Forgiveness: 5 Steps to Release Resentment & Reclaim Your Joy

By Kelly Browne

As seen in The Best Ever You!

The Mindful Way to Forgiveness: 5 Steps to Release Resentment & Reclaim Your Joy - Kelly Browne

We all carry stories — of hurt, betrayal, or disappointment. These stories, can quietly color our relationships, health, and sense of peace affecting our quality of life. I know this journey intimately, which is why I wrote 101 Ways to CreateMindful Forgiveness: A Heart Healing Guide to Forgiveness, Apologies and Mindful Tools for Peace to share what I have learned through heartbreaking trauma. Forgiveness isn’t about pretending it didn’t happen, letting someone off the hook for their behavior or absolving someone else. It’s about freeing yourself so you can live your life with joy. When we “mindfully forgive,” we’re not erasing the past — we’re loosening the emotional grip it has on our present state of mind. Through years of personal practice, research, and intuitive readings, I’ve discovered a simple, powerful process for mindful forgiveness that anyone can begin right where they are. Here are five gentle, effective steps you can take today:

1. Acknowledge the Hurt

Before we can release resentment, we need to compassionately witness and acknowledge the incident that occurred. Many times we suppress our pain or judge ourselves for holding on to past suffering. It’s absolutely true that our feelings aren’t like a switch that can be turned off but when we harness anger against someone, it’s heavy energy in your body that can create sickness long after the event occurred. Instead, take a quiet moment to name the hurt - what happened to you - and how it made you feel. Write it down. Say it out loud. Tell someone you trust. Honor your story. As I remind readers in Mindful Forgiveness, pain demands to be seen before it can be softened and energetically released from your body.

Prompt: What am I still carrying, and where do I feel it in my body?

2. Choose Willingness Over Readiness

One of the myths of forgiveness is that we must be fully ready to forgive. In truth, forgiveness rarely feels convenient. What matters more is a willingness — however small — to consider the possibility of letting go. More importantly, when you make the decision to create peace over the incident that occurred, it never means you have to renew a relationship with the person that hurt you. Yes, you can forgive and move on with your life without them. That’s not holding a grudge, it's setting a boundary for your own health, self-care, and welfare.

Even a tiny mindful intention in your heart shifts your energy from feeling chained to the incident to opening yourself to release it. Whisper to yourself: “I am willing to release this, for my own peace.”

Willingness plants the seed. The rest unfolds naturally.

3. Practice Compassion for Yourself First

Many of us jump to forgiving others before tending to our own hurt. Mindful forgiveness begins by extending grace inward to ourselves. Recognize the ways you’ve been affected. Offer yourself kindness. If we have hurt someone and made a meaningful apology with the spirit of intention to heal, let it go. If the other person wants to hold on to the event and carry it around, that is their choice. Don’t beg to be forgiven or demand someone apologize – especially if they don’t want to. A meaningless apology just diminishes and dismisses your feelings creating a bigger divide.

Open the path to peace by telling yourself: “I forgive myself for the ways I’ve suffered because of this.” You might be surprised how much emotional weight lifts from your heart when you make yourself the first recipient of compassion and the gift of grace.

4. Separate the Person From the Pain

It’s natural to merge a person’s behavior with their character, but forgiveness asks us to see beyond a single moment or foolish decision. This doesn’t excuse harm — it simply acknowledges that people act from their own pain, wounds, and limitations. 

Mindfully explore:What might have led them to act this way? What part of their story don’t I know?

This lens of perspective in looking at someone’s life experiences, even our own, softens rigid narratives and allows us to make space for emotional release. Many times we might receive a piece of information about someone that is illuminating, that gives us greater insight into the choices and decisions they made.

5. Create a Personal Ritual of Release

Forgiveness isn’t just a thought process — it’s an embodied experience. One of my favorite practices is creating simple rituals to physically symbolize letting go.

You might:

• Write a letter to the person (living or in Spirit) who caused you harm; give yourself a voice. Burn it, bury it, shred it. Energetically release the incident and cut the connection between you.

• Breathe deeply and visualize the heavy energy of hurt dissolving from your body. 

• Carry a stone all day representing your pain. Did you feel better carrying the stone? Now, write your pain on the stone, and throw it into a river, canyon or the ocean. Let it go.

• Light a candle to illuminate the part of yourself that’s ready to be free and receive love.

• Cleanse yourself in a salt bath or shower. An ancient ceremony of purification, sever and release the energetic connection to the incident. Watch it go down the drain back into the earth.

These mindful rituals mark the threshold between carrying the past pain of suffering, the energetic release and mindfully stepping into the present.

The Takeaway

Forgiveness isn’t about forgetting. It’s about choosing yourself. Choosing peace over pain. Choosing to reclaim the joy that resentment has quietly stolen so you can live a happy and healthy life.

In Mindful Forgiveness, I remind readers that this work isn’t easy — but it is healing for your own self-care. It is sacred. And it is available to all of us, one conscious, compassionate moment at a time. Give yourself the grace you deserve.

If you’ve been carrying old pain, know this: You are allowed to put it down.

Kelly Browne is a professional intuitive with celebrity and international clients. The author of six books including, 101 Ways to Create Mindful Forgiveness: A Heart Healing Guide to Forgiveness, Apologies and Mindful Tools for Peace (HCI; 2023) and the best-selling 101 Ways to Say Thank You Series, 101 Ways to Say Thank for Every Occasion, (AdamsMedia; 2022), she is a frequent podcast guest, contributor and influencer on emotional wellness, gratitude, and intuitive living.