On setting yourself free…

I speak with a lot of people who are hurting. They’ve been carrying this hurt deep inside for…ever and ever and ever! My work is helping them release that hurt and free themselves. Every hurt, every wound is an opportunity to grow, to heal, to become a better being.

We keep people alive inside us long after they’ve left the room. The father who never said “I’m proud of you,” the lover who walked away without explanation, the friend who vanished when we needed them most — we don’t just remember them; we house them. We give them a room in our chest and visit daily, tending the wound like a garden that needs watering. And somewhere along the way, the wound becomes a name tag. I am the person this happened to. It feels like proof that we existed, almost like evidence that we mattered enough to be hurt.

Absurd, isn’t it?

However, staying wounded doesn’t punish the person who wounded you. It punishes you, twice, nay more, multiple times — once when it happened, and now, every day, in replay.

They might never explain themselves; in fact they probably don’t even remember your name in the story they tell about their own life. And still you keep the case open, still you’re gathering evidence, still you’re arguing with someone who isn’t even in the room!

Letting go isn’t pretending it didn’t happen. It isn’t handing them a verdict of “no harm done.” It’s something closer to closing a ledger you’ve been keeping for free, unpaid, for years — and deciding the debt collection isn’t worth your remaining years on earth.

Water doesn’t remember the stone that split it in two. It just finds the gap and keeps moving, and somehow the two halves both reach the sea. A tree split open by lightning doesn’t spend its next hundred years grieving the scar — it grows bark over it, thicker than before, and the scar becomes the strongest part of the trunk.

You’re not separate from that logic. You were never built to be a museum for your injuries. You were built the same way the river and the tree were built — to keep moving, to keep growing, to let the break become the place where you’re hardest to break again.

Why do we hold on?

If holding a grudge hurts us more than the person who caused it, why do we do it anyway?

Well, that resentment does something for us, at least in the short term. It gives shape to pain that would otherwise feel senseless by handing us a villain, someone to hate. Villains are easier to live with than randomness. If someone did this to me, then the universe still makes a kind of sense — there’s a cause, an agent, someone to blame. The alternative, that terrible things sometimes happen for no reason or that no one can be held accountable, is far harder to digest.

Resentment also feels like protection. We tell ourselves that as long as we remember exactly how we were hurt, we won’t be caught off guard again. We turn that wound into a personal warning system. The trouble is that a warning system left running forever doesn’t just watch for danger — it gets a life of its own and starts finding danger everywhere, including in people and situations that have nothing to do with the original harm. The nervous system that was built to protect us becomes the very thing keeping us from trusting, opening up, or moving forward.

And then, there’s a quieter reason, one we rarely admit; our wounds have become part of how we explain ourselves to the world. “I’m guarded because of what happened with my ex.” “I don’t trust easily because of my childhood.” These sentences are true, but they can also become scripts we perform long after they’ve stopped being useful, a kind of identity we keep polishing because we’re not sure who we’d be without it.

The difference between Forgiving and Forgetting

One of the biggest obstacles to letting go is the fear that doing so means erasing what happened, or worse, excusing it. This misunderstanding is worth clearing up carefully, because it keeps a lot of people stuck.

Forgiveness is not amnesia. It doesn’t require you to decide the harm didn’t matter, or that the person who caused it was blameless. You can release your grip on a story and still remember every detail of it. You can let go of resentment toward someone and still choose never to let them close to you again. Forgiveness and boundaries may seem like opposites, but often, they are partners. Releasing the emotional debt someone owes you doesn’t mean reopening the door they walked through when they hurt you.

What forgiveness actually asks you to give up is something more specific: the belief that your peace depends on their apology, their punishment, or their understanding. It asks you to stop waiting for a sentence that may never be handed down, and to start living your life without that verdict.

This is why forgiveness is often described as something you do for yourself, not for the other person. Not because generosity toward them isn’t part of it, but because the actual mechanism of release happens entirely inside you. The person who hurt you may never know you’ve forgiven them. They may be long gone, or long dead, or simply indifferent. None of that changes what unclenching does for your own body and mind.

What the River Knows

There’s a reason contemplative traditions keep returning to water and trees when they talk about this. Nature offers a working model of resilience that doesn’t rely on resolution.

A river doesn’t need the rock to apologize before it moves around it. It doesn’t pause its current to blame the rock or think about how unfair the rock’s placement was. It simply responds to what is actually in front of it, in real time, and finds the path that continues its motion. Over enough time, that repeated act of moving around obstacles is what carves canyons — the very features we later call beautiful.

A tree doesn’t out-argue the wind. When a branch breaks, the tree doesn’t spend its remaining seasons devoted to the injustice of that particular storm. It seals the wound, redirects its energy, and keeps growing in whatever shape is now available to it. The scar tissue in a tree, in fact, is often denser and stronger than the surrounding wood — nature’s version of the old wisdom that we can grow stronger at exactly the point where we broke.

Neither the river nor the tree is doing this through willpower. They’re doing it because holding on was never an option nature built into them. We are the rare organisms capable of remembering an injury so vividly that we can suffer from it years after it happened, in the total absence of the person who caused it. That is a remarkable feature of human consciousness and, if we’re not careful, its cruellest trick. If we utilise it well, it is also one of the most beautiful and powerful abilities we have for our own growth, fulfillment and happiness!

What does release actually look like?

None of this means that forgiveness arrives in a single dramatic moment. For most people, it is a decision and also a practice; it is something way closer to physical therapy for an old injury than to a final courtroom verdict.

It might look like noticing in real time, when you begin rehearsing the old story again. You can stop and gently ask yourself: what is this replay doing for me right now? Sometimes the answer is that it’s protecting you from a future risk. Sometimes it’s just a habit with nowhere else to go.

It might look like writing a letter you never send — not to communicate anything to the other person, but to get the story out of your own head and onto paper, where you can finally see its edges instead of living inside it.

I often ask my clients to journal or jot down their hurts, real or presumed and burn the paper, savouring the moment of watching their grievances burn to ash!

It might look like grieving the apology you’re never going to get, the way you’d grieve any other loss — because that, too, is a real loss, and skipping the grief for it usually means carrying it indefinitely instead.

And it might simply look like redirecting the energy you’ve been spending on the past into something being built in the present — a relationship, a piece of work, a version of yourself you’re actually proud of. You don’t do this because the old wound doesn’t matter, but because you’ve decided it no longer gets to be the main character in every day that follows.

My invitation to you

You are not required to forgive anyone, on any timeline, for any reason. But, believe you me, it is definitely worth asking yourself, honestly, what the grudge is still doing for you and what it might be costing you in return.

The river was never weaker for moving around the rock. The tree was never lesser for growing new branches, instead of mourning the old ones. Whatever broke you is already part of your shape now. The only real question left is whether you’ll keep carrying it as a wound, or let it become, at last, the ground you grow from.

‘The wound is the place where the light enters you’ — Rumi

As a mindfulness practitioner and life-design coach, I help clients focus on well-being and personal growth and make life choices that prioritize their mental and emotional health. This leads to personal freedom and independence allowing the person to blossom and manifest the life they deserve. Connect with me at https://tinasaxena.com/ if you are seeking to go forward on your journey.