How to forgive ?

• It cover 2 areas : 1)Forgive others  2)Forgive ourselves
• Forgive is to able to let go of pain/ hurt/ guilty of past
• It is important to forgive by : 1)convincing ourselve that we don't own kama of others 2)seeing the good quality of others that worth us to forgive them.
• Why are u allowing others to hurt you? It is not your mistake, yet is their bad kamma & their fault.
• Don't suffer the anger. You are in charge of your mind
• Don't let anyone control of your happiness.
• You are master of your emotion
• let go pain of the past
• If we don't forgive, we are punishing ourselves & others.
• We don't need to punish them. Law of kamma will get them.
• The is a novice monk who broke the 8 precept by eating some sandwich in the kitchen. He later asked Ajahn Brahm to punish him as if he didn't punish him, he might do it again.Ajahn said'thank you for confessing. I won't punish you. Next time when you are hungry, there are many drink you can take, like honey,molasses etc. You are punished with 50 times of  strokes.' The kid got a shock as he didn't imagine he will get such severe punishment. Actually it is 50 times of strokes on a cat, so that he can learn about kindness & then can forgive himself.
• prisoners will commit crime again despite being prisoned (punished)
• There is always something we can do, eg use the pain and change into sweet compassion & wisdom as manifest in the story of  Who Ordered this Truckload of Dung?. One day you open your door & found out there are heap of cow dung in front of your house. You ar e puzzled as you didn't order it & you didn't know who placed it in front of your house.With ‘cow poo’ as a metaphor for life’s less appealing challenges, Brahm explains how we each find ourselves at times with a truckload of (emotional, psychological or practical) manure at our front door.
  “What do you do with all this poo?” he asks. “To remove it or  you can try to stuff your pockets with it. But then you will smell and lose friends.” As with life, when our challenges seem to stink to high heaven, we can wander around in stress and misery, carrying that poop in our pockets. At first, our friends will show us compassion and understanding. True friends will support our challenge. But after a while, even the closest friends don’t want to keep hanging around the smell of crap.
  “Instead, we must take that dung and use it like manure, slowly tilling it into our gardens,” says Brahm. Even though you didn’t order the problem, you are stuck with it and it stinks. If you carry it around you start to smell so you better find some other way to get rid of it. Ajahn Brahm says that this is the law of karma at work. “No matter what comes to you in life, make something good out of it.”
  Of course, when we are in the midst of such challenges, it is not always so easy. Sometimes life seems to throw things at us we just weren’t asking for. But Brahm argues that if we blame others, we get no closer to the solution. Apologizing for his language, he then quotes his forest monastery teacher. A country man not accustomed to the eloquent speech of the elite, Ajahn Cha once put it this way: “Blaming other people is like having an itch on your head and scratching your bum.” He urged his listeners “Don’t allow anyone else to destroy your happiness. It is up to you – you are in full control of your life.”
  It is clear that Brahm is not a man bent on converting, but one who genuinely seeks to help his fellow human by offering insight, compassion and accessible wisdom. Ajahn Brahm believes that any religion should be about happiness. His book and lectures aim for just that with excellent use of humorous stories to illustrate aspects of Buddhism in action. These tales resonate with the challenges and personal foibles we all experience regardless of religious affiliation.
  And what is the garden? The garden is our character; it is the wisdom that comes with experience and suffering. After all, some of the healthiest gardens have been tilled with lots of manure. Life brings challenges, of that there is little doubt. What we do with those challenges, according to Brahm, is what matters. Do we nurture the garden of our lives and grow from the experience, or do we wander through life stinking like poop?
  
  
  The above are talk given by Ajahn Brahmavamso at Wat Chetawan 24/12/2010