In the years following her traumatic experience, Singh delved deep into meditative practices to stop reliving the past. She also took up yogic breathing techniques, known as pranayama, and nada yoga – practising yoga against a backdrop of calming sound.

For three months, she focused solely on her goal of forgiveness with the help of meditative practitioners to truly and deeply forgive her ex-husband for the acts he committed against her.

“[Forgiveness] was a conscious choice as I decided to move away from a place of hurt, pain and negativity towards healing and happiness,” Singh said. “Once I forgave, I felt that something tight within me had loosened and dissolved.”

The concept of forgiving is as old as the scriptures – Buddhist, biblical and others. Now scientists and educators worldwide are taking a deeper look at what forgiveness is and the beneficial effects it has on our physical and mental health.

In 2015, Vishen Lakhiani, CEO of Mindvalley, a Malaysia-based online wellness education company, attended a week-long retreat in the United States to perfect a complex practice of forgiveness that is often overlooked in our daily lives.

This took place at the Biocybernaut Institute, a neurofeedback training facility in Sedona, Arizona. The goal was to work with its scientists and technology to help amplify his alpha brain waves; upping alpha waves is a process linked to higher creativity and greater compassion and insight. (Alpha brain waves measure between 8 and 12Hz and fall in the middle of a five-level spectrum: delta, theta, alpha, beta and gamma.)

Lakhiani spent roughly five hours every day for seven days forgiving people from various periods throughout his life for perceived wrongdoings against him, from high school teachers and business partners to family members. Each time he forgave, his alpha waves spiked. By the end of the seventh day, Lakhiani claimed to have felt a sense of liberation he had never felt before.

In January, Lakhiani held a 90-minute Zoom session to discuss his retreat experience from six years ago and share lessons in forgiveness, ways to forgive, and the physiological and physical health benefits of forgiving.

“One of the biggest things that happens when you practice forgiveness regularly is a feeling of compassion. You feel a oneness with the universe, a oneness with life, a oneness with nature,” Lakhiani said during his conference.

“Forgiveness training expands your sense of self and it makes you kinder and … gentler.”

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He described having decreased levels of anger, increased feelings of love, enhanced capacity to trust, a feeling of freedom from events of the past, and overall improved health.

Beyond the initial benefits, what the experts at the institute found and what Lakhiani described was that by using forgiveness to relieve the brain of past negativity, a subject’s alpha brainwaves were amplified to achieve Zen-level states.

Japanese scientists who have studied Zen meditators’ brainwaves discovered they differ depending on the practitioners’ level, from beginners to intermediate and advanced, said Dr James Hardt, president and founder of the Biocybernaut Institute.

He claims the seven-day training programme Lakhiani underwent “produces brainwave changes identical to what is seen in advanced Zen states”.

Hardt – a physicist, psychologist and psychophysiologist with more than 40 years of research and clinical practice in neurofeedback brain wave enhancement – has pioneered several such brain-training programmes to help clients access their highest brain functioning.

For the forgiveness training, Hardt had clients participate in a 14-step process for forgiving people who have wronged them in their life. As participants moved through the programme, their alpha brainwaves would increase. Decreased alpha wave levels suggested that the subjects had not succeeded in forgiving and required them to revisit the situation they were trying to reconcile and take a fresh approach.

“By overcoming desires for revenge, forgiveness promises to end suffering and enhance mental and physical health,” said Masi Noor, psychologist and bestselling author of Forgiveness is Really Strange.

“Over the years, researchers have developed different measures of forgiveness. Typically, they are scales consisting of statements that ask individuals to indicate the degree to which they are motivated to forgive, avoid and get even with their perpetrators.”

For those looking to benefit from forgiveness practices in their daily lives, it can be difficult to define and quantify the impacts of forgiveness without help from an instructor or therapist.

In his book, Noor collaborated with illustrator Sophie Standing to create image-based depictions of different concepts of forgiveness to teach the practice to young adults.

“Typically, stories are a good medium through which to invite teens and young people to explore what forgiveness is, how it might feel, and what consequences it could entail,” Noor said. “Making forgiveness tangible can further help young people to relate to it.”

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Noor has developed a lifelong fascination with forgiveness and co-created The Forgiveness Project with journalist Marina Cantacuzino. It collects and shares stories of victims, survivors, and perpetrators of crime and conflict who have restored and rebuilt their lives through forgiveness and reconciliation.

In March, Singh will collaborate with The Forgiveness Project to share her story of going from domestic abuse survivor to “destiny creator” to inspire those oppressed by past negativity to move toward a place of peace and understanding by forgiving.

“Any negative emotion, if sustained for a long duration, creates blockages in our energy channels which in turn leads to diseases in both our physical and mental body,” Singh said.

“Once I truly embraced forgiveness, I felt that everything was all right with the world and my heart was filled with deep peace which gave space for the creative energy within me to manifest a meaningful life.”

An eight-step guide to practising forgiveness

This is a condensed version of the Biocybernaut Institute’s approach to forgiveness, created by Vishen Lakhiani and Dr James Hardt.

1. Identify the person or act you wish to forgive and write it down. You can also choose to forgive yourself, writing down, for example: “I am forgiving my 27-year-old self for making a poor financial decision.”

2. Create an imagined yet peaceful and powerful mental space in which to conduct the act of forgiveness. You may want to imagine the place where the wrongdoing took place, or somewhere serene like a meadow, a beach or a mountain.

3. Imagine the person or entity there in the space you have created and read the “charges” as if you are in a courtroom. It is important to treat this step seriously and list all the ways in which the perpetrator wronged you.

4. Feel the anger and pain of what happened and let it out (safely). Yell if you want, or hit a pillow or verbalise your feelings for up to a minute.

5. Consider what you have learned through the process and write down three lessons gleaned.

6. Consider how the other party may have been hurt in the past and write down the ways they may have also been wronged that might have led them in turn to hurt you.

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7. Put yourself in the perpetrator’s shoes to try to understand their transgression. Maybe they were in financial trouble, had been abused in their childhood or had issues with self-esteem. Try to understand why they may have been compelled to commit the acts they did.

8. Turn forgiveness into love. You will have reached the final stage when you can visualise the person who wronged you in your mental space and give them a hug without feeling any negativity, discomfort or ill will.