Wednesday 21 November 2012

FORGIVENESS: A PATH OF LOVE


Do we really know what it means to forgive?



Forgiveness has been a frequent visitor in my life, especially this year. I hear the messages the universe (and my higher self) send to me and continue to move further and deeper in the layers and levels of forgiveness. It first came powerfully into my conscious mind this year, when I visited Thailand and had a phenomenal and magical session with Mai, the local shaman-healer-massage woman in Haad Yuan, Koh Phangan.  Since then, forgiveness has been a practice for me throughout the year with amazing results and has brought ease and abundance. In this experience I have found two parts along the path of forgiveness, organic forgiveness and sought forgiveness.


As children most of us had parents that 'made us' apologise when we had hurt another.  It became something almost mechanical instead of genuine. I see this still with children, the difference between saying "I'm sorry" flippantly (- there it’s been said now we can get on with the business of playing) and a genuine remorse “I’m sorry” (-I feel pain for the pain I caused, and wish to make amends)  When the words are spoken without the genuine feelings the hurt party tends to hold a resentment or retaliate. However, when I have experienced and witness the second type of apology, forgiveness from the harmed party seems to flow naturally, easily and love flows smoothly.

What happens when: the genuine apology never comes? Or, when someone doesn’t know they’ve done anything to apologize for? Or, when someone apologises for something that felt good to you, leaving a feeling of rejection and/or confusion?
Sometimes the tender, innocent part of ourself is hurt and the reason for hurt becomes elusive to our mind, till resolution and peace is found in our heart. Often the story we have about what happened or why we’re upset is not the reality, but a reality, the upset tends to be much deeper and far more simple than the stories we create around our hurt.  
As we move deeper through the layers of self, what happens when one’s parents are the antagonists and there is no internal reference point for genuine forgiveness. Where one has hurt connected to the experience of love and does not, possibly cannot, consciously know of the hurt inside that is asking to be seen and loved and to forgive?  

When our base line for love is connected to hurt, life can become a confusing and negative patterns seemingly impossible to break. Especially, when forgiving one's self, often the hardest person to forgive. The solution can be simple. Having an experience of love connected to feeling good, gentle, healthy. However, creating a space to experience this may be more difficult.  On one of the last days of training in Birth Into Being, I sat up and blurted out “Oh my god! I didn’t know easy was on the menu of life!”  If we don’t know it’s available, we will never choose it.

When we seek within to forgive, sometimes we have to forgive the same person over and over. It is arrogant to believe that working on something means it’s healed or fixed forever and there is nothing more to do. I have seen and experienced countless times when I or another says “I’ve already looked at this, it’s done and healed, I don’t want to look at it again” Only to find by looking again at a relationship, a deeper healing and forgiveness happens. There does come a point when a previously hurt relationship becomes healthy, and when this happens there is no resistance to looking at the relationship.

I’m not advocating digging up and rehashing painful memories to wallow in your pain-body, AT ALL!  I am advocating taking honest stock of what you are holding in your physical and emotional bodies.  Seeing what you’re aware of, what you didn’t know you were aware of till you had a look, and what you can detect but are not aware of (through your shadow friends: resistance, fear, tiredness, resistance, etc).  It seems most of what we experience in life is a subconscious replaying of patterns, like we are hypnotised to act and react in certain ways, which lead to different types of dis-ease until such time as we are able to become aware of the unseen truths behind the stories we tell and believe.

In my estimation forgiveness is the doorway to freedom and enlightenment for yourself. Enlightenment is seen in a variety of ways by different cultures. The running theme through them all is to become more present to yourself and others by becoming more present to love consciousness (the universal essence energy that is everything) to the point where one experiences others as themselves. Enlightenment seems to literally lighten a person, they feel lighter mentally, emotionally and physically.     

I seek my own enlightenment for the sake of others.
Bodhisattva vow


To hold (whether aware or subconscious) hurt and anger in one or more of your bodies (mental, emotional and physical) is to carry a weight around with you. It’s like having a splinter, your skin will naturally over time eject the splinter and until it is out, there is an irritation or even pain that you feel until it is ejected out of the body or you pull it out with tweezers.  In this analogy the splinter is the hurt one holds onto, the tweezers are forgiveness. Forgiveness will happen naturally, and we have the choice to let our patterns run and ‘deal’ with the pain over time, till we find we’ve forgiven. Or, we can sit down and have a look under a magnifying glass and pull out  hurt with our tweezers of acceptance, compassion and forgiveness.