“Peace is my passion. If someone had told me thirty five years ago that the key to peace was inner peace, I would have thought them utopian and unrealistic.
I preferred instead to work on something more practical – which was to focus on strategies for negotiation.
Now I have come to realize that I was the one who was perhaps unrealistic in believing we could arrive at a sustained peace in the world without also doing the necessary work within ourselves.”
William Ury – Peace Negotiator
Whatever other methods and approaches we may choose to move toward a world at peace, our inner work must be at the very heart of our endeavours. Forgiveness is a master spiritual and secular ethics practice. Mostly misunderstood, overlooked and sorely underutilised, yet it has the phenomenal potential to transform our lives across all four quadrants.
When practiced frequently, it helps us to heal and integrate our past trauma and pain, it has corresponding benefits in our physiology, our emotional, mental and spiritual wellbeing. It can transform the quality of our relationships from being an accumulation of grievances, to restoring the flow of appreciation and presence and it can help us to resolve collective trauma. It’s essential to learn how to forgive if we want to co-create a world at peace.
When we forgive, we choose to turn in our weapons and surrender the shield over our own hearts, so our forgiveness becomes an act of amnesty for all humanity.
