by Mother Myriam

Relationship advice: Most of us as we travel through life have been wounded by those who we thought loved us. Naturally we seek love, but sometimes we have learned ways that really do not bring love into our lives but actually drive us to choose negative relationships. Pain and hurt and abuse – physical and emotional – can fracture our souls. In mending our souls we have to recapture those parts of ourselves that were harmed.

You are not what you remember but how you remember. If you can remember negative experiences with forgiveness rather than resentment you will transcend fear into a state of love. Resentment means to re-feel something or some event. When we hold on to resentment we give power to our anger and our fears. Forgiveness allows us to let go of the past. Forgiveness allows us to heal our fractured souls and wounded hearts.

Taking responsibility for how we respond to our world, gives us back our power. Only a powerful person can afford to be vulnerable. And there is no place where we are more vulnerable than when we love. If you are having difficulty forgiving the person who wounded you, it might help to recognize that you are forgiving the person and not the behavior.

Clarity of vision when looking at the past will do more to empower you with the ability to love and to accept love than any other action. Do an exercise where you use your imagination to enter the mind of the person who wounded you. What had happened in their past that created their behavior? It is pretty clear, that people do not do horrible things unless horrible things have been done to them. More than sixty percent of criminals in prisons were abused as children. They were subjected to horrible events and thus they grew up to act in horrible ways. All of them are wounded in some way or another. Your parents were wounded as they were growing up. We have wounded our children as they grew up. The cycle goes back generation upon generation. However, the cycle of wounding can stop now with you. When you can look at your parents as imperfect but still love the spirit of God that is within each and every one of us, you will realize that they like you were just doing the best that the could.

Who do you surround you with? Are your friends and family members toxic? There is nothing that can kill love more than to hang around people who are incapable of having positive relationships. When those around you demand that you act in a negative way, they need to be eliminated from your life. You can hope that they will change but you cannot control it. You cannot control other people in your life. You can control whether you allow them to create a toxic environment for you and your soul. Fear loses its control when we realize that we can always walk away from any person or situation that makes us feel unloved or unloving.