentments.

In recent years, much has been written about the destructiveness of repressed emotions

and particularly anger and resentment in contributing to life-threatening illnesses (see references for further reading). In Chapter 1, I started the discussion of emotions and the effect of emotions on the balance within our systems and we will now explore the role of emotions in contributing to our emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual health.

We are emotional beings. We are born that way and the repression of emotion leads to emotional distress and emotional dis-ease. This distress and dis-ease over a long period of

time culminates in the manifestation of physical distress and dis-ease.

Emotions are neither positive nor negative. Feelings of anger, sadness, frustration, joy, love,

etc. are not good or bad; rather they are just feelings. Many people are afraid of emotions such as anger in the mistaken belief that anger leads to violence. Violence actually results from the repression of emotions and feelings of powerlessness.

This is the beginning of the third chapter of the book The Healing Garden: A Place Of

Peace by Gwen Nyhus Stewart. There's lots more information online, but if you've read this

much, you'll undoubtedly find the book of great value!