"Inner peace can be reached only when we practice forgiveness. Forgiveness is letting go of the past, and is therefore the means for correcting our misperceptions"
About this Quote
Jampolsky frames inner peace less as a mood you stumble into and more as a skill with a price tag: you pay in grievances. Coming from a psychologist associated with A Course in Miracles-adjacent thinking, the line smuggles therapy into spiritual language, collapsing mental health into moral practice. The insistence on "only" is doing heavy lifting. It rejects the modern buffet of self-care (optimization, boundaries, biohacks) and names a single choke point: the stories we keep retelling about what was done to us.
The subtext is deliberately provocative: your suffering isn’t proof of how wrong the world was, it’s evidence that your perception has calcified. Calling hurts "misperceptions" reframes injustice as cognition, which can be liberating or infuriating depending on what you’ve lived through. The move works rhetorically because it swaps the courtroom for the eye exam. You don’t need a verdict, you need a prescription. "Letting go of the past" isn’t amnesia; it’s a refusal to keep using yesterday as the organizing principle for today.
There’s also a quiet power play here. Forgiveness is positioned as agency, not charity. You’re not absolving someone for their sake; you’re reclaiming your attention, cutting the feedback loop where anger keeps delivering the same headline. Still, the context matters: in clinical terms, forgiveness can be a tool, not a mandate. As a north star, the quote is clean and bracing. As a rule, it risks sounding like spiritual bypassing when the wound is still bleeding.
The subtext is deliberately provocative: your suffering isn’t proof of how wrong the world was, it’s evidence that your perception has calcified. Calling hurts "misperceptions" reframes injustice as cognition, which can be liberating or infuriating depending on what you’ve lived through. The move works rhetorically because it swaps the courtroom for the eye exam. You don’t need a verdict, you need a prescription. "Letting go of the past" isn’t amnesia; it’s a refusal to keep using yesterday as the organizing principle for today.
There’s also a quiet power play here. Forgiveness is positioned as agency, not charity. You’re not absolving someone for their sake; you’re reclaiming your attention, cutting the feedback loop where anger keeps delivering the same headline. Still, the context matters: in clinical terms, forgiveness can be a tool, not a mandate. As a north star, the quote is clean and bracing. As a rule, it risks sounding like spiritual bypassing when the wound is still bleeding.
Quote Details
| Topic | Forgiveness |
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