A Conversation About Forgiveness

The greatest spiritual lessons are the hardest to accept, to forgive, is to evolve, to evolve, is to be closer to understanding why we are here

I was listening to UK composer, Peter Raeburn’s latest piece of art.

In spatial audio, with distant echoes and classical piano, he conveyed feelings of gratitude for the life he was able to continue to live through the life-giving hands of surgeons.

This composition brought up two conflicting emotions that my psyche battles with regularly, gratitude and vengeance.

To refuse forgiveness, is to refuse the most simple attribute of humanism, our capacity to make mistakes.

When I battle with my refusal to forgive, it is always the same questions my mind grapples with, why do they deserve it? Why should I give them the satisfaction of freeing them from the costs of their mistakes when they have such a grave affect on my loved ones and my life.

These burning type of questions, are exactly that, burning. These people who can occasionally consume my mind, have no idea they live there, and the heat that I create from my lack of forgiveness is burning only myself.

I asked a question to my Hale on Earth community a few days ago about their capacity to forgive. I asked them how difficult they find it to forgive, and I found it profoundly interesting that most people chose the option of “not difficult at all.”

But I don’t believe forgiveness can be summed up into something as simple as, “I forgive you.” It is not words, it is feelings, engrained emotions and habits, behaviors, patterns, and more often than not, you don’t even realize you live in this situation of lack of forgiveness.

To become conscious of it, is to do dig deep, and to do the work involves revisiting emotions that are painful, but part of who we are.

If you have a poor lifestyle, eat whatever you want, don’t treat your body like the temple it is, you may suffer from a lack of forgiveness with one’s self—punishing yourself subconsciously for mistakes you may have made in the past or behaviors you continue to embark on because of the guilt or victimhood you cling to. All of which roots in forgiveness.

If you speak poorly about others, maybe an ex, maybe a friend or family member, you may think you have forgiven their behaviors towards you, but to be in true forgiveness, to be free from that grudge or burden, means you have nothing poorly to say at all.

Self-sabotage, whether conscious or unconscious is rooted in the lack of forgiveness. It means you are clinging and grasping to something that has not been resolved, and it will suffocate you in ways that you may not even realize. Because to explore your emotions, is to explore your body, to explore the reason you exist, and all of that “exploration” produces fear which the mind vehemently rejects.

“Forgiveness is to relinquish your grievance and so to let go of grief. It happens naturally once you realize that your grievance serves no purpose except to strengthen a false sense of self. Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life - to allow life to live through you.”— Eckhart Tolle

I have begun to understand forgiveness as the key to surrendering. If I can forgive myself for my past, and forgive others for how they disrupted my life, I can truly be free of my attachment to the past Self, and live effortlessly through the ebbs and flows of life.

These resolves come to me at different points in cosmic or hormonal relations. I know the squeezing and suffocating nature of being unable to accept what is, is a frequency that omits from me when I am in a state of non-forgiveness. So when I turned on Peter Raeburn’s Recovery, I allowed emotions to spill, hate to be spewed from my mind, and cleansed, trying to find my own recovery.

As a Pisces, we are grudge holder’s. I used to think of it as a super power. Once you’ve wronged or disrespected me or someone I love, you were simply deleted from my life. I thought that was healthy. If I didn’t like your energy, then bye. No arguments or mal-intent. Just a swift exit that I thought was freeing to me.

We hold humans to such an impossible standard. Why should I expect perfection from others, when I, myself, is so imperfect?

Why should I expect a particular tone or action from you, when I fall short and speak out of turn so often as well?

It is through the practice I learned from Eckhart Tolle, of seeing myself in others, that has helped set me free from these ridiculous expectations I have for others.

I thought I was releasing people from my life because it was helping me, but it only hindered, because I was unconsciously holding a grudge. It is okay to set boundaries, but humans turn to condemnation far quicker than necessary.

Explore your own grudges, your own boundaries, and the way you speak about others from your past or present whether to others or in your mind. Explore the feelings that arise in the body when you mentally put yourself in the room with someone who has wronged you, is there heat, is there burning, is there tension, you then, have work to do.

Like I’ve expressed before “the work” never ends. Every few months I think I have forgiven the doctors who misdiagnosed my mother or the people who have wronged my partner, but if I visually put myself in a room with them, I don’t yet see myself in them, and I don’t yet accept their mistakes. But I acknowledge, and I do the work when the emotions arise.

Condemnation nation, cancel culture, we live not to forgive.

It is such a sad society we have produced. Throw away the mistake maker’s, fight over the governance of our bodies, argue over who is right and wrong. Modern society makes me laugh because we think we know everything when we know nothing at all.

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” ― Socrates.

There’s a commercial that plays often in the US. There is a non-profit called Jesus Gets Us that makes these exemplary commercials to relay to a younger audience the stories of Jesus and the Bible.

Although I don’t relate to the vernacular of the Bible or Jesus and don’t attach myself to a particular deity, the concepts and messaging is something that I love.

Recently, they made a commercial demonstrating the concept of forgiveness and resentments. As a Catholic school girl I know the story well, the message that Christians so often forget, is the final and most powerful one, the concept that Jesus evokes, “I forgive all who put me on this cross.”

The metaphorical “cross” is of course the idea of a crossroads, a challenge, our suffering. We bring about our own suffering, and others bring it to us as well. His final message wasn’t to attack those who betrayed and wronged him, the ones who brought him to the “cross,” it was to forgive them.

The commercial showed an inmate, condemned to death. A woman in the audience said his final words before the injection, was to “forgive them.”

Emotionally-driven, unconsciously living, humans will bring other humans to their cross often; they’ll pile the crosses like kindling for a fire, but through forgiveness, you will not burn.

🤍