Anxiety, panic and depression can be very debilitating. They drain our energy and make it more difficult to get on with life and do the things we need to do. When severe, anxiety and depression can seriously cripple a person’s ability to lead a meaningful life. Yet, there is a way out of these debilitating conditions. Forgiveness can help us to be free of anxiety and depression, as well as reduce the tendency to panic. At the very least, Forgiveness can make it much easier for us to manage these issues. How Forgiveness Helps When we look at the causes of anxiety and depression, our thinking processes are often part of the problem. Anxiety becomes habitual when we spend too much time having worrying and frightening thoughts. Your body then gets into very alert and vigilant state. This means your body is being flooded with the types of hormones that make it even more likely that we will think anxious thoughts. By putting your nervous system on “alert,” you tell your nervous system to look for those things which might go wrong (or are going wrong), and to not look for things that are going right. Your perspective becomes one-sided and distorted towards the negative, and often without you even realizing it. Likewise, thoughts of doom and gloom such as feeling stuck in a situation with no way out or no hope for a better future, can also become habitual. Such thoughts cause your body to be flooded with the types of hormones that make you feel sluggish; lacking in energy or enthusiasm, and even more likely to have despairing and unhappy thoughts. By giving us a way to change or interrupt our habitual thought patterns, Forgiveness allows us to make radical positive changes. It helps us to cope with the things that we find worrying or fearful, and it also helps us to find hope and new possibilities in situations where we feel stuck. Yet, Forgiveness can take us further than this; much further. Practicing Forgiveness Forgiveness can produce deep and powerful changes in our attitudes, beliefs, and thinking habits. It can set us free from the past, so that we can face life with confidence, and we can go forward to create a better future. Forgiveness helps us break through the thought patterns that create fear, anxiety, depression and panic. Practicing Forgiveness helps nourish our nervous system with positive, life enhancing feelings. These positive feelings and the associated hormones make it easier to see and enjoy the good things in life. This in turn makes it easier to become even more forgiving. Forgiveness also makes it easier to feel like reaching out to other people, and reaching out to others is known to be one of the best ways to reduce stress and anxiety, and to help people move out of isolation and depression. A Life without Anxiety, Depression and Panic What often feeds a sense of anxiety, is a feeling of being overwhelmed and not able to handle life. What this boils down to is really a feeling of not being able to handle other people. It is often the things that other people “might” do or say, which make us anxious. Likewise, depression often comes from how we respond to other people’s behavior. Perhaps someone has been rude to us, or said something unkind; or someone we depend on does not seem to like us or approve of us. If we do not know how to manage our feelings about such events, then these can build up till we feel hopeless, and depression sets in. Therefore, both anxiety and depression are often triggered by how well we cope with the demands, expectations and hopes of other people. However, there is more to it than that. The real issue is not what other people say or do, or what they want or expect from us; the real issue is what we say to ourselves about it. In other words, how we interpret the situation will determine how we feel about it. Forgiveness Protects Us from Other People’s Behavior What we need is something that can sit between us and other people, or situations, which cause us to feel anxious or depressed. This is what Forgiveness does. Forgiveness helps to protect us from the affect of other people’s behavior, by helping us become more detached from the effects of their behavior. We might feel anxious because we do not know how to handle someone behavior towards us. We might feel worried that they will say something harsh or rude to us. However, as we learn Forgiveness, we see that we have a way to handle them. We can forgive them, and equally important, we can forgive ourselves. Through Forgiveness, we have a way of handling or coping with any situation. We might feel depressed because we do not see a way out of a very difficult situation. As we learn to forgive, we find that we do have a way out. By looking to how we can forgive the people around us and forgive ourselves for getting into unhappy situations, our whole perspective begins to change. New possibilities, which we were blind to before, become really obvious and accessible as we learn to forgive. Forgiveness Helps us to be Free of Fear By learning how to forgive, we begin to discover that we have an inner freedom that we perhaps didn’t even know was there. It is that inner freedom which enables us to find happiness even in difficult situations. It is like we rise above circumstances and find an inner strength, and new abilities to handle situations, and to handle other people and their behavior. Through Forgiveness, we start to lose a lot of our fear of other people and our fear of life. We begin to become kinder to ourselves and kinder to those around us. Does this cause them to behave differently towards us? Very often it does, but we have the inner strength and inner freedom, such that we do not need to rely on that. Our inner freedom liberates us from being a victim of circumstances and enables us to shape the ways in which we are affected by the people and events in our life. Forgiveness is quick and easy to learn (see the chapter: The Four Steps to Forgiveness). Begin today to put aside anxiety, fear, worry, depression and panic attacks. Breathe free, and learn to live your life to the full.
wow very nice story dear