The Teaching of Ajahn Suchart.
28 September 2024“When you forgive the person who has hurt you, you are improving yourself and making yourself better and higher. You are not doing anything for him or her, but you are doing it for yourself.”
Question: I feel extremely sad because someone has hurt me badly. Please teach me the Dhamma’s way to forgive and to give loving kindness to this person who has hurt me?
Than Ajahn: You can look at it as the consequence of your past kamma. You might have done something bad to this person in the past, and now it is his turn to get back to you.
You look at it as something that you can’t prevent. So getting angry or having ill will towards this person will not make you feel better, it actually makes you feel worse.
In order to make you feel better, you just have to forgive him. When you can forgive him, you are better than him, you will be a better person yourself. Instead of having ill will towards him, you radiate loving kindness to him, and in this way you are developing yourself to become higher.
When you forgive the person who has hurt you, you are improving yourself and making yourself better and higher. You are not doing anything for him or her, but you are doing it for yourself.
…….
Question: How do I fix my anger to someone who has caused me harm in the past? The memory of the pain they caused me makes me angry.
Than Ajahn: Just try not to think of the past.
The reason you keep thinking about the past because you don’t have the ability to bring your mind to the present, so you need to develop mindfulness. If you have mindfulness, you can bring your mind to stay in the present and whatever happened in the past will disappear from your mind.
What you need now is to develop mindfulness by keep on focusing on an object so that your mind cannot go to the past or go to the future.
You can recite a mantra. When you think of the past you just repeat the mantra. If you can keep on reciting it for a while, you will forget about the past event that you have been thinking about. To forget is to forgive, to forgive is to forget.
You have to stay in the present. You need mindfulness to bring your mind back into the present. Without mindfulness, your mind likes to go to the past or to the future. You can use a mantra as an object to anchor your mind to stay in the present, or watch what your body is doing all the time.
By Ajahn Suchart Abhijāto
Youtube: Dhamma in English
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