Forgiveness: A necessity (Part 1)

What is forgiveness? Is it good to forgive?
Forgiveness can be;
: the act of forgiving someone or something
: the attitude of someone who is willing to forgive other people
We will look a bit closer at forgiveness. It is
something we often refuse to do because we do not
want to free the one who caused us harm (physical,
emotional or any form) to be free of the guilt of
hurting us. And it is true, somehow by forgiving the
person, we set them free. But what we forget is that
the person suffering most from our grudges, from
our hatred, from our anger, is not that person that
harmed us, but our very selves.

If we forgive whole-heartedly, we do a favor to the
perpetrator, but a 100-fold bigger favor to
ourselves. We set ourselves free from continued
suffering, from continued negative emotions. I heard
recently a talk (online) by Michael Beckwith who
proposed five steps of forgiveness:

The first step to forgive someone, is to be willing to
forgive. This is often the most difficult one. Since
they harmed us, we have the right feel hurt. By
forgiving truly that hurt will be no longer ours.  
Somehow we see our hurt, our grudges as a
retaliation for the wrong that was done. It is not! It
is something we can free ourselves from and
whatever was done, we will no longer allow it to
hurt us anymore, we will get it over with; we will
stop perpetuating the effect of the nastiness that we
encountered.
 I think sometimes we have to
sincerely pray for the strength to forgive. It is
somehow the way of our Creator and when we ask
for help in going that way, we do get the help.
Once we find in ourselves the willingness to forgive,

The second step is
actually do the forgiving. Saying to the person in
real life on in our own thoughts world, I forgive you
Saying it, living it, feeling it.

The third step is to try to understand why the
person was so nasty to us. This is compassion,
empathy. Trying to imagine what the person must
have gone through to reach this level of nastiness.
How much must that person have suffered him or
herself for them to feel the need to make others
suffer in such a way. If we try to put ourselves for a
short while in the skin of the person we have
forgiven we will come to a compassionate
understanding.

The fourth step is to wish the person we forgave
well. Sometimes we forgave but still rejoice in the
feeling of the bad karma that will come over him, or
the punishment he may receive in hell. The fourth
step is to give up also these thoughts and truly wish
him or her will, even if the person is no longer on
earth, wishing them eternal peace in the hereafter.

And the fifth step was to really do something nice
for that person. That makes forgiveness truly
complete. Could be an anonymous note or send an
anonymous present in the mail. Or just meet them
and have a nice conversation. Or just praying for
their well-being.
I liked the proposed process here in five steps. I
have experienced the benefits of true forgiveness
myself and have read and heard so many stories
about the liberating effects of forgiveness. I hope
we all can think about this for a while and consider
forgiving all our fellow humans for all small and big
wrongs done to us.