.
f r e e s o u l ________________________________________________________________________________
THE JOURNEY NEWSLETTER
a newsletter dedicated to educating, informing and inspiring people
to apply new possibilities in healing and inner growth
VOLUME.4
7/30/06
All about Forgiveness
Each month I go to a women’s circle. Each month we have a subject and share our experiences on that particular theme. Our most recent theme was forgiveness, and we each had exactly five minutes to speak. As the evening unfolded I found myself wrapped in a rich tapestry that was woven from each women's story. I was touched by many different experiences of forgiveness, and we all witnessed many different levels of maturity and ability to step away from our old knee-jerk reactions. By the time I drove home I also found myself passionately inspired to explore this subject in more depth in this newsletter.
We all seem to believe that forgiveness is a good thing, at least most of the time, but what exactly does forgiveness mean in each of our own lives? Why is it a good thing? How does it happen? When is it necessary? What are the things we need to forgive? And are there things we should not forgive, ever?
During most of my life I didn’t know anything about forgiveness. I grew up with parents who without a doubt loved me and my two younger siblings very much, who raised us with as much attention, understanding, care, and caring as was within their capability. The kind of personal violations I remembered were really of the minor kind: my sister using my clothes without asking me, my parents not buying us an ice cream even though it was a really hot day, teachers grading a paper unfairly, or my mother nagging me about not practicing my violin often enough. Only twice in my life was I slapped by my mother, and both times she apologized right afterwards. I always thought of my childhood as a fortunate one, one that gave me a nurturing environment to develop my talents and abilities, and with that came a certain obligation: to use these talents to give something back to the world, to those people whose lives were burdened by less fortunate circumstances. It became my life long search how best to do that. As I grew older, somewhat to my surprise, I discovered I myself also had plenty of inner limitations and obstacles that all wanted to be let go of.
In spite of all the healing and personal growth work I have done in my life I didn’t come to understand the power of forgiveness until I started studying The Journey two years ago.
When I read Brandon’s book I was struck by the key role forgiveness played in her own healing. I was impressed by how much she already knew and how many healing approaches she had practiced and mastered by the time the tumor showed up in her body. And yet all that she had learned to that point hadn’t prevented that tumor from growing. When she finally stumbled onto the experience that was to become the full Journey process, she checked with her inner source to ask whether she was done. The answer was a definite NO. Almost in despair she asked what else can possibly still be missing? This time the answer was simply: forgiveness.
Why then is forgiveness so powerful?
In my current understanding of the healing process, whether it concerns a physical or an emotional condition, forgiveness is the last piece in a chain of transformational experiences that can heal the body or the mind from the trauma it was exposed to.
When we truly and wholeheartedly forgive, what we are really doing is giving away the impact someone's action had on us; in that moment of forgiveness we are giving away our story of having been hurt or wronged, and we step back into the broader truth of our divine nature, that part of our self that cannot be injured, the part that is eternal, free, enlightened and always complete. I know such a part is alive and well in each and everyone of us.
There are a few important things to understand about forgiveness.
First: Acceptance is not forgiveness. It may sound similar and feel helpful to find acceptance, but when you accept you merely acknowledge that something exists and that you choose to live with that reality. In spite of acceptance you may still be licking your wounds, you may still deep down believe that “this” should not have happened, and still continue to experience yourself as a victim. - True forgiveness has a profoundly different energy. It sets you free.
Second: We cannot tap into this power just by giving forgiveness lip service. We may understand that it is important, we may say all the right words, but if our forgiveness is not genuine, if we don’t truly feel it, it will not liberate us in the same way.
Third: It is hard to forgive someone in the present for something that has its origin in the past. How often do we react to triggers, to someone pushing our button, giving us an instantaneous feeling of being wronged, mistreated, ignored, attacked, or misunderstood? How much time have we all spent arguing, defending, blaming or punishing someone and the part we were cast in felt oh, so familiar? How often are we aware that we are replaying an old pattern, a role within a story that was written into our cellular memory a long, long time ago?
These are the experiences that often have us running in mental and emotional circles. As we battle the ghosts from our past, we may be unable to hear what our current antagonist is really trying to say or do. And if that person gets caught up in their own story of the past, we are soon so entangled in proving the other person guilty that it can become impossible to hear or understand what is really happening. Forgiveness isn’t all that effective here. Trying to reshape the present doesn’t have a big influence on the imprint that shapes our day to day experience and behavior. When this imprint is anchored in our past, in an old wounding experience, it creates a lifelong pattern that is often difficult to brake. But... once we discover that imprint, that root of our present experiences, then we have the chance to fundamentally change its hold on our current reality. In the Journey we call this imprint the cellular memory. And forgiveness at the level of cellular memory is where it is absolutely the most powerful.
In my experience in working with the Journey there are just a few things that need to happen in order for forgiveness to be complete and do it’s profound healing work.
Speaking our truth.
This is the first step. The younger you needs to have the freedom to express what couldn’t be expressed in the past, to be free to feel everything that may have been suppressed, and to say all that wasn't said. In real life this is often hard to do. The person who hurt us may be unwilling to talk, unavailable or even dead by now. It’s fortunate that it doesn’t seem to make a difference to our brain whether we are talking to a person standing before us or talking to the imagined presence of that person. That’s why hypnosis, guided imagery, and visualization work. The most dramatic benefit of Journey-work is that the cells in our body can’t tell the difference either.
Here too it is important that we open up completely and just speak from our raw emotions that were present at the time, without editing or judging ourselves. Not only do we have the right to speak our truth now, but we always did: We just didn’t know it.
Feeling fully heard, seen and understood.
This is the second component. Again this is much harder to do in real life, because real people tend to get caught up in arguing and defending their actions. But in the Journey we have the chance to speak to the internalized presence of a person. In that realm of connectedness that we achieve here, we can access a response from a deeper level of that persons' soul. In a Journey we have a lot of tools that allow us to feel fully heard, seen and understood in ways that were sorely missing in our real life experience. When that happens, the need to argue, to explain ourselves and to convince the other person finally disappears - Our truth has passed beyond our internal space and is now shared by the other person.
The willingness to fully hear, see and understand.
This is the last requirement. As long as we believe that the other person was acting intentionally, maliciously, or carelessly against us, it will still be hard to forgive. Or, if we believe on the other hand that we somehow caused our painful experience, we continue to live with the conviction that we need to be someone other than who we truly are. Only when we discover that the action that hurt us was born from the limited emotional abilities and lack of inner resources that the other person lived with, when we begin to see the pain, struggle, fear or stress the other person was in, and that it was their inner environment rather than something about us that caused their behavior, we free ourselves to feel... compassion. For it is within compassion that forgiveness lives. When we begin to feel compassion, forgiveness becomes effortless.
So, are there things we shouldn’t forgive?
What do you think? What is it that you want to choose? If the choice is one between liberation or holding on to an old story, which would you pick? Knowing that forgiveness is not about letting go of justice, not about condoning actions that hurt you, but about walking the path that heals, what might then keep you from picking liberation?
Liberation and freedom have a grand and glorious sound to them, but to many of us they can be frightening. Why is that? Because we are being asked to give up a piece of our old identity, to let go of a story that used to define who we are. We are being asked instead to step into the unknown.
We only need to look at how fiercely entire nations hold on to the stories of being wronged, enslaved, and mistreated to remember how very difficult it is for us humans to let go of these stories, to let go of an identity, even when it is a painful one. We all know that it can feel impossible to even consider forgiveness. When there is such a nessecity to continue to mistrust, condemn, hate and fight. The irony is that it makes us feel safer to do this. It feels that we are protecting ourselves. - But are we really?
Once we understand the healing power forgiveness brings to one human being, can we begin to sense what it might do for a whole nation? How might we look at another nation if we could see it through the eyes of compassion? Can we even imagine the amount of profound transformation this would bring?
I do know this: each time one of us leaves behind a piece of our old story, each time we are able choose liberation and freedom and step into that unknown by forgiving a parent, a sibling, a relative, an ex-spouse, a boss, a coworker, or a stranger, we feed this capability in all humanity. The glory of the freedom that awaits you there, you can only discover when you dare to take that step - with or without the help of a Journey.
Who is it then, deep down in your heart, that you would truly like to forgive?
No comments:
Post a Comment