Forgiveness Helps You to Create a More Abundant Life
by Mary Hayes Grieco

In America, our ancestors got on boats and braved storms and the unknown for the chance to own a bit of land and the opportunity for some personal freedom. They wanted more. It is hard-wired into American culture and our global influence that we seek more, and that if we work hard we will get it, whatever it is. A small percentage of people seem to find a way to tap in to the magical wellspring that is in the Land of Opportunity, but a lot of us knock our heads against a wall or feel defeated before we start, when it comes to living our dreams. Yet we keep believing in them. A book like 'The Secret' comes along and whispers to us once again, You create your reality from your thoughts. You can create a life full of abundance! Go for it! And we buy it.

But there’s a secret within 'The Secret' and that is that you can’t create anything that you can’t receive. If you don’t feel worthy inside, you won’t feel deserving of good things, and it will be hard for you to get them or keep them. Your get rich quick scheme or even your sensible get rich slowly plans will not work so well if they are built on top of a foundation of shame and unworthiness that is inside you. You have to root out the sources of your shame and forgive yourself for having carried this heavy illusion along thus far. And if you forgive the ones that installed this shame in you originally when they abused you, you will break the cycle of shame that has rolled forward through many generations.

A lot goes on in the bottom of your mind that comes from other times: your early childhood, the lives of your ancestors, and perhaps even past lifetimes. You may be carrying influences from the past in your unconscious mind that hold you back despite all your conscious diligence using positive affirmations. Sorry to say it, but it’s true — no matter how many times you consciously affirm wealth in a day, if you carry stories of poverty and despair in your unconscious mind, wealth will not be yours because the beliefs in the unconscious mind always win. The psyche needs to be detoxified of poverty influences, because the impacts of poverty can endure inside you long after the desperate times are over. Those stories need healing. These poverty stories that are lodged in the bottom of your mind will respond as beautifully to the method of unconditional love and forgiveness as current issues do, and in a way the impact is even more far-reaching.

In Chinese medicine, it is said that we carry the influences of the previous seven generations in our body/mind. I believe this to be true because I have personally experienced both the strengths and the frustrating poverty influences from my ancestors which have little to do with today’s inviting opportunities. I have some talent and some opportunity and the ambition to create some modest wealth in this lifetime, but I have had to work like the dickens to extract from within me the crippling influences of the potato famine which took place in Ireland in 1847! I used to have a persistent belief that my fate is perennially linked to being poor, because I am a second generation Irish American on both sides, and my forebears struggled with poverty as a nation for hundreds of years, until only recently. I found it necessary to heal in my own psyche some of the imagery of my grandma’s ocean journey in 1909, which was imbued with great personal loss and the presence of rats. Depressing! Some strand of her life story and the energy of her depression wrapped around my own ankles when I attempted to move forward into greater prosperity, even though I suppose she would have wanted me to have that. I have also had to heal the inner child in me who believed I was unworthy of any goodness because of the random abuse incidents that occurred to me while I was growing up. As I complete each piece of this personal work, I see my external capacities for material abundance steadily improving.

What is abundance, actually? It’s not just plenty of money. It’s a whole way of walking in your human life on Earth that is complete and satisfying. It includes loving relationships, nature, time, meaningful service, creativity, and contributing to the pressing needs in our society. There is an old scripture from the Hindu world called The Guru Gita that frames the concept of abundance for me in a new way. They refer to it as mukti/bhukti — two sanskrit words that are joined as a phrase, meaning spiritual liberation/worldly fulfillment. In this same scripture it is declared that the four goals of life are wealth, pleasure, justice, and spiritual liberation. I love this! It’s such a great contradiction to the money is the root of all evil, you’re a worm, the world is a vale of tears, sex is dirty, it’s more spiritual to be poor etc. toxic belief systems inside the Irish Catholic version of Christianity that I grew up with. So whenever and wherever you find yourself at the point where you are consciously creating abundance, seek your inspiration from many sources, but don’t forget to get down and dirty with doing the emotional work inside that will give you the capacity to receive all that you want. Spirit wants you to thrive!

"For 'tis sweet to stammer one letter of the Eternal's language; on earth it is called Forgiveness!" Henry Wadsworth Longfellow