Adds years to your life and health to your years.

Ahhh, spring time, when the sun comes back bringing with it, its warming light and reviving power.  Spring is the season of Easter, gardening, allergies, spring break, cleaning, and renewal of life.  This season is not only about renewal in nature, but renewal of us as well.  Spring is a great opportunity to reexamine our life and make changes where needed.  The first step is cleaning out or "spring cleaning of the soul".  Our emotional garbage builds from year to year just like all that junk in your attic.  After several years the emotional bags began to fill and then overflow into areas of our life, specifically our health. Fortunately, there is a solution to getting rid of all those overflowing bags, the best self cleaning solution on the market, FORGIVENESS.

 

For some of us we were first introduced to the concept of forgiveness at a young age in the context of our religious teaching.  Christianity along with several other major religions are rooted in the concept of forgiveness.  In the Bible, Matthew 19:22 Jesus instructs us to forgive our brother "seventy times seven".  For others forgiveness has been taught through the hard lessons of life, "To err is human to forgive divine" (Alexander Pope).  No matter how you learned about forgiveness we each have our own perspective and definition on exactly what it means to forgive, however; one common thread holds true for everyone, not allowing yourself to forgive is unhealthy.  In my research to investigate the connection between forgiveness and physical health what I discovered about the effects on our bodies was not surprising.  I was surprised, however to learn about the amount of research being done on the subject of forgiveness; major research universities such as Stanford University, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin at Madison and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill all have had large scale Forgiveness research projects.  Though most of these projects are in their infancy stage there findings are intriguing.  According to a Gallup pole most Americans think that it is important to forgive, however; less then half of us actually practice the concept in our lives.  Harboring ill feelings toward another or holding a grudge can actually increase your chances for heart disease and even cancer.  Research has shown that anger prone people are three times more likely to suffer a heart attack or bypass surgery then those who are less angry.  Men who were better at diffusing anger had half as many strokes as angrier men, and out of 680 women with chest pain found those who harbored feelings of anger were four times more likely to have high cholesterol and higher body mass index both of which are linked to heart disease (Better Homes &Gardens, 4-2002).