We’ve all been hurt by another person at some time or another — we were treated badly, trust was broken, hearts were hurt.
And while this pain is normal, sometimes that pain lingers for too long. We relive the pain over and over, and have a hard time letting go.
This causes problems. It not only causes us to be unhappy, but can strain or ruin relationships, distract us from work and family and other important things, make us reluctant to open up to new things and people. We get trapped in a cycle of anger and hurt, and miss out on the beauty of life as it happens.
We need to learn to let go. We need to be able to forgive, so we can move on and be happy.
This is something I learned the hard way — after years of holding onto anger at a loved one that stemmed from my childhood and teen-age years, I finally let go of this anger (about 8 years ago or so). I forgave, and not only has it improved my relationship with this loved one tremendously, it has also helped me to be happier.
Forgiveness can change your life.
Forgiveness does not mean you erase the past, or forget what has happened. It doesn’t even mean the other person will change his behavior — you cannot control that. All it means is that you are letting go of the anger and pain, and moving on to a better place.
It’s not easy. But you can learn to do it.
If you’re holding onto pain, reliving it, and can’t let go and forgive, read on for some things I’ve learned.
1. Commit to letting go. You aren’t going to do it in a second or maybe not even in a day. It can take time to get over something. So commit to changing, because you recognize that the pain is hurting you.
2. Think about the pros and cons. What problems does this pain cause you? Does it affect your relationship with this person? With others? Does it affect work or family? Does it stop you from pursuing your dreams, or becoming a better person? Does it cause you unhappiness? Think of all these problems, and realize you need to change. Then think of the benefits of forgiveness — how it will make you happier, free you from the past and the pain, improve things with your relationships and life in general.
3. Realize you have a choice. You cannot control the actions of others, and shouldn’t try. But you can control not only your actions, but your thoughts. You can stop reliving the hurt, and can choose to move on. You have this power. You just need to learn how to exercise it.
4. Empathize. Try this: put yourself in that person’s shoes. Try to understand why the person did what he did. Start from the assumption that the person isn’t a bad person, but just did something wrong. What could he have been thinking, what could have happened to him in the past to make him do what he did? What could he have felt as he did it, and what did he feel afterward? How does he feel now? You aren’t saying what he did is right, but are instead trying to understand and empathize.
5. Understand your responsibility. Try to figure out how you could have been partially responsible for what happened. What could you have done to prevent it, and how can you prevent it from happening next time? This isn’t to say you’re taking all the blame, or taking responsibility away from the other person, but to realize that we are not victims but participants in life.
6. Focus on the present. Now that you’ve reflected on the past, realize that the past is over. It isn’t happening anymore, except in your mind. And that causes problems — unhappiness and stress. Instead, bring your focus back to the present moment. What are you doing now? What joy can you find in what is happening right now? Find the joy in life now, as it happens, and stop reliving the past. Btw, you will inevitably start thinking about the past, but just acknowledge that, and gently bring yourself back to the present moment.
7. Allow peace to enter your life. As you focus on the present, try focusing on your breathing. Imagine each breath going out is the pain and the past, being released from your body and mind. And imagine each breath coming in is peace, entering you and filling you up. Release the pain and the past. Let peace enter your life. And go forward, thinking no longer of the past, but of peace and the present.
8. Feel compassion. Finally, forgive the person and realize that in forgiveness, you are allowing yourself to be happy and move on. Feel empathy for the person and wish happiness on them. Let love for them, and life in general, grow in your heart. It may take time, but if you’re stuck on this point, repeat some of the ones above until you can get here.
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Obama promises to suspend Habeas Corpus - Boing Boing: "Rachel Maddow points out that in Obama's national security speech yesterday, he proposes to replace Guantanamo-style detention without trial with his own detention without trial, a system he calls 'Indefinite Preventative Detention' through which people who are believed to be likely to commit a crime at some point in the future can be locked up forever without charge, trial, jury or appeal. "
Steampunk casemod in honor of new game Damnation: "
Jake von Slatt sez, 'Holy Mother of Zod! My arch nemesis Jake-of-All-Trades Hildebrandt has created what has to be the most definitively Steampunk casemod EVAH!
Behold the Telecalculograph, Mk. II!'
It's a promo for the forthcoming game Damnation, and you can win it! Be sure to check out the 'making of' video for lots of sweet little notes, like the spring-loaded tug-knob that works like a pinball launcher, which turns on the machine and spins up a flywheel, making the whole thing feel mechanical rather than electric.
Continuations and ruby | blog@iamnolegend.com [ochronus]: "Today I take a look at the concept of continuation, its implementation in ruby and some examples. As its name suggests, a continuation is an abstract representation of the control state, of the things to come. Practically continuation support in a language means you can ‘save’ your state at a point and return to it later. This is called a first-class continuation. "
Tennessee Congressman Steve Cohen is revealed to have an enlightened attitude about marijuana in this exchange with drug war dinosaur Robert Mueller. The tired-looking FBI director seems to be reciting his false arguments like a pull-string puppet. (Via The Agitator)
First Look At VMware's vSphere "Cloud OS": "snydeq writes 'InfoWorld's Paul Venezia takes VMware's purported 'cloud OS,' vSphere 4, for a test drive. The bottom line: 'VMware vSphere 4.0 touches on almost every aspect of managing a virtual infrastructure, from ESX host provisioning to virtual network management to backup and recovery of virtual machines. Time will tell whether these features are as solid as they need to be in this release, but their presence is a substantial step forward for virtual environments.' Among the features Venezia finds particularly worthwhile is vSphere's Fault Tolerance: 'In a nutshell, this allows you to run the same VM in tandem across two hardware nodes, but with only one instance actually visible to the network. You can think of it as OS-agnostic clustering. Should a hardware failure take out the primary instance, the secondary instance will assume normal operations instantly, without requiring a VMotion.''
There's a new version of Google's Chrome open source browser available, as the team behind it has announced. Google is citing up to 30 percent performance increases on JavaScript-heavy tasks. I've taken it for a spin, comparing it to Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, which also has very fast JavaScript performance thanks to its TraceMonkey technology. The new Chrome does work faster than the Firefox beta at this point, and the performance is another way that Google's browser is maturing and innovating.
Google is putting its money where its mouth is on the performance increases in the new Chrome. If you go to this web page, it will automatically start running a series of seven separate JavaScript-focused browser benchmark tests. You can paste the same URL into Firefox or another browser, and compare the results you get to Chrome's results. I got significantly higher numbers (higher is better) on all the tests with the new version of Chrome, as compared to Firefox 3.5 Beta 4.
The performance increases in Chrome come from an update to its V8 JavaScript engine, and a new version of the open source WebKit rendering engine. It is worth noting that Firefox 3.5 will be coming out in a Release Candidate version in early June, with the final version due shortly after that. The final version may outperform Chrome in JavaScript tasks, as both Mozilla and Google are targeting improvements there. As far as the latest beta of Firefox, goes, though, Chrome performs faster. It also continues to have the advantage of running tasks within tabs as separate applications, which means far fewer browser crashes. However, Chrome does not yet have anywhere near the ecosystem of useful extensions that Firefox has.
Twitter As a Traffic Generator : Set Up a TwitterFeed: "This morning I awoke to update myself on the scandal and news surrounding the blog post on optimizing start-up costs by Jason Calacanis, and clicked over to his blog homepage, instead of the post itself. I then came across Jason’s post on his 9,000 + Twitter followers and read this quote : ‘Twitter is the #2 referrer of traffic to my blog… behind Google.’"
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There's a new version of Google's Chrome open source browser available, 
