Monday Morning Greetings 2025 #19 – Is Forgiveness the Most Important Quality of an Aspiring Yogi?
Dhanurdhara Swami May 5th, 2025
Recently I gave a talk on forgiveness titled “How to give up justified hate?” While giving the talk it dawned on me how important it is for one on the path of yoga to be forgiving. My reasoning, which connected yoga with forgiveness, was based on a quote that connected the two:
“The shadows of resentment keep our spiritual light from shining through, never allowing us to fully experience who we are.”[1]
Yoga means to bring the mind to sattva, literally the original state of being. The mind is like a lens or mirror. Its original state of being, the state of sattva, appears therefore when it’s clean and not distorted. This is accomplished by meditation which means concentrating on one thing, usually a mantra. By doing so, the other disruptive thoughts emerging from the ego, which distort or sully the mind, are quelled. The mind then naturally moves toward sattva, its natural state, where the lens of the mind is clear and we can perceive or experience who we really are.
Meditation means controlling the mind. It begins with rules or instructions on how to control the mind’s activity in relationship to others. Such rules are called yamas. The first and most important yama is ahiṁsā, nonviolence, and it takes precedence over all other rules and regulations. For example, one can even lie and transcend the second yama of satya (truthfulness) if the intention is to protect another from violence. In that way ahiṁsā takes precedence over every other yogic ethical rule and is thus the foundation of yoga. If you can’t control the mind to the extent that violence against others physically, verbally, or even in your thoughts, is restrained, you haven’t even attained the most rudimentary platform of yoga.
Forgiveness means “to give up resentment against, to give up desire to punish, stop being angry with, pardon, to overlook.”
What about a situation in which someone has done something horrible to you or others? There is certainly a discussion to be had about when it’s appropriate to drop one’s resentment, or if there is a psychologically needed period of moral outrage required for one who has faced or witnessed such abuse. That is a deep subject beyond the scope of this post. Still, any type of hate, even “justified hate,” “keeps our spiritual light from shining through, never allowing us to fully experience who we are.” A yogi must therefore be forgiving and rid the heart of resentment.
There are many good reasons to forgive. A thorough discussion of the topic would certainly cover many of them. The ultimate reason to forgive, however is simply spiritual. Resentment deters our movement towards a clear mind and the realization of the self. It’s often a great challenge. But a yogi must forgive, even when our hate is “justified”!
“Forgiveness means to give up all hope for a better past!”
[1] I had been careless taking notes and as a result I often there have forgotten to put the attribution to the citations I collected. Therefore, in my posts occasionally I list a citation without citing its source. I have two such instances in this post.
- Monday Morning Greetings
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