ForgivenessWorks
What You Can Do Within Your Community
These are a few suggestions to help you create new ideas for how you might present the power of Love, Forgiveness and Nonviolence in your community.
1.Commit yourself to make forgiveness as natural and as important as breathing and eating in your life as well as your community’s life.
2.Create Forgiveness Gardens or Parks in your church and in your own neighborhoods.
3. Encourage schools and children’s groups of different racial composition to create Forgiveness Gardens.
4. Reach out to Muslim individuals and organizations and join with them to create Forgiveness Gardens to remind us to forgive our misperceptions of each other.
5. Create a Forgiveness Community Evening or Weekend for your community.
a. A day or evening of people sharing their stories about how forgiveness works in their lives. Involve children and adults in the storytelling. Share stories on forgiveness, and how it is an important stepping stone to bring about nonviolence in our communites.
b. Create a panel about the benefits of forgiveness and the deficits when we do not forgive.
6. Children’s Art Contest for your community.
a. Children’s pictures of what forgiveness means to them
b. A mural on some wall in the community
c. A bill board that would show this mural
7. Begin to volunteer at schools and help create the possibility of motivating teachers to take the first fives minutes of each school day to help children with their grievances and anger and how they might use forgiveness in their lives.
8. Read the book, Forgiveness: The Greatest Healer of All and pass it around to others.
9. Do your best when having conversations with others to share a forgiveness story of your own or of someone elses.
10. Help us create a Book titled ForgivenessWorks: Stories that can change your life. Send in your story to www.ForgivenessWorks.org, or send it to: Jampolsky/Cirincioone, 98 Main Street, #777 , Tiburon, CA 94920.
11. If you wish to pass out the shoe inserts that heals one soul that state: May Every Step You Take Be One Of Forgiveness, you can order them by phoning Jonathan at 510-570-0666.
12. Think of new ideas of spreading Forgiveness. For example you can make a our own Forgiveness Tool Chest: Put the Forgiveness book in it. Where there was a hammer, put an x, and state we are no longer going to hammer people, the same thing for the chisel in that we will not chisel any one; the same thing for screwdriver in that we won’t screw people any more. And put a mirror in to remind you to forgive yourself. Pass on this idea and encourage adults and children to create their own Forgiveness Tool Chest.
13. Go to your local Public Television Station or Local Access Television Station and encourage them to put television programs on the air that are related to forgiveness and non violence. Be willing to help them create such a program.
14. Remind yourself and others that forgiveness is a choice that will get you out of feeling a victim, will empower you life in the present and release the past.
15. Remember that Forgiveness means giving up all hopes for a better past.
16. Interface with existing group…Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, YMCA, YWCA, etc.
17. Ask yourself and others to buy a sack of potatoes. Put the names of people you have not forgiven on the potatoes, one potato at a time. Get a plastic bag and commit yourself to carry the potatoes with you wherever you go. The next day, repeat the exercise adding potatoes to new people you have not forgiven.
Feel the heavy load you are carrying around with you because of your unforgiving thoughts. Consider the possibility that it might be to your advantage to forgive those people so you have no potatoes to carry around with you any more.
Forgiveness: the Greatest Healer of All
If there was ever a time in our lives, and in the history of the world to stop the recycling our anger, to finally let go of our grievances, to release the painful past, to bring forgiveness and love into our lives, it is obviously now.
The growing problems that face us are not going to be solved by governments alone nor by politicians or more wars. It will take a serious, internal shift of individuals joining each other and uplifting our consciousness to one of forgiveness, love, compassion and a willingness to live in a consciousness of “giving”. Solutions are more abundant than problems when we truly believe in a Divine Source and trust in a loving God becomes all consuming in our lives.
There is a great thirst to understand at both a cognitive as well as emotional level the dynamics of what it truly means to forgive and to be forgiven. There is a hunger to get to know how to get rid of the blocks that often makes forgiving seem so difficult or even impossible for us to do, and to rid ourselves of the emotional and physical trauma that not forgiving causes us.
There is another way of looking at the world where we can choose whether we want to experience peace or conflict, to experience love or fear. We can choose how we perceive ourselves, others, and the world around us. It is these choices, and the willingness and the courage to forgive, that offer us the greatest gift we can give not only to others, but to ourselves.
Let us go beyond ourselves, our families , our communities, our country and reach out to all people of all faiths. Let us see others as not attacking but suffering from lack of love. Let us not exclude anyone from our love or forgiveness. Let us see everyone as our brother and sister; let us see everyone as our Siamese Twin. As we deepen our belief in the power of Love and Forgiveness to heal our lives, the world that we see will heal also.
Gerald G. Jampolsky, M.D.
Diane V. Cirincione, Ph.D.