Read or listen to stories of others who have exercised forgiveness, in even more difficult circumstances than yours.
Pardons are exercises of forgiveness on one side, and rituals of remorse on the other — meant as a personal act by the President, but in recent years handed over, more and more, to supposedly disinterested lawyers.
Having footed the resulting massive bill, after the second world war the Americans imposed the London debt agreement of 1953 on their allies, an exercise in debt forgiveness to Germany on the most generous terms.
Though Playing Dead takes anxiety about student loan debt beyond an extreme, that anxiety is more prevalent in the culture, with novels such as Camille Perri's The Assistants and a segment on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (its debt forgiveness exercise owing much to prior work by activist groups like Strike Debt).
I feel the forgiveness exercise for me was very powerful".
But it was in the realm of the heart, not surprisingly, that many a Kleenex met its end, including one exercise involving self-forgiveness, a process that basically involves saying what you feel you've done wrong; taking responsibility for it; stating that you're human and make mistakes; and then expressing what you're going to do differently in the future.
Sometimes, when I see they're stuck financially, even though they're doing the work, I send them forgiveness exercises to do, because I know there's a huge correlation between resentment, grievances and anger to financial struggles.
To help you practice self-forgiveness, the exercise of writing a letter can be a powerful emotional and cognitive tool to start the process.[18] Write a letter addressed to your younger or past-self, and use a kind, loving tone.
