Living like a child without resentment and grudges...

Past 6 months has been an amazing journey for me simply because of my daughter as she graduated from being a infant to a toddler, she now understands feelings, emotions and knows how to react and reciprocate her feelings, this phase also has been a immense learning and growth experience for me.

Its only when you see your kid grow you realize you need to unlearn so many things in life or reset your belief systems or just reiterate the things we already know esp., with the way we react to situations and people.

Simple example is holding grudges against another human being, we as parents are so guarded towards our kids that we are constantly controlling them and disciplining them and in the process we often say and do things which the kid don’t like or feel hurt and they show their emotions by either crying or throwing stuff around.. but this feeling is so short lived., the min the parent shows care and give a warm hug and explain the reason behind this behavior the kid just bounces back from whatever they were feeling at that moment to a instant bright smile, the next min they behave perfectly fine with the parent who had early on annoyed them.

As we grow up this ability to forget the feeling of hurt diminishes and we fill our hearts and minds with grudges and resentment against  the individuals who have hurt us along the way., this baggage that we carry not only adds burden to our already stressful life it also affects any future relationship we get into.

As human beings we always draw upon past experiences and learning’s to shield ourselves from getting hurt in the new relationship that we form and more often than not this habit hinders and hurt the new relationship than nurture it.

Again bringing my daughters reference, will it not be easy if we adults can forget the past and get on with life without any grudges just like how kids do ? Can we forgive, not saying forget and move on in life so that we feel less burdened inside and be at peace with ourselves ?

This again needs lot of thinking and reflecting on the journey we have had and the kind of people we have met, I have had my fair share of bad experiences with people while I was in my early 20’s., it really took a while for me to comprehend why someone would hurt an another person so much and that’s when I decided to take control of my life and really channeled all my energy into studies and completing my masters and finding a good job and in this process I did hold a lot of resentment as I had not forgiven those who hurt me and this really affected my ability to TRUST people. I would never look at a person in the same way ever again, there used to be an element of preconceived notion already built in my head even before I knew the person and this habit of mine did affect relationships and I did miss out of possibilities of great friendships.

Then few years back I accidently stumbled on Oprah Winfrey show and the topic for that day was forgiving and in that show one incident which Oprah said hit the right cord or me.. She said and I quote “ I was angry with this one particular person for ages for something that she did to me and I accidently met her after many years and she did not even remember who I was “ and she said that is when she realized she has been carrying this burden on herself for years when the other person does not even remember the incident so the only person who really suffered in the process was “YOU” and only “YOU”.

This was a realization point for me too, I was holding resentment towards people who hurt me and I was constantly thinking about them and that’s when I realized I need to let go of all the grudges and resentment I was holding on to, and what did I do, I started to find out where these people where, at that time there were no social networking sites, so I contacted many  people and eventually found each one of them, I called them and spoke normally to them and they told me they were very happy I called and they did apologize to me for what they did and that definitely felt good and it was such a big release.

This exercise did help me to move on and it was from then on I started to learn to forgive people every time they hurt me but definitely not forget !!!  And another key lesson I learnt in the process is never to bring any past experience to a new relationship or existing relationship as this can only hinder and never help sustain that relationship.

So its key to let go of grudges and carry less baggage as we cruse along our lives and thanks to my daughter who keeps reminding me this day in and day out  !!