When negative emotions are held in your heart and your mind day after day, month after month, and year after year, the result can be devastating to your health, even life threatening. Following steps of forgiveness can alleviate much of the pain and fear of the experience, thus allowing for a state of ease, rather than disease. And, the one essential key to this whole forgiveness process is sincerity.

In order for the Morter 5-Step Forgiveness Process – forgive yourself (for allowing the event to affect your health), forgive the other person (for any harm he or she may have caused you), give the other person permission to forgive you (in case you did something you weren’t aware you did), see the good in the situation (the lesson the situation taught you, even if it’s that you’ve learned you wouldn’t do the same thing to someone else), be thankful (for the experience and the lesson it taught you and wish everyone well) – to be effective, you must perform these steps with feeling and emotion. You must truly mean what you say as you go through each of the steps. Your feelings of forgiveness must be as strong to the positive side as your feelings toward the event you are forgiving are to the negative side. In other words, you must actually balance or neutralize your negative feelings toward the situation by blanketing it with positive, loving feelings.

This does not mean that you must now view the situation or person as good or that you agree with or condone their actions. What it means is that you must see the good in the situation as it relates to you. When you can learn the lesson from the experience, then you will see the good in the experience. Finding the good in the situation has been described as “like flipping a switch and turning on a light.” Once you see the good in the experience, then you know why it happened and what lesson it offers you. The good lesson may now be glaringly obvious. You may even wonder why you never recognized it before. The key is that you now see the good and learn the lesson.

Though it may be difficult to perform these forgiveness steps at first, you will get better at it with each experience. The toughest lessons to learn are the first ones that you tackle. Those nagging experiences from your past may have been haunting you for a very long time. These situations may be hard to overcome, however your health depends on your ability to do so. And, as you begin to apply this Forgiveness Process to current situations, you will see how easily you can adopt the practice into your every day living.

Things don’t happen to you, they happen for you to learn a lesson. If you learn the lesson correctly, it will enable you to give and receive unconditional love. Be thankful for each lesson you are offered, not only those in your past, but also the lesson of the moment.