Forgiveness is the door to gratitude. If you have been on a personal excellence program you will be aware of the significance of gratitude. Even if you haven’t you may be intuitively, or even, on your own grounds, theoretically, aware of its significance. Gratitude is the well spring of generosity, generosity flows from one who deems that they have received in excess of their due, hence they are able to freely give away. Gratitude in itself provides one with a deep sense of well being and allows one to truly take control over one’s life, to freely choose one’s path.
The opposite of gratitude is resentment. Resentment is the experience that one has been done in, has not received one’s due, or has been unjustly treated. Resentment looks at the world (or other people) as says “you haven’t given me enough, you need to give me more. You have treated me unfairly.” Resentment is a horrible experience, believe me, I know. There is not much more unpleasant than the moral outrage we experience when we feel someone or something has been unfair to us. From within such a perspective our attention gets trapped. It gets trapped on the misbehaviour of another, and on continuous thoughts about what the other needs to do to satisfy the self. We lose our autonomy when we are resentful. Our attention is no longer on what sits in our own hands, it is on what sits in the hands of another. We can’t freely chose the path we feel we should take because all of our thoughts, feelings and actions are framed in relation to the other and the power the other has to withhold what we feel they should grant.
There are many techniques one can use to transmute resentment into gratitude. One can, for example, practice meditation to calm the mind down and arrest the train of thought entrenching the resentment. Another technique involves deliberately re framing the event or person in such a way that one manages to pick out the good. These, and other, techniques are very effective. But when we look at the core of all of these techniques, what we in fact see is the concept of forgiveness. To overcome resentment one needs to forgive, forgive the other for the injustice, real or perceived (though practically it makes little difference which), that they have committed.
One of the biggest problems with resentment and getting over it is that it is very often justified. People do not just feel resentful by accident. Most of the time there are concrete reasons why the person feels resentful. A battered wife, an exploited husband, a neglected child, an oppressed minority, an outcast friend. The resentments of all these people are firmly rooted in the failing of another, they are not just fancies of the imagination.
But the concept of forgiveness is a beautiful one. It the first place forgiveness does not at all require a person to convince themselves that the other person has not failed in some way. Forgiveness is something we can chose, even whilst still recognizing that the person has done us wrong. To forgive someone I do not need to show why they aren’t so bad. I can forgive simply by choosing it as an act of my own free will. Nelson Mandela forgave, but this did not mean he endorsed the actions of his oppressors, rather he just allowed himself to let it go.
A mistake people often make is that they fail to recognise that forgiveness says nothing about the person who has been forgiven, it only says something about the person who has done the forgiving. A barrier to forgiveness is the aversion to vindicating the actions of the oppressor. The sense is that if I forgive a person for his misbehavior I am indirectly saying that it is ok. But this is not the case, as we have seen. Forgiveness is not about condoning the misdeeds of others, it is about refusing to be defined by them. Forgiveness then actually has nothing to do with the other person, it is a matter of how you chose to relate to the other person, it is an immensely personal affair, it is about how you define your inner world, whatever the facts about the world beyond you. The person very well might be a monster, but still you can forgive.
Forgiveness is often associated with repentance. We feel that we can forgive someone only when they repent and acknowledge their misdoings. I have found however, in my own personal experience, that the repentance of another often serves to further entrench my resentment. When someone tells me they are sorry for what they have done I often feel more vindicated in my anger towards them. “Ja, you see, you were a bastard.” Repentance cannot ensure forgiveness because forgiveness is something I choose, not something the guilty party can do for me. I do not hereby claim that people should not apologize when they know they have done wrong. But one can’t expect an apology to always produce forgiveness, it just doesn’t happen that way.
Forgiveness, when practiced right, is unconditional. To truly forgive someone is not dependent on them changing their ways. We see unconditional forgiveness in a mother who holds no resentment towards her son who has become a monstrous degenerate that keeps 
stealing her jewelry. She will embrace the wreck that is her son, his misdeeds erased from her mind, and in that instant there is no monster, he is her sweet boy, untainted in the heart of his mother. (This sort of love, by the way, is miraculous. It “cleans” the beloved and makes them feel refreshed and undefined by their misdeeds.)
Though the mother, I am sure, wants her son to change, her regard and concern for her child is not dependent on him changing. She will want her son to change for his sake, not because by so doing she will be able to forgive him. She does not need him to change for her sake, she wills him to change for his sake, because she has forgiven him, unconditionally. The person who can look at his oppressors and say, “I forgive you” even as they are tormenting him has cracked the code of forgiveness and has set himself free.
Perhaps the fundamental truth about forgiveness is that one can’t make much sense of it without experiencing it. Forgiveness is the experience of sincerely saying: “you have done me wrong, but it is ok, I forgive you.” The words “I forgive you” are immensely powerful. These words incite us to put our resentment aside. By uttering these words we can suspend the internal dialogue of resentment and hopefully get into touch with the feeling of being at peace with the injustice of another. Hopefully once we have tasted that feeling it can expand in us until we truly let go of the resentment.
But it is because of this that forgiveness can never be forced on another. There is nothing you can say to a person to get them to touch on that feeling of forgiveness. Ultimately people will let go of resentment and forgive when they are ready to and there is little anyone can do to speed up the process for them. For someone to forgive they must be deeply tired of being resentful, they must want to forgive. But forgiveness is not easy to achieve, even when one is tired of resentment. Forgiving is much the same as stopping smoking. One can struggle with it for ages with very little progress, but sometimes, when the drive is strong enough, it happens, and we are set free.
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