The Grudge I Carried for Eight Years
For eight years, I held a grudge against someone who had betrayed my trust in a business partnership. I thought I’d forgiven him. I said the words. I even meant them, on the surface. But every time his name came up in conversation, I felt a tightening in my chest, a hot, compressed anger that hadn’t moved an inch in all that time.
I was carrying it like luggage I’d forgotten I was holding. It was affecting my sleep, my relationships, and, I would later realize, my ability to receive the very things I was praying for.
Yogananda’s teachings on forgiveness found me at exactly the right time. And what struck me wasn’t just that he advocated forgiveness. Everyone advocates forgiveness. What struck me was how radically he defined it, and how specifically he taught it could be achieved.
What Yogananda Actually Meant by Forgiveness
Yogananda didn’t teach the kind of forgiveness where you say “I forgive you” through clenched teeth while the resentment still burns underneath. He taught something far more demanding and far more freeing: complete erasure of the emotional wound.
In Where There Is Light, he said:
“Forgiveness is the strongest weapon of the strong. It takes more courage to forgive than it does to be angry. When you forgive someone, you take away the power of their wrongdoing over your consciousness.” – Paramahansa Yogananda (1988), compiled from his talks and writings
That last line stopped me cold when I first read it. The power of their wrongdoing over your consciousness. That was exactly what I’d been allowing, I’d given someone who hurt me years ago ongoing power over my present-moment peace. Every time I thought of him with resentment, I was re-wounding myself. He’d moved on. I was the one still bleeding.
Yogananda’s phrase “forgive and forget truly” means exactly what it sounds like. Not just the conscious decision to forgive, but the deep subconscious release of the memory’s emotional charge. The event might remain as a fact in your history, but the pain, the anger, the sense of injustice, all of it dissolves. That’s what “truly” means in his usage.
Why Surface Forgiveness Fails
I tried for years to forgive through willpower and moral reasoning. I told myself that holding grudges was unhealthy. I reminded myself that everyone makes mistakes. I even tried to see things from the other person’s perspective. And intellectually, I could. I understood why he’d done what he did.
But understanding isn’t forgiving. Yogananda was very clear about this distinction. The mind can understand and still hold resentment. The intellect can rationalize while the heart stays locked. True forgiveness has to penetrate below the conscious mind into the feeling nature, the same deep level where the wound was originally created.
This is why Yogananda emphasized meditation and inner work as the foundation for genuine forgiveness. You can’t think your way to forgiveness any more than you can think your way to falling asleep. It requires a shift in your being, not just your beliefs.
The Spiritual Logic Behind Complete Forgiveness
Yogananda placed forgiveness within a larger spiritual framework that made it feel less like a sacrifice and more like common sense. His reasoning went something like this:
If God, or the divine, or the infinite intelligence, whatever language resonates with you, dwells equally in all beings, then the person who hurt you is, at the deepest level, a manifestation of the same consciousness that you are. Hurting you was a mistake born of spiritual ignorance. Holding onto resentment against them is, in a very real sense, holding resentment against a part of yourself.
He also taught that unforgiveness creates a karmic entanglement. As long as you hold hatred or resentment toward someone, you remain energetically bound to them. The grudge is a chain, and you’re on both ends of it. Forgiveness is the act of releasing yourself from that chain.
“When you hold resentment toward another, you are bound to that person or condition by an emotional link that is stronger than steel. Forgiveness is the only way to dissolve that link and get free.” – Paramahansa Yogananda, quoted in The Law of Success (1944)
I’ve come to feel the truth of this in my own life. The people I resented most were the people who occupied the most mental real estate. They were taking up space that could have been used for creativity, for love, for spiritual growth. Forgiving them wasn’t letting them off the hook. It was taking back the space they’d occupied without paying rent.
The Exercise: Yogananda’s Meditation for Deep Forgiveness
This practice draws from Yogananda’s emphasis on combining meditation with directed feeling. It’s not a one-time fix. It’s a process that (in my experience) takes consistent practice over days or weeks, depending on the depth of the wound.
Step 1: Sit in Quiet Meditation
Find a time when you won’t be interrupted. Sit comfortably. Close your eyes. Spend five minutes simply calming the breath and the mind. You don’t need to achieve a deep meditative state, just settle into a place of relative quiet.
Step 2: Bring the Person to Mind
Gently bring to mind the person you want to forgive. Don’t replay the story of what they did. Just see their face. Hold it there as neutrally as you can, as if you were looking at a photograph.
Step 3: Speak Internally to Them
Say silently, as if speaking directly to them: “I release all resentment I hold toward you. I free myself from this pain. I wish you well.” If the words feel hollow at first, that’s normal. Keep going.
Step 4: Feel the Release
This is the most important step. After speaking the words, try to feel, in your chest, in your stomach, wherever you carry emotional tension, a softening. Imagine the tight knot of resentment loosening, dissolving, melting away. Breathe into that space. Let it open.
Step 5: Replace With Compassion
Yogananda taught that forgiveness isn’t complete until the space left by resentment is filled with something positive. Try to feel genuine compassion for the person, even a small amount. Recognize that their hurtful actions came from their own suffering, their own confusion, their own spiritual blindness. This doesn’t excuse what they did. It simply acknowledges the truth of why most people cause harm.
Step 6: Practice Daily Until the Charge Is Gone
You’ll know the forgiveness is complete when you can think of the person and the event without any emotional contraction. When their name comes up and you feel, nothing. No tightness. No heat. Just peace, or maybe a quiet compassion. That’s the “truly” in “forgive and forget truly.”
What Changed for Me
I practiced this meditation nearly every morning for about three weeks, focusing on the person I’d resented for eight years. The first few days, I could barely get through Step 2 without feeling anger surge back up. I’d sit there with my jaw clenched, trying to wish well someone I still wanted to scream at.
But around day ten, something cracked open. I was in the middle of the practice, silently saying “I release all resentment,” and I suddenly felt tears streaming down my face. Not tears of anger. Tears of relief. As if something I’d been gripping for nearly a decade had finally dropped from my hands.
By the end of three weeks, I could think about this person with something approaching genuine neutrality. I didn’t want to be his friend. I didn’t want to do business with him again. But the burning was gone. The mental real estate was freed. And I noticed, almost immediately, that I had more energy, more creativity, and more openness in my daily life.
Forgiveness as Ongoing Practice
Yogananda didn’t treat forgiveness as a one-time event. He saw it as a spiritual muscle that needed regular exercise. Small resentments build up constantly, irritation with a coworker, frustration with a family member, annoyance at a stranger. If we don’t practice releasing these small charges regularly, they accumulate into the kind of deep grudges that take years to dissolve.
I’ve started applying the same basic practice to smaller offenses as they happen. Someone cuts me off in traffic, I notice the flash of anger and silently say, “I release this.” A friend says something thoughtless, I feel the sting and then consciously let it go before it can harden into resentment.
It doesn’t always work perfectly. I’m not a saint. But the practice has shortened the half-life of my resentments from years to hours, and sometimes to minutes. That’s not perfection, but it’s freedom of a kind I didn’t have before.
Yogananda’s teaching on forgiveness isn’t gentle advice for polite people. It’s a radical spiritual practice that dissolves the chains we forge between ourselves and those who’ve hurt us. And the person it frees most is always, always, you.
