Forgiving others is one thing. Forgiving ourselves is another. It seems as if every day I become mindful of yet another piece of poison, as Don Miguel Ruiz would call them, that I somehow internalized as a child and have been living with for decades. The lies were all a part of my domestication to the planet. As we evolve and grow, we become mindful of those lies which we no longer agree to and which we must replace in our lives.

Removing them from our lives is one part of the process of healing and evolving. The other part is forgiving ourselves for internalizing them in the first place. Most of these lies, we may not have even realized were lies when we first internalized them. We just ate them because we were told they were good for us.

About 3 years ago, I wrote a piece called No more poison!. In it, I reflected on something don Miguel Ruiz said in his book The Four Agreements. He wrote, “Taking things personally makes you prey for predators. They can hook your attention with one little opinion, and feed you whatever poison they want. Refuse to eat poison! When he put it in those words, “Refuse to eat poison!” I realized how logical that sounds. Most people would not voluntarily or consciously eat poison. Yet some of us eat and serve poison on a daily basis.

Any time we hold a resentment towards someone, we are poisoning ourselves. The longer we hold the resentment, the more poison we are ingesting. A steady ingestion of poison over time can lead to an early death. So, in actuality, when we do this we are not only poisoning ourselves, we are committing suicide. We are leading ourselves to a type of early death. Nelson Mandela once said, “Holding on to resentment is like taking a poison pill and waiting for the other person to die.” We are the ones who die when we hold on to resentment.

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