Tagged: “The Forgiving Life”

I know that forgiving is important in both Judaism and Christianity. Is forgiveness mentioned in other faiths or worldviews such as Islam or Buddhism?

There is a book in the Koran called Joseph, which is based on the story of Joseph forgiving his half-brothers in Genesis within the Hebrew scriptures.  Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism have favorable views of forgiving.  My book, Forgiveness Therapy, discusses these different viewpoints.  The different world religions do not talk negatively about forgiveness.  Buddhism does not have a word for forgiveness, but some of the stories in Buddhism show forgiveness.  Again, I discuss this in the book, Forgiveness Therapy.

Free on YouTube – Watch Dr. Robert Enright’s Greek Forgiveness Education Presentation

In case you missed it, you can now watch Dr. Robert Enright’s presentation during yesterday’s (Feb. 4) Greek Forgiveness Education webinar, on YouTube–for free. Details about the webinar can be found in the article posted immediately below this one.

The unique webinar was broadcast live via Zoom video conferencing from Greece. More than 4,500 individuals participated in the webinar or have watched the YouTube video since it was posted.

Dr. Enright, Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and founder of the International Forgiveness Institute (IFI) was the featured presenter for the webinar. His topic, “The Healing Value of Forgiveness from the Aristotelian Philosophical Perspective,” has special significance in Greece because Greek philosophers like Aristotle not only helped shape the world some twenty centuries ago, but they are still very much alive in the principles underlying what is being taught in the country today.

“I have been relying on Aristotle for 35 years,” Dr. Enright said in his opening remarks during the webinar–the same length of time he has been studying the “moral virtue” (Aristotle’s term) of forgiveness. “The English translation of what Aristotle described as a moral virtue is ‘magnanimity’ or ‘largeness of heart,’” Dr. Enright added–what he calls the very essence of forgiveness.

Following Dr. Enright’s presentation, Dr. Peli Galiti, Director of the IFI’s Greek Forgiveness Education Program spoke on “The Way to Forgiveness: From Theory to Practice.” For the past eight years, Dr. Galiti has been conducting Forgiveness Education training workshops for Greek teachers. During that time, she has trained more than 600 teachers to use the Forgiveness Education Program developed by Dr. Enright which is now being taught to more than 6,000 Greek students.

When a close friend really hurt me deeply I felt attacked mentally, physically, and emotionally. I always felt out of control. I faced humiliation and suffered anxiety. I developed migraine headaches and spent time in the hospital. Their words made me feel worthless. Am I worthless?

You most certainly are not worthless.  Why?  It is because all people are special, unique, and irreplaceable.  There never was a person on this earth quite like you…..and there never will be again.  As with the case of self-esteem or negative feelings toward the self, your thinking sometimes can become too general about who you are relative to the betrayals which you have experienced. You might slowly, and without even noticing it, drift into negative self-statements about who you are as a person. It is time to resurrect the truth: You are a person of worth no matter what, not matter how much pain you have, no matter the condemning statements from others. I urge you to re-read the previous sentence until this new thinking about who you are is solidified and consistent within you.  You….have…..great……worth.

We have been in this new year for almost a month now. The idea of being happy in the new year is lost on me because of how I have been treated in the past. I am angry. Can you suggest a way for me to truly have hope for a happy new year this time?

We sometimes think that those who hurt us have far more control over us than they actually do. We often measure our happiness or unhappiness by what has happened in the past. My challenge to you today is this: Consider forgiving those who have hurt you, who have hurt your happiness.  Your response of forgiveness now to the one (or ones) who hurt you can set you free from a past influence that has been toxic. Try to measure your happiness by what you will do next (not by what is past). Your next move can be this––to love regardless of what others do to you. I gently urge you to try this and see if your happiness increases.

What do you think is the highest reason to forgive? For example, is the morally highest reason to forgive to preserve my own emotional health in self-care? Is it to help the other person to live a better life?

Those are very good reasons to forgive.  I would say one of the highest reasons to forgive is this: to exercise goodness, particularly love, as an end in and of itself regardless of how others react to your offer of forgiving and whether or not you show immediate psychological improvement.  In other words, to offer love regardless of the consequences seems to me to be a special reason to forgive.