Forgiveness is good for you

In the spirit of Ramadan, I thought I would talk about something not entirely related to nutrition. But it is certainly related to health.

Once, last year, I was talking with my then-seven-year-old daughter Selma about kids at school and bullies. She had been very upset a few weeks prior to that because she was picked on by some of her classmates because she couldn't pronounce the Arabic letter 'kh' properly. She came home crying and we spoke to the teacher and the matter was resolved. Or, at least I thought it was. Later I realised that she would still get upset when she thinks about it. So I thought I would try and teach her a new life skill, which I only learned recently.

This is how our conversation went:

Me: Selma, imagine that somebody passes you in school and bumps into you painfully, then runs off. And you can't find him. What would you do?

Selma: I would shout at him.

Me: But he ran off!

Selma: I would run after him and yell at him.

Me: You might not find him.

Selma: I could tell my cousin Khaloody to find him and yell at him or I could wait until I see him again and then tell him not to do that again.

Me: What else can you do?

Selma: I could tell the teacher what happened.

Me: But you don't know his name or his grade, so that might not help.

Selma: I would probably cry.

Me: Do you think these are the only options you have in that situation?

Selma: Mmm ... I think so?

Me: What about forgiving him? Do you know what it means to forgive?

And that's how we started a long conversation about forgiveness. The most important life skill that NOBODY ever really seems to teach you.

If you read as many self-improvement books as I do, you'll understand the importance of forgiveness for personal growth. The basic theory everywhere is that the more you forgive the happier (and healthier) you'll be.

And, that theory is, of course, part of all religions, including Islam.

But did anyone ever teach you HOW to forgive? How do you forgive someone when they've violated you? How do you forgive another person who has stolen from you, lied to you, or killed a relative of yours? How do you forgive a parent who has abused you or a spouse who had an affair?

We all know it's great to forgive, and we all hear stories of great people who did it, including stories of our beloved prophet Mohammed who never slept upset at anyone.

But HOW DO YOU DO IT? I was dying to find out. Once, I was watching TV at home and the answer came to me.

There was a programme on the Jazeera Documentary Channel about a professor in the US who runs forgiveness classes at a university in California.

The documentary also showed some schools in the US where they teach forgiveness to children. WOW! That's when it occurred to me that forgiveness is never really a tool that we give our kids. And, that's what sparked my conversation with Selma.

I wanted to learn to forgive too! So after the programme, I went on Amazon and searched for a book that could teach me how to forgive. It completely changed the way I looked at things. It actually taught me, step-by-step, how to forgive others even if they have been unfair to me.

This book is called Forgiveness for Good, by Dr Fred Luskin. There's no way that I can explain it as well as he did in the book, but I'll tell you about the things that made a difference to me.

The basic theory is that we are going about life with our own set of 'unenforceable rules'. If you want to know what that is, imagine a police officer on traffic duty who cannot pull over speeding motorists because his car has broken down.

Frustrated, he decides to write violations for these people anyway, although he can't do much with them. For the next hour, he writes quite a few. They will stay in his car or in his pocket. Either way, they will have to occupy space from his surroundings. Soon, their accumulation becomes a nuisance.

This is the analogy that Dr Luskin uses to show us how each of us has his own set of 'rules' that we're trying to apply to others, but when other people don't stick to these rules, we write out tickets (by getting upset) and these tickets stay with us like unnecessary baggage.

Want to learn how to forgive? You have several options. I would recommend that you first start by taking note of all the 'unenforceable rules' that you're trying to apply to the people around you. Stop applying YOUR rules to others. You cannot change people who don't want to change, and you'll only upset yourself in the process.

In the end, I will leave you with this great forgiveness quote that I found in the book:

"Of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontation still to come, to savour to the last toothsome morsel of both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back - in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you."

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