FORGIVENESS AND FORGIVING

With the recent High Holidays having come and gone, I was thinking, once again, about forgiveness and forgiving. Jewish Tradition tells us that every year we must ask for forgiveness from our fellow human beings as much, if not more so, than the forgiveness we ask from G-D for our own transgressions. This is a wonderful opportunity for us to cleanse our souls and start over again. Yet, so many of us gloss over this opportunity and fail to take full advantage of it. Furthermore, many of us don't realize that this opportunity exists for us on a daily basis. Every day we wake up we can look at it as a new beginning, a new chapter in our life and a new opportunity to mend relationships.

In the years prior to the existence of a social networking websites such as Facebook, I would open my email account the week before Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and would receive emails that read: sorry for the mass email, but I would like to apologize to all who I have hurt etc. This year, a week prior to Yom Kippur, I opened my Facebook page and saw so many people's Facebook statuses changed to say something like: I would like to apologize to all who I might have hurt this past year ... etc.

Is this a true and sincere apology? Do these mass emails and Facebook status changes meet the quota of apologizing and forgiving? I wonder why I did not see any mass emails or status changes that read: I would like to forgive all who have wronged me.

I began thinking how difficult it is to ask for forgiveness and more than that, how extremely difficult it is to forgive.

I think one of the reasons it is so difficult to ask for forgiveness is our innate resistance to admitting that we were wrong, as one of the difficulties in forgiving someone who has wronged us, is that same need to stay right. Maybe, when we forgive, we release the person from being wrong and so many of us would rather bear grudges than release the person from their wrong doing.

One of the first things to understand, is that forgiveness is not something you do solely for the person who hurt you, but something you do for yourself and for the sake of your own inner freedom. In my yoga classes, I often teach the concept of letting go. While, I mostly refer to letting go of the tensions existing in the body, these tensions are often caused by grudges we bear from past hurts. When you let go of those grudges, you let go of tensions residing in the body as well and you allow yourself

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