Times may change, especially in these modern days, but the main anchor in life has always been the light within your inner being. This, provided you take the time to tune into it, will provide you with a true perspective of the important issues of life.

As you know, it's not what you accumulate materially that makes a truly successful life. Once people eventually pass on from this realm, they leave behind their material accumulations. The real treasure that you take with you is the experience you've gained and, more importantly, the spiritual advancement you have achieved in the process.

If you have issues which need to be healed at a heart level, finding a way to heal those issues will free you to move deeper into heart and soul consciousness.

Sometimes, people choose a challenging life in order to trigger transformation into greater strength and wisdom. After all, it is the strongest steel that is forged in fire. No matter what negative experiences you may have endured in this life, there will have been life-experience reasons behind all of them.

The most powerful tool for gaining advancement from negative experiences is that of forgiveness. Whether you yourself need to gain freedom from the chains forged by bad memories or you want to help another person to achieve this, the principle remains the same.

Once a person realizes that they can forgive another, for no matter what, they become free! Free to move on to a better life and free of the regret and the hardship that the memories that such hardship brought. Sure, it's hard to do, but it works like a charm! You just have to disengage from the lower emotions long enough to grasp that key to the freedom of higher consciousness.

The key to freedom from the memory of a bad experience is to first forgive the experience. The big challenge is to forgive the perpetrator and, if necessary, any guilt that you feel yourself. But, first, you have to own the experience as part of your reality and start by forgiving that experience.

Such an experience came your way because of a decision in your past. A bad experience doesn't mean that you were bad. It means that you chose, at a superconscious level, a wake-up call to trigger your own transformation into attaining greater wisdom. The people with the greatest compassion are often the ones who have seen and lived through the most tragic events that were full of the need for compassion.

Remember this vital principle - anger does nothing against the one who hurt you. Anger and resentment serve only to trap you in the lower frequencies of consciousness at a time when you should be able to fly as free as a bird into the higher realms of spiritual consciousness.

If the experience is so bitter and painful that you find it impossible to forgive, this is how you can climb right over that barrier. Start by pretending to forgive. Over and over, pretend to forgive and the breakthrough you seek will soon occur.

The exit point from limitation lies just above you, through a door marked, "Forgiveness."

With serious cases, the help of a skilled professional may well be necessary. In lesser cases, calling upon a higher power can be a huge help in letting go of the hurt from past experiences. There's always a way to gain help from a higher spiritual power. According to your preference, you can call on God, Jesus or other great spiritual figures to ask for the power to transform the dark into light.

You can also connect with your soul consciousness, which is connected to the Divine, and ask that higher part of yourself to heal your inner issues.

If you need to let go of past hurts, let them go now using the magic key of forgiveness and you will be free to soar even higher into the sacred space which exists within your soul consciousness.

This was one of many chapters from my latest e-book, Spiritual Metaphysics.

Important note: Big issues create big blockages, often in your unconscious mind. This raises the question, how do you recognize a blockage that needs healing when it is hidden away from your conscious mind?

That is the subject of a chapter called, "A Blockage Hunting Exercise." It is one of many empowering spiritual exercises in this revolutionary and thoroughly enlightening book, Spiritual Metaphysics: Answers to the Great Mysteries of Life - now available for immediate download here.

Owen Waters is a spiritual researcher and author.  For articles and books by Owen Waters, visit InfiniteBeing.com.