Lately my mother seems to favor saying something along the lines of “…. I don’t want to hold a grudge,” or “We don’t hold grudges in this family.” Then she follows her statement up by describing some grudge she’s holding against someone. It’s kinda funny, really. I don’t say much; rather, I just witness her. She’s not a big listener anyway. She’d probably just get angry and defensive if I said anything to her. But she keeps doing it, and I keep noticing that she keeps doing it, and somewhere along the line, I got curious about grudges. What are grudges anyway?
Well, I tend to think of them as some unresolved feelings towards another or even a situation that happened. To me, it’s like these feelings are tied up in a knot, and they’re stuck. They seem to require some patience and willingness on the part of the person holding the grudge to relax and approach the knot with some curiosity, to check it out, and begin to gently unravel it – to tease the separate feelings apart and look at them. That’s what I think.
As a society (and as a person raised as a Catholic), it seems easy to slip into the mindset of “I don’t hold grudges” because we don’t want to hold grudges. We want to look and be forgiving. We want to move on, when in reality, we’re not there yet.
It seems to me that if and when we notice a grudge, check out whether there may be some unresolved feelings we may be holding towards another, and tell the truth about it, then we become more able to begin to deconstruct it. We become empowered as we open to the idea of working with ourselves to do the inner work to help resolve the grudge.
I see the value of inner work. To me, it’s just a way of perhaps discovering information about ourselves. I’ve learned that we can undertake inner work without self-judgment or criticism. Instead, we can simply be curious as we endeavor to understand the magnificent and complex beings that we are through this amazing work. An added benefit of resolving grudges is that it leaves us lighter and freer to live and consciously create our lives, going forward. Who wouldn’t want to live in this way?
A NEW DAY 