How to forgive – welcome to our very first post in the Sunday Rituals Series.

WELCOME to our new series called SUNDAY RITUALS!

I am so excited to invite you to a 6-week series, where every Friday, I will share with you a very special Sunday Ritual, so you can check it out and get ready to act upon it the upcoming Sundays. 

This series is ALL ABOUT YOU! 

Does the following sound familiar to you? 

The entire week, you are on auto-pilot. Running from one appointment to the next without ever reflecting on what’s actually happened. You attend dinner dates and parties you don’t even want to go to. You eat convenient fast food to save some time without ever thinking about your health and body. Every day, you are just looking to get to the end of the week and finally have some time off, before the whole thing starts over again on Monday.

Feel ya! I’ve been there and I luckily got out of there! 🙏

With the Sunday Rituals Series, we want to stop the hamster wheel for good!

Sundays are the perfect days to calm down and reflect whilst getting ready for a fresh start into the next week. 

In our Sunday Rituals Series, you will get some inspiring ideas on how to make the very best out of your Sundays and leave the week behind. 

By making your Sundays a special self care day for yourself, you will train your body and mind to calm down and have a look inside. 

Before we head into our actual ritual, we will reflect on what happened this week and how we are feeling. 

The long-term goal of our Sunday Rituals is to wave goodbye to this hamster wheel for good and put both of our hands firmly on the wheel of our own lives and chase these dreams!

Todays’ Sunday Ritual is all about Forgiveness. 

Forgiveness is an incredibly powerful tool which will enable you to live a much happier and abundant life. 

 

Why forgiveness is essential for an abundant life

 

We carry so much weight with us and every single one of us comes with some kind of baggage. 

That’s absolutely fine and normal. 

But there is also some baggage, which we do not have to carry around anymore. 

It weighs us down and stops us from flying high, quite literally. 

There is an invisible blockade inside of us, oftentimes not even recognized that hinders us in chasing these big dreams of ours without us even knowing. 

These blockades vary from person to person. Sometimes they come as limiting beliefs about ourselves and our lives, passed on by our parents and grandparents. 

Other times they might be an old scar coming from former relationships that have hurt us big time and seem to never leave us again. 

Blockades can really come in thousands of different ways and stories. 

But there is one thing that all of these have in common. Every blockade can be released.

And one of my favorite ways to do that is forgiveness. 

While it may seem a bit odd to practice a Forgiveness Sunday, it might surprise you, how good it feels and how released you may be after todays’ Sunday Ritual. 

Even if you think, naaah, I don’t have anything or anyone to forgive, life’s great – bear with me! 

That’s exactly what I thought when I started my self care journey. 

Little did I know that EVERYONE has something or someone to forgive – it might even be ourselves, that we might want to forgive. 

So, let’s get right into it. What do you need for todays’ Forgiveness Sunday?

Tiny list for today

  • Notebook
  • Pencil 
  • Quiet Time and space without distractions
  • Cozy blanket
  • Coffee or Tea or Hot Chocolate or whatever your favorite beverage may be 🙂

We will start our Sunday Rituals the same way every week. 

weekly Sunday Reflection

To get ourselves ready and into the mindspace of a proper self-care sunday, we will start each week with the ritual of reflecting on the past week as well as on thinking about the upcoming week.

Write down the answer to the following questions in a few sentences:

  • How do I feel right now on a scale from 1 to 5 with 1 being “not great” and 5 being “amazing”?
  • What went well this week?
  • What could have been better?
  • What’s up for next week? Any special events or occasions?
  • Which goals are set for next week? (Maximum of 3 goals)
  • What’s on my to-do list for next week?
  • How would I feel if I reached all of my goals and to-do list items?
  • What am I grateful for today?

 

let’s get started

 

Now, let’s get started. 😊

I hope you are sitting in a cozy spot right now with a cup of tea 🍵in your hands and your journal 📒ready to fill. 

For today, I want you to understand that forgiveness is so much more powerful than it may initially sound. 

Oftentimes, we are not even aware of the fact that there might be something inside of us that so urgently needs to be released. 

We are holding a grudge against someone we are not even in contact with anymore. Or maybe deep down we are still not over that heartbreak from 3 years ago. 

The consequence of not practicing forgiveness is actually quite tremendous.  

It drains our energy levels to the max and stops us from getting to where we want to be in our lives.

And the worst thing about it – we are not even aware of it!

 

awareness

 

For now, try to get into a comfortable position and sit still. 🧘‍♀️

Close your eyes and try to think of a moment or a person in your life that somehow still affects you negatively. 

This might be anything really.

Maybe it’s an old schoolmate who didn’t treat you all too well back in the day.

Or it’s an ex partner who broke your heart out of the blue.

Maybe it’s your best friend who said something really hurtful a year ago which still lives in your mind. 

Now here’s an important side note. It might even be something YOU did to another person, which you are still not over yet and in retrospect feel really bad about. So consider this as well.

Whatever it is, I want you to write it all down in your notebook. It can be one memory or ten or twenty. There is no limit really. 

Take a few minutes and think about it.

Write down what comes to mind. Don’t overthink it. Even if it seems like a small thing, if it’s still in your mind, it deserves to be forgiven.

Okay. Once you’re done with the above, let’s get on with the next step. 

 

Forgiveness

 

Now that you have defined what may be holding you back, I want you to journal about your forgiveness ritual. 

Give yourself as much time as needed and start writing.

Write down what it is you want to forgive for every single thing you noted down above. 

Here are some examples of how you could express your thoughts on forgiveness:

I forgive XY for making me feel bad about my outfit when we went out for drinks. She didn’t mean it in a hurtful way and it was not her intention to make me feel bad even 3 years after this happened. I release this feeling right now and I forgive.


I forgive myself for acting like XY in this situation. It was overwhelming and scary, so I acted out without thinking about the consequences. It can happen to anyone and I am sorry it happened that day. That does not make me a bad person. That’s human after all and I apologized. There’s nothing else I can do about it anymore, so I forgive myself and I release the negative thoughts about myself right now and I will never look back again. 

 

Now, when reading this, it might seem like a simple exercise finished up in a couple of minutes. 

But it’s not. It’s actually quite an emotional and sometimes exhausting exercise

You might be brought back to a certain hurtful situation and tear up. 

That’s absolutely normal. If that happens, it’s actually really good because it means that there was in fact something you needed to let go of. 

So give yourself time and permission to feel whatever comes up. Anger, sadness, relief, embarrassment – anything is welcome and appreciated. 

 

Off you go!

 

Now let’s get started with this emotional but alleviative exercise and clear our minds in order to make space for the important stuff in our lives! 

Our goals and aspirations. The manifestation of our dreams! 

I hope you will enjoy this weeks’ Sunday Ritual and that you will see the benefit of this exercise for everything that’s coming. 

Before we can start chasing our dreams, it is vital to free our mind of unnecessary baggage and thoughts. 

I hope you are having the coziest and most eye-opening Sunday! 

Give yourself the freedom to do whatever feels right today. 

Don’t let anyone’s opinion hinder you in realizing your dream Sunday. 

The sun is shining and everyone’s outside? So what! 

If you prefer going after your Sunday Ritual, then DO IT! Your future self will thank you BIG TIME!

As always, I’m rooting for you 🔥and I cannot wait to hear about your Sunday Ritual Experiences! 

Let me know how it went for you and if it was helpful for you! 🙂

Talk to you next week,

Noni

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