Reasons to Learn Forgiveness
by Mary Hayes Grieco

There are many reasons to take the time to learn and live
the ways of Unconditional Love and Forgiveness.
Here are some of them:

Reason #2 You want to reduce your stress and improve your health.

The need to heal stuck emotional issues, especially resentments, is a universal human health issue. We know this to be true, intuitively: holding on to negative things is bad for us, and destructive to our health, no matter how "right" we might think ourselves to be on a certain point. But today this truth is also being tested and proven scientifically and medically: in the last ten years over 1200 studies have suddenly emerged that explore the relationship between emotional toxicity and physical disease, as well as the relationship between the practice of forgiveness and the measureable reduction of physical stress. Here are some of the findings from those studies.

People who were in a toxic stress condition who were taught to forgive

• lowered their blood pressure
  
• improved their immune system response
  
• reduced anxiety and depression
  
• improved the quality of their sleep
  
• improved their self-esteem and sense of empowerment
  
• reduced stress
  
• reduced dysfunctional patterns of behaviour
  
• improved the quality of personal and professional relationships
  
• increased energy level
  
• improved sense of social integration and belonging
  
• increased peace of mind in daily life
  
• increased experience of peace in the dying process

I had a student who cleared up a case of colitis that she had struggled with for 16 years --- the same amount of time that she was angry with her ex-husband! She had never made the connection between her issues with her ex and her colitis, but this persistent condition was 50% better the day after she finally forgave him, and the rest of it cleared up completely over the next six months.

I heard back from a woman whose "female problems" resolved immediately after she forgave her father for trying to make her (his only child) into a son all her life. It’s amazing how the subconscious mind can take on a misguided directive from a powerful person and drive an unconscious message into the physical body as a disease. The message Don’t be female!! in her unconscious mind caused her endocrine system to shut down completely for four years, and it started right up again after she forgave the source of that message, uprooting that health issue for good.

I watched a woman recover from a mysterious all-over muscle spasm condition that had almost paralysed her and was baffling to her doctors. This condition softened and unwound itself, month after month, as she did the steady work of forgiving the family system that had always rejected her and made her the family scapegoat. She has perfectly normal flexibility now.