Someone wronged you. You feel hurt, bruised, and totally justified to hold onto anger. You’ve been treated with disrespect, ripped off, cheated, stepped on. You’re normal to crave justice.

There is a myriad of reasons we can feel wronged, some big and others small. It can be especially difficult to let go of anger if someone has hurt someone we love or someone unable to defend themselves. Whatever the reason, unforgiveness can feel like a gaping wound, a cut that won’t heal. When we wake up, we think about it. When we lay our heads on our pillows at night, we think about it. When happy moments present themselves, our happiness is tainted with anger, hurt, angst. Our anger may feel inescapable.

Have you been there? Most of us can relate to this feeling. But unfortunately, it punishes us more than it punishes the perpetrator. What we want our angst to accomplish is futile and we end up hurting ourselves.

Forgiveness from the 21st Century Ego

At Sahaja Online, we’re all about adapting to the continuously changing world. Seventy-five years ago, you may have had to travel to a cave in the Himalayas to find a deep spiritual meditation experience. Today, you can get it on your iPad on Sahaja Online. We thought it would be interesting to look at how the classical Ego within has also evolved in the 21st century. And how forgiveness – the ultimate weapon – can still be used as effectively.

Our lives and egos have gotten subtler. Forgiveness and inability to do so have taken subtler forms and crept into us, many times without us realizing it. We think that we don’t have hang-ups, yet, we suddenly find ourselves avoiding something or someone. Only this time, we avoid them in more subtle ways, such as not opening their email, Facebook or WhatsApp message. When we’re really mad, we call Caller ID the invention of the decade, because we don’t have to pick up their calls. Or, we unfriend them on Facebook.

And then the decibels of sound from people banging on their keyboards at work is perhaps a sign of their lack of forgiveness towards their boss. We discover new passive aggressive tools at our disposal all the time. Passive aggression seems like an appealing strategy because we can pretend we aren’t reacting with an outburst and we think we’re getting even with the person we can’t forgive. Twitter trolls are perhaps the greatest examples of collective lack of forgiveness! When we feel this way, we take pride in uniting with other people who cannot forgive and let go.

Decades ago, we thought that we only had trouble forgiving people who had personally wronged us. Today, unforgiveness is much more than that. People can be unforgiving when their favorite football team is losing. Do we need to say more about holding grudges because the candidate people voted for did not become their President?

Simply stated, the number of things that we can’t seem to let go is only increasing every day. And what this is doing is clogging up our 21st century ego more and more. In its defense, our 21^st century ego has also adapted smartly to be able to fit more junk into it with newer facets of our lives coming into existence. Our egos today can cater to multiple channels of hate – online, offline, at work, at a movie theater and at peaceful marches and political rallies alike. These channels have the same result – our likes and dislikes get stronger, we become more biased, our patience and acceptance weakens and we are more and more engulfed in a dog eat dog mentality.

In the end, these hooks entangle us. They hold us back. They keep coming back to haunt our thoughts and actions and drive our desires and plans. Soon we end up with complicated lives. We get “messed up,” as we like to call it.

And then some souls turn towards things like meditation. Which is where we come in.

Our 6^th Chakra: Agnya

Here at Sahaja, one way that we can understand anger and forgiveness is to examine our 6^th Chakra: Agnya, popularly known as “the third eye.” Our 6^th Chakra, Agnya, is located in our brain in the optic chiasma, or the optic nerve fiber junctions. Agnya is located at the front of our brain, in our center forehead area. Agnya’s vibrations can be felt in our ring fingers. Agnya controls our sight, hearing, thoughts, and pituitary gland. This gland is responsible for growth, physical maturation, metabolism, and sleep. Thus, unforgiveness not only weighs down our mind but also our physical bodies.

In our 6^th Chakra, Agnya, resides these essential qualities:

• Forgiveness
• Humility
• Compassion
• The state of Thoughtless Awareness
• Ego

Within Agnya resides our qualities of forgiveness and humility and our ability to detach from rigid and impossible rules and conditions. In Agnya, we find forgiveness for ourselves and others.

If you’re struggling to forgive someone else, or yourself, balancing your Agnya Chakra can help. Here are some common symptoms associated with an unbalanced 6^th Chakra:

• Inability to forgive
• Lack of humility
• Self-pity
• Self-harm
• Preoccupation with the past
• Poor habits
• Excessive worry about the future
• Arrogance
• Pride
• Aggression
• Oppression

Living with these symptoms is certainly not a life sentence, even though it may feel that way. You too can rediscover compassion, which may mean forgiving yourself before you can work to forgive anyone else. Sahaja meditation raises the Kundalini energy up through each of our Chakras, balancing each of them as it travels upwards. The self-realization process in Sahaja meditation fosters within us a sense of humility and forgiveness, doing away with the need we may feel for firm justice and exact resolutions. Through forgiveness, you will find relief and end your own suffering, letting go of the past and rigid standards with humility and compassion.

Easier said than done, you say? Here are some tips from how Sahaja practitioners find forgiveness.

Introspection

The starting point really is introspection, to look for that slightest of disturbances within us. Why do we feel angry or annoyed? What exactly is it that’s holding us back from being completely free and light? It starts with daily introspection, but eventually must become a continuous process throughout the day. Sometimes the introspection can produce a list of hang-ups and holdups deep inside us! Don’t worry, it’s normal.

Reduction of the Ego

Meditation is central to reduction of the ego. Early morning meditation, right after a good night’s sleep, is even more effective in reconciling ourselves with our holdups.

Cooling Down

Cooling down of our liver and the right energy channel almost always helps since emotions like anger and irritation hinder us from seeing ourselves clearly.

A Higher Purpose

Reminding ourselves of a sense of higher purpose in our lives helps. Higher purpose enables us to detach from insignificant tangles within us.

Collective Meditation

Collective meditation is a blessing. Practitioners report that they have lost count of the number of times when they attended a group meditation session only to think afterward, “What was I thinking with my own silly hang-ups? There are so many better things in life to be enjoyed. Let’s move on.”

There is hope for unforgiveness. It is possible to finally let go.