Yvonne HrdyThe Elders Posts have so far given us great information and tools to help unlock our highest potential.

This week, Emerald Heart Elder Yvonne Hrdy, continues in this vein as she shares with the Blog, how held resentment can negatively impact our lives. Yvonne explains how the feeling can manifest and offers simple strategies to help release these toxic emotions.

 

Letting go of Resentments

One of the biggest ‘energy killers’ in our lives – besides fears of course – are resentments or holding on to resentments and grudges towards others. Resentment is an emotion that is often less visible in our lives, other than anger for example, and sometimes it can even stay hidden from our own self-awareness for a long time.

It’s a low-vibrational energy, like thick and heavy streams that cover your cells and close down your heart. It poisons your inner being over time while you sub-consciously wait for things or persons to change on the outside. It holds you tied to the story of your past, to incidents that happened or did not happen, and prevents you from moving forward in your evolution.  It hinders you from feeling joy and happiness in your life and holds you from creating the life you would love to create in alignment with your soul’s purpose. The God-Consciousness which tries to express itself through you all the time gets distorted in its creation, as resentment rises to the surface and turns into a rather destructive energy that then causes harm to yourself or others.

It can be as simple as you withdraw from others and cut off communication, or that you hold yourself back in what you have to give to others or humanity. Or it can become so extreme that it turns into hate and a desire for revenge as we can see in a number of global conflicts at the moment.

Indeed, this is what this kind of energy does over time: it builds up, as a perceived or experienced hurt that could not be expressed openly for different reasons. Maybe you could not cope with the depth of the hurt of the emotion, or that you had put yourself in a dangerous situation maybe. If you keep these feelings inside, and if you are somebody who tends to direct emotions towards yourself it can almost make you implode and create severe pain and diseases over time. Or the energy keeps growing inside, like a monster behind closed doors, and seeks itself a valve once the pressure has become too big to erupt as volcanic-like destructive forces, directed towards others in order to destroy.

And of course, there are all kinds of shades in between these two extremes: be it that you develop a somewhat bitter or cynical personality over time or you silently start to judge or despise others. Another kind of behavior as a result of undissolved resentment is what I call ‘shooting between the cracks’. Often spiteful remarks about others or placed directly at others with the intent to make the other feel bad. Most perfidious are those actions and comments that are wrapped as compliments for example. Well, usually you can feel very well that it is not meant as a true compliment.

I definitely had to learn a lot about resentment in this lifetime and I am still refining my awareness. I have experienced it from both sides, as perpetrator and recipient.

There is usually a hurtful experience that often comes along with a sense of injustice and/or sense of humiliation. The hurt cuts deeply into the system but cannot be expressed openly the moment it happens, be it because of its depth or because more hurt or humiliation is being anticipated.

Since I started to walk a path of self-development and transformation and since a number of years, now a true spiritual path with full commitment, I learnt to let go of a lot of anger, resentment and sometimes even hate towards others, myself and the Universe and I learnt to untie myself from the past and my limiting patterns.

What I am experiencing quite often is a kind of fine-tuning process. The more of the ‘rougher patterns’ dissolve the more the Light can illuminate the hidden nuances within one’s behavior. Like a diamond that is slowly emerging from all the polishing work. It feels like a deep, satisfying pleasure when I discover one of those not-so-pure streams within actions that have been carried out with best intent or knowledge, but do carry an ounce of this resentment energy towards God and the world, or whomever, and prevent me from creating the highest vibration of love I am able to. These are moments of gratitude because when you see it clearly it means you have a fully conscious choice and it is so much easier to make a decision for love instead of destruction in this specific moment.

Here are a few strategies that helped me to let go and maybe you find these helpful too:

Allow yourself to feel the hurt and the pain

Resentment is not a primary emotion, there is always pain or hurt underneath. When you feel resentment, sit still for a moment and go inside and allow yourself to feel the pain underneath the resentment. As I said above, it usually results from hurt that was accompanied with a sense of injustice and humiliation and it can date back very far, sometimes several lifetimes. But the story is not important; to release the locked emotion is important. So, just feel inside: Don’t you feel valued, respected, loved, seen or treated with justice for example?  Allow yourself to feel it, allow the energy to shift and then give yourself whatever it is you need.

What am I supposed to learn from this?

We might like this fact or not, but everything that happens in our life is being given by God and is a learning experience for us.  When you don’t feel loved it might be that you chose to learn to love yourself first. When you don’t feel respected it is because you need to learn to respect yourself first. When you don’t feel seen it might be because in this lifetime you chose to learn how to make the step and step out of your closet and let your essence shine into the world. Or, sometimes things might happen to put our ego back into shape again so that we learn about humility, patience or compassion for example.

Find out why you hold on to resentments

If you have difficulties to let go of the past, explore why you would rather choose to hold on to this destructive emotion. It can be as simple as having a Fear of Letting Go or something deeper. For example Fear of the Future, when you let go of an old story that consumed much of your energy; Fear of Stepping into my Power, Fear of Taking Responsibility for my Life, Fear of Speaking Up, Fear of Showing my True Self, to give just a few examples.

Let go, give thanks and celebrate

Once you have discovered the reason(s) for your resentments, just let them go with thanks and happiness.  Give thanks to the person or situation through which the resentment was triggered in order to point you into the right direction to something that had not been whole yet within you.

Give thanks and make clear to yourself that you don’t need the resentment anymore, because you have learned what you felt you needed to learn.

 Forgive, what needs to be forgiven and especially don’t forget to forgive yourself for having been in a seemingly ‘victim situation’. Forgiveness does not mean to deny or to make smaller severe transgressions. It rather means that you untie yourself from the past rather than having your life defined by a hurt that had happened to you.  And last but not least: celebrate! You have just made another step on this journey to inner freedom.

With Blessings and Love,

Yvonne Hrdy,

Elder of the Emerald Heart

Munich, Germany.