Clearing karma through forgiveness can be a powerful way to evolve as a spiritual being. But forgiving someone who you feel doesn’t deserve it is one of the most challenging things you’ll ever do in a lifetime. There could’ve been situations in your childhood that completely wrecked your psychological state as an adult. When you’ve suffered the consequences from other people’s mistakes, you’ll spend most of your time healing those wounds just to have a normal life. But if you want to move forward to the next phase of your personal growth, then clearing karma through forgiveness is the way to do it. It won’t to be easy. But it’ll be worth it. 

What is forgiveness?

Forgiveness is the art of letting go of pain, resentment, or the urge for revenge towards someone who has hurt you. It involves a conscious decision to release negative emotions and grant pardon to the person who caused you pain. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you are forgetting about what happened. It just means that you are CHOOSING to let that energy go. 

Why is clearing karma through forgiveness important?

Forgiveness releases that energy from your body on a physical, emotional, and psychological level.

Experiencing trauma is like having a wound. If you neglect the wound, it will get infected. It may get so infected that it spreads to your bloodstream. The infection will get into your blood and make its way into your brain or into your heart. But if you care for the wound and tend to it quickly, you might just end up with a little scar that most people won’t even notice. 

Let’s take the hypothetical situation of being cheated on by your partner as an example. If you don’t do the healing work and process that trauma, then years may pass before you realize that you have yet to forgive them. What will happen is you’ll develop character flaws that stem from that wound. You may develop a resentment towards people that look like your ex. Or you may develop trust or abandonment issues. You might even develop self-esteem issues and constantly compare yourself to others. This can also develop into physical symptoms like chest pain or high blood pressure. The possibilities are endless with how a traumatic event can negatively affect your life if you don’t let it go. 

What’s even worse is that you’ll continue to face the same lesson until you have learned from it and released it completely (more on that later). 

Why is forgiveness hard?

Forgiveness can be difficult when you aren’t ready to accept accountability in the situation. If we go back to the example of being cheated on, you may find it difficult to forgive this person because you are not ready to accept that you may have behaved that drove them to that behavior. Perhaps the reason you faced this lesson was to learn about self-worth. It’s difficult to say what specific lesson you’ll need to learn because it is a case-by-case scenario. This is something that only you can figure out (with the help of resources, like therapy, of course). 

Sometimes forgiveness can be difficult because it feels like you’re letting them off the hook. Again, this isn’t about them at all, it’s about you. The laws of karma still apply to every person involved in the situation. That means that whoever caused you pain will inevitably feel the reverberation of their actions. It’s like the saying goes “what goes around comes around”. Your forgiveness will not change the fact that karma will hold them accountable for their actions eventually. 

What if I was completely innocent and did nothing to deserve it?

No one ever “deserves” for bad things to happen to them. However, the reason things happen to innocent people is far more complicated because of the spiritual nature of the universe. 

Everything happens for a reason. 

Sometimes we don’t like to hear that, but it’s the truth. The universe was created by a Source of all creation. God. Everything that you see is God and everything you don’t see is God. This Source is everything while also being nothing simultaneously. Everything is a small fractal of Source, and it is experiencing itself by interacting with another piece of Source. Every being on this planet is playing a part in one giant experience to see where we will go as a society, a planet, and as a consciousness. How you behave towards another piece of Source will determine the consequences in which you receive. This applies to you in this lifetime, and it applies to your past lifetimes as well. Your past life decisions are influencing your life today. 

This is the concept of karma. 

On top of that, your soul actually chooses which karmic lessons you are going to face before you reincarnate on the planet. Some of the toughest and wisest souls will choose to go through hardships, especially as a child. This quickens the process of evolution for a spiritual being. 

I am not saying that it’s okay or acceptable for bad things to happen to innocent people. Especially children, because they should receive nothing but love. But the soul of that child has chosen these experiences because of the wisdom in which they will gain from it. Souls that endure the greatest amount of pain inevitably develop into the most powerful versions of themselves. 

Only if they can move past the pain and into a place of forgiveness. Thus, clearing karma through forgiveness. 

These karmic lessons don’t just involve the “victim” and the “perpetrator”. It also involves anyone else that being effected by the experience. I put those words in quotations because your soul will also choose which role to play in each of these scenarios in order to complete a karmic lesson. So in this lifetime, you may be the victim. But in past lifetimes, you may have been the perpetrator. 

What is the point of karma?

Karma is the concept of learning a lesson by experiencing it in every conceivable way. In order to experience it in multiple ways, the soul must either play the different roles in one lifetime, or play these roles throughout multiple lifetimes. Let’s go back to our previous example of a partner cheating on the other. The way a soul would learn this lesson completely is by experiencing the lesson through the lens of everyone involved. Again, this may take multiple lifetimes to accomplish. 

The lessons from being a cheater: 

• The psychological impact it can cause their partner
• Facing unresolved childhood wounds of insecurity and inadequacy 
• Possible sex addictions that were never addressed 
• Not living an authentic life and therefore in an inauthentic relationship
• The emotional and psychological impact it can have on their children
• What betraying someone’s trust feels like
• The discomfort of lying to someone over a period of time 

The lessons of being cheated on: 

• Recovering from low self worth or self-esteem issues
• Not standing up for yourself 
• Mindfulness of the health of their romantic relationship
• Acknowledging their partner’s needs and how they may have been neglected
• Listening to their own intuition about the situation
• Developing better situational awareness 
• Dealing with resentment
• The impact that their choice to stay or go will have on their children

The lessons of other people that were involved: 

• The impact of infidelity on a family
• Friends having to choose which partner to stay in touch with
• Being romantically involved with someone who is married 
• Having a parent that never recovered from infidelity 
• Learning to live with divorced parents
• Living with two parents that stayed together but resent one another 

As you can see, the possibilities of lessons learned are endless and far more complicated than what meets the eye. This is just a small list of examples when it comes to experiencing infidelity. Can you imagine the lessons to be learned when experiencing war, murder, human/animal slavery, or destruction of the planet? I’m sure you can because you probably have learned many of them already. 

How are you clearing karma through forgiveness?

Once you understand that you were probably a perpetrator at one point in this life or another, then it will help you be empathetic towards your perpetrator in this situation. 

 This is also happening in order for you to learn a lesson as well. So the question is, what is the lesson you are learning? The sooner you can process the trauma and figure this out, the sooner you can move into a space of forgiveness. 

How do you forgive when you feel like you aren’t ready?

Not feeling ready is a sign that you did not process the trauma fully. This is something that you can’t rush, but you also shouldn’t delay it either. The longer you hold on to negative energy, the more opportunities you give it to destroy your life and your relationships. For the sake of your future self, it’s better to start the healing process as a soon as possible. 

What forgiveness is NOT

• Emotional bypassing: This is when you suppress your own emotions and focus more on logically rationalizing the situation. Letting it “roll off your shoulders” so to speak. Working through a trauma healthily requires the acknowledgement of how you think AND how you feel about it. 

• Letting them off the hook: If someone behaves that needs to be held accountable, then perhaps this situation is a calling to do so. Sometimes bad people behave a certain way because nobody has stopped them. I’m not saying that this should be your responsibility. But if you have an urge to help hold someone accountable, then follow your gut. This may spare someone else from getting hurt in the future, especially if violence is involved. 

• Tolerating unacceptable behavior: Forgiveness doesn’t mean that you have to accept bad behavior from the person whom you have forgiven. It means that you have let go of that energy. If there are constantly new situations that cause you pain from the same person, then this shows a lack of respect towards you and your feelings. Not only is this person disrespecting you, but you may be disrespecting yourself by continuing to tolerate the behavior. It’s on a case-by-case basis.

• Forgetting: True forgiveness requires full acknowledgement of the trauma. It doesn’t require you to forget that it happened. No longer having the trauma cross your mind because you have worked through it is not the same as forgetting it.  If you have forgotten or don’t recall the trauma, then this could be a sign of dissociative amnesia. 

•  Reconciliation: This is the act of restoring the relationship that was damaged by the trauma. It requires the willingness of everyone involved. Each person will need to engage in open communication and have a genuine desire to understand each other’s perspectives. This may not be feasible in some situations, but you can accomplish forgiveness on your end without the other person’s participation. 

How do I clear karma through forgiveness?

There are a number of ways to reach a place of forgiveness, but here is one exercise you can try: 

• Acknowledge the trauma by writing it down or speaking it out loud. This helps get the energy out of your body. Try to describe how the event makes you feel in great detail. 

• Allow yourself to feel any emotions that arise from the memory of the event. Some of you were never allowed to process the trauma because you didn’t have a safe container to express those emotions in. You can create one for yourself by writing your feelings down, and then burning the paper if you fear that others may read it. You can also confide in a therapist or someone who is willing to hold emotional space for you. 

*I would caution against confiding in someone that is going to fuel any negative emotions or make the healing process about them instead of you. This can always be a joint process in which you hold space for one another. This is an intimate endeavor so I would suggest you choose your container wisely.

• Write a letter to the person who hurt you, then burn it. This gives you an opportunity to express any feelings that you couldn’t get out before. This letter doesn’t have to be sent to the person. In fact, it’s usually better if you don’t reopen that old energy. Involving the other person when reconciliation is not an option will only create more karma to deal with. You’ll also most likely want them to react a certain way, which will be unlikely. Don’t create unrealistic expectations from others. Again, it’s not about them anyway. 

* Why do we burn the letters? This not only destroys any evidence of your private thoughts, but it’s also symbolic for transformation and purification of that energy. You’ve put that energy on paper, and you release it by burning it. 

• Create new affirmations. Write down the negative outcomes that you have experienced from the trauma. Then, write down an opposite outcome that you want to manifest. For example: 

Negative outcome: I’ve become distrustful of any new romantic partner

Opposite manifestation: I attract relationships that are built with honesty and trust

Since you want to anchor in the new manifestation, you’ll want to keep this somewhere rather than burn it. Be sure to use present-tense “I” statements rather than what you “want”. Wanting something implies that you don’t have it. Stating something as if it were already happening is how you manifest it into your reality.

Clearing karma through forgiveness will take time and patience. It’s not a linear process, it’s an art. It will be challenging and feel impossible at times. Just remember, you were placed on this planet to experience these challenges to find out who you really are in the face of adversity. This is giving you an opportunity to redefine yourself, which is it gift.