How To Let Go Of All Of The Pain In Your Life

It Begins with Forgiveness

I have asked people attending my workshops about the challenges they face in their lives. With the earliest workshops beginning in 1967 and the most recent approaching September, 2026. In 1967 most of my audience, like myself, were in our early 20s, and we came to understand that our parents, aunts and uncles, members of our community, shared the best insights and information about how to deal with life issues – to the best of their abilities – they were decent, loving human beings. And there was a subgroup within our culture that felt they no longer could abide by the restrictions, caveats and covenants that everyone else in our culture lived by through multiple generations. In our immaturity and arrogance, we believed there was much more that we could do with our lives than what our parents and others believed we were capable of – and in part, we were right. Hence we began to participate in the civil right movement. The second wave of the feminist movement, the beginning of the environmental movement, the vegan movement, new voices to an old anti-war movement, voices against hegemonic, neocon regime change movement, rewriting what was wrong with our history movement, and a new back to the land homestead movement and finally the consumer protection and social justice movements. During these movements, I would ask friends and others I met – what are we not aware of, why aren’t we seeing more change and more people finding their voices to speak out? That was the beginning of my understanding that we were a divided nation, and I ask the same questions today. What becomes of the movement or its supporters who feel unappreciated, maligned and discarded as irrelevant to the conversation? Emotional pain and unbridled anger are just some of the results.

One person said he feels conflicted about what he really wants. Being conflicted is like saying, for instance, I want intimacy and solitude, or I want to eat healthy food and junk food. We are living in the duality of incompleteness.

How do you reconcile these? It’s simple. You recognize that, at any given moment, every single thought has its opposite in your consciousness and you determine the advantage of each side.

This is not a defect in you. It is the oldest observation in Western philosophy about what a human being is. Twenty-four centuries ago Plato described the soul as a charioteer driving two horses pulling in different directions, and he did not describe it that way to shame us — he described it that way because that is the design. Walt Whitman put it with more swagger: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.” The people who get into trouble are not the ones who contain opposites. They are the ones who insist they don’t.

Acknowledge that you have opposing thoughts and desires. Otherwise, you’ll bury unwelcome ideas. They’ll remain inside of you and are likely to come out later. That’s where you harm yourself and others. You may do things and then think, how could I have done that? A part of your nature may emerge that you didn’t consciously realize was there.

The psychologist Carl Jung gave that buried part of you a name — the shadow — and spent a career warning about exactly the sequence I just described. Everything you refuse to acknowledge in yourself, he argued, does not disappear; it collects in the dark and acts without your consent, and the less you admit it’s there, the blacker and denser it gets. His conclusion has been compressed by time into a single famous sentence: until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. That is not mysticism. That is a precise description of the person who “suddenly” explodes at a spouse, “inexplicably” sabotages a success, and then stands in the wreckage asking, how could I have done that?

You will know exactly who you are by understanding what you are capable of doing. Then you can decide how to act in your own best interest. If you’re trying to be a happy, wholesome, healthy person you won’t entertain the dark thoughts and feelings that are there. Once you get into the habit of making the right choices for yourself it becomes easy. You start to know when you’re making the correct decisions.

Of course, being human, you sometimes choose wrong options. That’s okay as long as you can recognize what you’ve done and learn from your mistakes. You’ll scream at someone, you’ll do something that in retrospect is stupid. And then you’ll say, alright, I acknowledge that I made a mistake. What can I do? Forgiving yourself is key to rebalancing.

So is forgiving others.

The whole idea of forgiveness is to allow yourself to go forward. If you don’t forgive, you are stuck with the anger and pain of the event. You honor that pain more than your right to go forward without it. All of the love and kindness in you and directed toward you will mean nothing if you’re not willing to acknowledge why you’re in pain. Forgive the pain and get on with your life.

No one has explained why forgiveness matters better than the philosopher Hannah Arendt. In The Human Condition, published in 1958, she pointed out the terrible thing about human action: it is irreversible. What has been done can never be undone, and if that were the whole story, every one of us would remain chained forever to the consequences of a single deed — the victim chained to the wrong done to them, the wrongdoer chained to the wrong they did. Forgiveness, Arendt argued, is the one human faculty that breaks the chain. It is the only response to a wrong that does not merely react to it — retaliation is just the original act played back — but begins something genuinely new. She considered it, along with the promise, one of the two powers that make a shared human life possible at all. When you forgive, you are not being soft. You are exercising the single most creative power you have: the power to release the future from the past.

One clarification before we go further, because this word carries centuries of confusion. Forgiving is not excusing, and it is not forgetting, and it is not reconciling. The English bishop Joseph Butler worked this out in a set of sermons back in 1726 that moral philosophers still cite: to forgive is to give up your resentment and your claim to revenge — nothing more. You do not have to decide the offense didn’t matter. You do not have to let the person back into your life. You do not have to pretend it didn’t happen. You are not settling their account; you are closing yours. Modern forgiveness researchers draw exactly the same lines. Keep that distinction in hand for the rest of this conversation because every objection people raise to forgiveness — “so I’m supposed to say it was okay?” — is an objection to something forgiveness never was.

Although you may blame others for the distress you feel, your pain is your own doing. You create it. If you were to write me an insulting letter, for example, calling me arrogant, conceited, and self-righteous, I could choose to become very angry. I could strike back in an attempt to retaliate or I could go to the other extreme in an attempt to prove how nice I really am. I could internalize what you say and become depressed. With any of these responses, I am causing myself pain by reacting to what you’ve said.

I did not invent that insight, and I want you to know how old and how tested it is. A Greek slave with a crippled leg worked it out nineteen hundred years ago. Epictetus, born into slavery and later the most sought-after teacher in Rome, opened his handbook with the sentence the whole Stoic school stands on: people are disturbed not by things, but by the views they take of things. And he applied it to precisely my example of the insulting letter: remember, he said, that it is not the person who reviles you who injures you — it is your judgment that you have been injured. Take away the judgment and you take away the injury. Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor who studied him, compressed it further in his private notebook: choose not to be harmed, and you won’t feel harmed; don’t feel harmed, and you haven’t been. Here is what should get your attention: when psychologists in the twentieth century finally built therapies that reliably work — Albert Ellis’s rational emotive therapy, Aaron Beck’s cognitive therapy — both men openly credited Epictetus as the source. The most validated form of psychotherapy on Earth is a two-thousand-year-old slave’s insight with a clinical manual attached.

Another possibility exists. Before reacting, I can take a step back and think about the situation. That way I’m distancing myself from the immediate conflict and putting it into perspective. I can look at the letter you sent and think about your possible intentions. I might decide that I took what you said out of context. Maybe I’m misinterpreting and assuming something that wasn’t meant.

“Take a step back” sounds like a figure of speech. It has since become one of the best-documented techniques in psychology. The researcher Ethan Kross and his colleagues have spent years testing what they call self-distancing — replaying a painful event as if you were a fly on the wall watching it happen to someone, or coaching yourself through it by name, the way you’d talk to a friend. The results are consistent: people who step back this way show measurably less emotional reactivity, ruminate less afterward, and reason about the conflict more wisely, and the shift shows up in the brain’s emotion circuits, not just in what people report. Seneca, who wrote the ancient world’s great treatise on anger, prescribed the same medicine in three words: the greatest remedy for anger is delay. The feeling arrives instantly; the judgment behind it can be reopened for hours. Use the gap.

If you react to a situation without thinking it through, it’s difficult to later change your mind about what happened. Once you become emotional and retaliate, you start justifying your actions. Your ego tells you that what you did was right. Unnecessary conflict arises.

Realize that people have the right to their feelings. Some will like you and some won’t. That has nothing to do with you. As long as people don’t spread lies to hurt your reputation or physically harm you, they are entitled to their opinions.

When you start to feel distressed, take a step back and ask yourself, what is really happening here? Do I have to accept this situation as painful? Must someone’s negative feelings toward me affect how I feel about myself?

What old hurts do you still keep alive? Which ones come up over and over? Perhaps some of these sound familiar: Your mother wasn’t there when you needed her. You were abused, rejected, ridiculed, or abandoned. Someone stole from you. Something that was supposed to have been given to you was given to someone else.

The Buddha had a teaching for exactly this, and it is worth carrying with you. When something painful happens, he said, it is as if you were struck by an arrow. But then you add your own suffering to it — the replaying, the resentment, the why me — and that is a second arrow, and the second arrow is the one you shoot into yourself. The first arrow was never up to you. The second one always is. Notice, when you review your list of old hurts, how much of what you are still feeling is first arrow and how much is second.

You must give up old hurts to be free to live more fully. Otherwise, the pain from the past influences the present. You keep yourself from relating to others because you were abused or abandoned earlier in life. You want to be open and trusting, but you have painful memories of being manipulated and taken advantage of. So you hesitate to be yourself. You keep your relationships from working because of the way you were treated previously. That happens when you don’t let go of the past.

Friedrich Nietzsche had a name for what an unreleased hurt eventually becomes: ressentiment — resentment that has stopped being a feeling and become an identity. The person consumed by it, he wrote, cannot be done with anything; the injury becomes the lens through which all of life is read, and the injured party ends up organizing an entire existence around the person who hurt them. Think about what that means. The one who wounded you may have forgotten you exist, and meanwhile they are the curator of your inner life. Nietzsche considered the ability to shrug off an injury — to be unable to take one’s enemies seriously for very long — a mark of strength, and he marveled at anyone who could say of an offense, what does it matter, and mean it.

And here is what the grudge is doing to you below the neck. In a study that has become a classic, the psychologist Charlotte vanOyen Witvliet wired volunteers to monitors and had them do, on cue, exactly what you do voluntarily: rehearse a real grievance and nurse the grudge. Blood pressure rose, heart rate rose, skin conductance rose, the brow muscles clenched — and the readings stayed elevated after the rehearsal ended. When the same people imagined empathizing with their offender and letting the grievance go, the body stayed calm. Every replay of an old hurt is a fresh dose of the original stress, administered by you, to you, with the offender nowhere in the room. Psychologists call the habit rumination, and decades of research — much of it by the late Susan Nolen-Hoeksema — show it is one of the strongest predictors of who becomes depressed and who stays depressed. The hurts on your list are not sitting inertly in storage. They are running, and you are paying the electric bill.

Living life fully involves taking risks. Unless you take chances, your past fears prevent you from growing.

Examine the hurts that keep reappearing in your life. See what makes you emotionally imbalanced. Notice the patterns. Resolve the hurts and they will stop reappearing. It may seem easier said than done, but you are put into painful situations for a reason. There are lessons you need to learn. Work through your issues and in time you will resolve them. You will regain balance if you work at it.

END OF PART 1

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BEGIN PART 2.

Do you hide it? Scream it out to the world? Distract yourself? Go into therapy? Chronically complain and whine? Share pain with someone else?

If you deal with pain in any way except by making constructive changes, then you are keeping your hurt alive. Therapy tells you that your hurt is real. While the right kind of therapy has the potential to do you good, sometimes therapy can serve to reinforce your pain, making it more genuine. When this happens, your whole immune system becomes depressed. You start manifesting physical symptoms. The pain grows and becomes as tangible as a tumor and takes on a life of its own.

I want to be careful and honest here, because in the decades since I first wrote those sentences the evidence has come in, and it cuts both ways. On the broad question, the research is against me: psychotherapy, taken as a whole, works. Hundreds of controlled trials and the meta-analyses built on them show that people who get good therapy do meaningfully better than people who don’t, for depression, for anxiety, for trauma, and the gains tend to last. If you are suffering and a skilled therapist is available to you, the numbers say go. I would be doing you no favors to pretend otherwise.

But the specific mechanism I was worried about — that rehearsing pain can make it more real — turned out to be one of the better-documented traps in the field. The old idea of catharsis, that venting anger drains it, has been tested and it fails: in Brad Bushman’s experiments, people who vented by pounding a punching bag while thinking about the person who angered them came out angrier and more aggressive than people who simply sat quietly. Single-session psychological debriefing after trauma — walking people back through the horror while it’s fresh, which was standard practice for years — was reviewed across its controlled trials and found useless at best, with some evidence it made lasting trauma more likely, and it is no longer recommended. And the psychologist Amanda Rose has shown that what she calls co-rumination — friendships organized around rehashing the same problems again and again — measurably raises depression and anxiety even as it makes the friendship feel closer. So the line I should have drawn, and draw now, is not therapy versus no therapy. It is this: any practice, professional or amateur, that has you rehearsing your pain without changing anything is keeping the wound open. Any practice that builds your capacity to act — that ends sessions with something to do differently — is on your side. Judge every conversation about your pain, including the paid ones, by that test.

Therapy can also make you dependent on someone else. You start to feel you can’t resolve your own problems. It’s disempowering to suggest that unless you’re being helped by someone you’re incapable of positive change.

I see this often in the recovery movement, where people must acknowledge their dysfunction and then go through a program involving several steps. Everybody has to go through the same stages. People are discouraged from dealing with problems on their own, even if they feel capable of doing so.

I owe the recovery movement a correction, and I’d rather make it plainly than quietly. In 2020 the Cochrane Collaboration — the most demanding evidence reviewers in medicine — went through the studies on Alcoholics Anonymous and twelve-step programs, tens of thousands of participants in all, and found that for helping people stay sober, AA and treatments that connect people to it performed as well as, and on the key measure of continuous abstinence better than, established professional therapies — at little or no cost. I presented the sameness of the steps as a weakness. For a great many people, it turns out the structure and the fellowship are the treatment. My underlying point stands — no single road is the road for everyone, and you are not incapable of change without a program — but the program itself has earned its place in the evidence, and I say so.

As for the immune system and the tumor: I wrote that as a warning, and it was closer to literal than I knew. A meta-analysis of some three hundred studies has established that chronic stress measurably suppresses immune function — the psychological state degrades the biological defense. Researchers at Ohio State found that married couples’ blister wounds healed substantially more slowly after a hostile argument than after a supportive one; hostility, measured in the blood, slowed the knitting of skin. And the neuroscientist Naomi Eisenberger discovered that social rejection activates the same brain region that registers the distress of physical pain — a finding so literal that in a later experiment, three weeks of ordinary acetaminophen, the headache pill, measurably dulled people’s daily hurt feelings. I am not suggesting you medicate heartbreak from the bathroom cabinet. I am telling you the pain you may believe you invented is real in the tissue. Which is exactly why letting it go is not an emotional nicety. It is a health decision.

You may distract yourself from pain by looking for things to take its place, such as food, drugs, or being overly responsible. But a better approach than distraction is to take quiet time every day during which you can be introspective. This allows you to face what’s bothering you, and to put your problems into perspective.

Sometimes you want to share your hurt with others, but after a certain point, this doesn’t do any good. I have friends who always want to share their problems with me. This is fine, except when it’s the same problem over and over and they never change anything. Then, I simply ask them what they’re trying to achieve. Are they talking just because I’m willing to listen? They share the same thing over and over, until I don’t want to hear it anymore. Finally I tell them, “If you’re not willing to change, don’t share your problems with me anymore.”

Perhaps most of the pain you now experience is not real but you make it appear real. Is that possible? Be honest. Perhaps much of what you’re calling your physical crisis does not exist but is self-created. Is that possible? If it is, remember this: Until you let go of self-created or self-perpetuated pain and no longer treat it as a real problem, it will continue to live.

Intellectually you might understand this, but nothing will change until you actually let go of your pain and fill your mind with affirmations to reprogram your body and mind. Tell yourself that you’re pure, whole, complete, healthy, positive, lovable, and an ideal human being who deserves all the good things life has to offer. Until you do, the old messages will supersede the new ones.

A word on how to do that well, because the research has added a wrinkle worth knowing. Psychologists have found that repeating flattering statements you don’t yet believe — standing at the mirror insisting “I am lovable” while a voice inside answers “no you’re not” — can actually leave people with low self-worth feeling worse, because every repetition restarts the argument. What holds up in study after study is affirming what you value and what you do: writing about the things that matter most to you, recalling evidence of what you’ve already come through, telling yourself the truth in advance — I am someone who keeps going. Aim your affirmations there. You are not trying to win a debate with the old messages. You are trying to make them irrelevant.

Once you start believing in yourself completely, you’ll be amazed at how far you can go. Where you didn’t think you had the resources, your self-confidence will enable you to accomplish what seems impossible.

People ask me how I do all the things I do. When I first wrote this essay I counted fifty books, 165 television programs, sixteen documentaries, thirty-five specials. I had built resorts and detox centers and owned and operated health food stores and natural food restaurants. I had done more than 7,000 radio broadcasts and helped over 20,000 people train for and complete marathons — and the decades since have only made the list longer. How do I do it? I’ve never gotten around to believing that there’s something I can’t do. I believe that I can do anything. As a result, anything I want to do I just do.

The only person that can stop me is me. The moment I listen to anyone else’s doubts I stop myself. People might say, “Gary, you can’t do that because you don’t have the education, support, or money. You don’t have the institutional systems behind you.” Maybe I don’t, but I don’t need those. I don’t accept what people say I can’t do. In my belief system, I make up the rules.

Some people try to stop me. I’ve been called a quack, a charlatan, and a fraud. Some people even try to make me appear crazy. But there’s no way they can convince me that I’m anything other than a perfect human being. As a result, I continue to go forward. I don’t waste my life in frivolities and fear. I’m not motivated by what I can’t do but rather by what I can. So everything people say can’t be done I end up doing.

I believe the human spirit is perfect. As long as I’m in touch with that spirit in my body, mind, and soul, I realize my perfection. I just have to trust enough to connect with it.

At some point you might say, “Gee whiz, if Gary’s done all these things then maybe I can too.” Of course you can. I’m no more special than anyone else. I wasn’t born or raised differently. I have as much dysfunction in my background as most people. But I choose not to identify with that dysfunction. I don’t let myself be a victim sitting around feeling sorry for myself. Why hold on to that?

This is your journey. There’s no other support system you need. You need only you. Look for resources out there to help strengthen you, but don’t depend on them.

Now is the time to look at the pain you’ve held onto, and let it go. Reaffirm every single day that you do not need that pain in your life, and give yourself something in its place. Create small goals, intermediate goals, and major goals. Focus on achieving those. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do anything that you want to do. If anyone else has accomplished something then you can do it too.

When I first wrote this, I told the story of an eighty-six-year-old woman who had just run a marathon after starting to train at seventy. The record keepers have been busy since, and the new stories are better. Harriette Thompson, a concert pianist and two-time cancer survivor, ran the San Diego marathon in 2015 at ninety-two. Mathea Allansmith, a retired eye doctor in Hawaii, finished the Honolulu Marathon in 2022 at ninety-two and a half and went into the record books as the oldest woman ever to complete one — she started running in her late forties and simply never stopped. And then there is the story I want you to remember, because it belongs in this essay more than any other: Fauja Singh, a farmer from Punjab, lost his wife and then watched his son die in an accident in front of him. He was eighty-nine years old and drowning in grief. He took up running — at eighty-nine — to keep the grief from burying him. At one hundred, in Toronto in 2011, he became the first hundred-year-old in history to complete a marathon. He kept running nearly to the end of his life, at one hundred and fourteen. He did not deny his pain. He refused to make a home in it, and he put something in its place. That is this entire essay, lived out in one man.

Become the hero in your own life. Have the courage to go out there and make changes. You will meet obstacles, of course. You just have to differentiate real from imagined obstacles and reject the imagined ones.

END OF PART 2

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BEGIN PART 3

Notice what you enjoy doing and engage in those activities often. Enjoyable experiences will give you the confidence to continue doing things that are good for you. That’s why I ran marathons for so many years. It feels good, and it reaffirms my right to be strong, disciplined, and integrated in body, mind, and spirit.

There is now a name and an evidence base for this advice. Behavioral activation — the deliberate, scheduled practice of doing the things that give you pleasure and meaning, especially when you least feel like it — has been tested head-to-head against full cognitive therapy for depression in large trials, and it holds its own. The doing comes first; the feeling follows. Aristotle would not have been surprised. His word for happiness, eudaimonia, was not a mood at all — it was activity, the exercise of your capacities at full stretch. You do not find a good life and then act. You act, and the life assembles itself around the actions.

Are you happy in your work situation? I never work at a job I don’t like. Yet many people feel stuck in their work. They argue that they must stay there; they have no choice. These people justify their actions with questions such as, “Who is going to pay the mortgage?” “Who will feed the kids?” “Who is going to pay the health insurance?” Their concerns go on and on. Thus they rationalize being stuck in an unhappy situation.

Ask yourself, do I enjoy my surroundings? Some years ago, I visited the southwest to see some old friends. I did a workshop in Santa Fe where I got to talk to some ex-New Yorkers.

I spoke to one woman who is a jewelry designer. She makes costume jewelry and jewelry from platinum, gold, and silver. This woman loves her work and enjoys the pace of life of Santa Fe, the cleanliness, being close to nature, and the people. Most Santa Fe residents will let you be whatever you want to be; the whole community acknowledges freedom of expression.

I also met a third-generation police officer. He told me how difficult it was for him to convince his Irish Catholic family that he wanted to do something else with his life. He does landscape architecture, which he loves. His life is fulfilled. He feels balanced. As a result, he no longer suffers from migraine headaches. He has lost weight. He’s happy in his marriage.

These people weren’t afraid to make changes. Think of how your life would change if you did things that made you feel good and were around people who supported you. That doesn’t mean that what you are doing is not what you should be doing. I’m just suggesting that if you feel trapped you may need to go forward.

If you find yourself unhappy in your living or working environment, take a step back and look at both sides of the issue. Fold a piece of paper in half and on one side write about why you stay put in the same location, the same job, the same lifestyle. Why haven’t you let go of your pain, anger, disappointments, and hurt? Why do you continue to blame yourself?

On the other side, list what you would ideally like to do. That way you can focus your attention on it. Write about the resources you will need to achieve what you want to do. Maybe a year or two of schooling is necessary to get the skills, credentials, and support system you need. Your written ideas will give you a plan of action. You’ll have goals to focus on.

Selecting a job or a place to live based on what gives you the greatest pleasure may be a difficult concept. Society doesn’t teach you to associate happiness with lifestyle. You’ve been taught that you can only attain so much. You are told that you are limited because of your education, class, gender, culture. Your belief system says that what you have is the best that you deserve and the best you should expect.

You have to stretch your beliefs to go beyond that notion. Why should you accept a barren little island as your reality when you’ve got a whole continent to explore? You probably do so because you’ve been told that’s what you can expect. You’re middle class. You come from a certain background. Everyone else does it this way so you’ve got to do it this way. Your whole life becomes circumscribed by your supposed limitations.

It’s easy to lose sight of possibilities that can enhance your life and bring you greater enjoyment. If your family has never gone to the ballet, for instance, you don’t go to the ballet. If they have never gone to an art exhibit, you don’t go either. If they’ve never been hiking, you don’t do that either. You don’t do anything outside of what is expected.

If you accept the expectations that everyone lays down for you they become as formidable as an impenetrable, unscalable prison wall. These limitations don’t really exist, but you make them seem real. Instead of taking a step back to differentiate between what’s real and not real, you are prone to staying limited. You’ll say things like, “We’re in a recession.” “I can’t change.” “The only jobs I can get are jobs I don’t like.” “I’m stuck in my ways.” “I’m too old.” “I have to live with it.”

When I first wrote that list, the excuse of the day was a recession. The script keeps updating itself — since then it has been a financial crisis, a pandemic, inflation, and lately the certainty that artificial intelligence is coming for all the jobs anyway. Notice what never changes: the excuse always wears the costume of the current headline, and it always performs the same function, which is to justify your lack of motion. The headline rotates. The wall stays. That alone should tell you the wall was never made of economics.

Such words justify your lack of motion. Instead of changing you become frustrated and start to sublimate. You indulge in alcohol, food, television, or sex. You find endless ways to distract yourself.

Experiment with new experiences and behaviors you might enjoy. Once you identify what you do enjoy, create a support system with people that enjoy the same things. One of my friends likes to cook and watch movies. So do I. We’ve watched movies for six hours at a time. His energy is compatible with mine, and we have enough in common to build a friendship. You want to be with people you feel comfortable with, who reinforce a lifestyle that makes you comfortable.

Doing what is natural requires little effort. It feels as though you are doing what you should be doing. Ask yourself, what do you feel good about doing? What do you look forward to? What gives you great joy? Build your life around these things.

Write down the following: I’m going to forgive ______ because I will gain ______. This exercise allows you to see how you will benefit from giving up the pain and anger connected to your feeling hurt. It shows you there is a reward in giving it up.

When I first proposed that exercise, the reward was something I asserted. It has since been counted. Meta-analyses covering dozens of controlled studies show that structured forgiveness work reliably increases forgiveness and, with it, hope and emotional well-being, while lowering depression and anxiety. Frederic Luskin’s forgiveness projects at Stanford trained people carrying the heaviest grievances imaginable — including mothers from both sides of the conflict in Northern Ireland whose children had been killed — and recorded lasting drops in hurt and stress. And in 2024 came the largest test ever run: more than 4,500 people across Colombia, Indonesia, South Africa, Hong Kong, and Ukraine — places where grievance is not a personal quirk but a historical inheritance — worked through a self-guided forgiveness workbook, a few hours, alone, no therapist. Compared with those still waiting, they became measurably more forgiving and their depression and anxiety symptoms fell. The workbook, built on psychologist Everett Worthington’s REACH method, is free online. The exercise you just did with one sentence and two blanks is the seed of exactly that process.

If you want to see what forgiveness looks like at full strength, look at what happened in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, in 2006, when a gunman walked into an Amish schoolhouse and shot ten little girls, five of them fatally, before killing himself. Within hours — hours — members of the Amish community were at the door of the gunman’s widow and his parents, comforting them. They attended his funeral. They set up a fund for his family. The world watched in disbelief, and some critics said it was too fast to be real. But the Amish explained that they were not reporting a feeling; they were keeping a commitment, one their community had practiced for centuries, and the grieving — which was long and terrible — went on inside it. They did not say the act was excusable. They did not pretend their daughters were not dead. They gave up the claim to hatred, and they did it before hatred could put down roots. Forgiveness at that scale is not a mood that visits you. It is a decision, made early and kept daily, and the feelings follow it the way warmth follows a fire that somebody chose to light.

Once you can let go and forgive, you can get on with your life and move forward. The more you release, the freer you become. Life is an educational process. With each lesson you learn to live it more constructively. You keep rebalancing yourself.

Decide what you want to change. Then find the strength and resources to make the conversion, step-by-step, day by day. Remove something that you don’t feel you want and put something that will work in its place.

There’s a lesson in pain. Pay attention to what it teaches you. Once you learn the lesson you’re not going to repeat it. You can share what you’ve learned with others and help them in the process. The lesson of pain can be learned by examining who first creates the situation which results in a reaction of pain. For example, you say something without thinking or knowing that it will provoke a reaction in someone; then, when they do react, you feel pain. Another example: you’re frustrated, but instead of dealing with the frustration in a constructive way, you overeat something that’s bad for you; then, the next day, you feel an inner pain for what you perceive as your weakness in relying on your old, self-destructive behavior patterns.

The deepest testimony on this subject belongs to Viktor Frankl, the Viennese psychiatrist who survived the Nazi camps and lost nearly everyone he loved to them. Out of that came Man’s Search for Meaning and its central observation: everything can be taken from a person but one thing, the freedom to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances. When we are no longer able to change a situation, Frankl wrote, we are challenged to change ourselves. Psychologists later gave a name to what he was describing — post-traumatic growth — and found it is not rare: a large share of people who endure terrible events eventually report deeper relationships, clearer priorities, and a stronger sense of what they can survive. But let me add the caution the research adds. Growth is common; it is not owed, and it is not on a schedule. Nietzsche’s line that what does not kill us makes us stronger is only true of pain that gets metabolized — examined, learned from, released. Pain merely survived and stored makes nothing stronger. The lesson is not automatic. You have to go get it.

Remember a difficult time in your life. What did you learn from that experience? How have you grown and become better for it?

List your major conflicts. Now take the role of arbitrator and assess the pros and cons of both sides of your conflict. Let’s say you have a conflict about being married. First note the benefits of being on your own. You are free to make up your own mind. You can live for yourself. You won’t be part of a codependent relationship. You have time for yourself. You can make mistakes without being criticized. You can create your own schedule instead of working around someone else’s. You don’t have to wait for someone else’s approval before doing things.

The negative part of being on your own might be that you feel incomplete. In our society you’re nobody unless you’re a part of a relationship. You may feel insecure being alone. You may think you’re unlovable and that something is wrong with you. People do not expect you to be happy being single.

Then look at the other side of the issue. What are the benefits of being married? You have the security and companionship of another person, someone to wake up with and grow old with, a person that will share love and affection with you.

The down side might be going into debt buying things you need to have as a couple. Things may become more important than the relationship. You may go into debt buying a house you don’t really like or need. Soon the relationship may exist to pay for the mortgage, the furniture, and the children. The stress will put a damper on the relationship, and it will no longer be joyful.

Researchers have since discovered why this mediator exercise works, and the finding has a wonderful name: Solomon’s paradox, after the king who dispensed flawless wisdom about everyone’s dilemmas but his own. In experiments, people reason visibly more wisely about a conflict — weighing both sides, admitting what they don’t know, seeking compromise — when the conflict belongs to someone else. Hand them their own version of the identical problem and the wisdom evaporates. But here is the useful part: when people were instructed to view their own conflict from the outside, as though it were happening to a stranger, the gap closed. The wisdom was in them all along; it was the first-person view that blocked it. So the exercise I’ve given you is not a gimmick. It is the documented correction for a documented blind spot. You already possess the counsel you need. You just have to change seats to hear it.

When you look at everything from the positive and the negative aspects you will clearly pin down what the ideal situation would be for you. Then you can make your move.

Most people live their whole lives remembering the one or two rushes they experienced early in life when they were willing to take some risks. If you start taking some chances now, you can feel charged all the time. You can become the adventurer in your own life.

Think of times you felt excited to be alive. Perhaps you were going down rapids, starting a romance, beginning a new career, seeing the Grand Canyon, or going down a roller coaster. Find ways of creating new highs for yourself and you will have something to look forward to every day.

Your brain, it turns out, is built for exactly this. Novelty is one of the most reliable triggers of the dopamine system — the circuitry of anticipation and motivation — and researchers tracking people’s daily movements have found that those whose days contain more new places and new experiences report more positive emotion, with the effect visible in the brain’s reward pathways. New experience even stretches time: a routine week vanishes in memory, while a single day full of firsts feels, in the rearview mirror, like a month. This is why the years speed up as we age and repeat ourselves — and it means the remedy for a life going by too fast is not to slow the clock but to stop repeating the days.

So here is where this chapter has been heading all along. Epictetus told you the injury lives in your judgment of it. The Buddha told you the second arrow is the one you shoot yourself. Arendt told you forgiveness is the one act that opens a future the past has not already written. And a ninety-year-old farmer in running shoes showed you what all of it looks like in practice. The pain you have been keeping alive is asking for your decision, not your loyalty. Let it go — and then go find out what you are capable of. The freed-up energy has to go somewhere. Make it adventure.