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The Power Of Forgiveness
tim brownson -
It took me about 5 seconds to
approve this excellent guest post from Sonia Voldseth.
It’s a valuable lesson and a
great follow on to my last post, ‘A Beginners Guide To Meditation’.
You know that old saying often
wrongly attributed to The Buddha,
“Not forgiving someone is like drinking poison
and expecting them to die?”
It’s so true.
Most people know they need
to forgive in order to move forward.
But we’ve received so many
mixed messages about what forgiveness is
and what it isn’t that
sometimes drinking the poison seems like the best option we have.
Have you ever rushed to forgive
someone but found it didn’t really work?
Like you forgave them (you
thought) but you still felt really crappy and hurt and angry
every time you thought about
the situation?
And then maybe felt annoyed
that the whole forgiveness thing wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, and
wondered what was wrong with you?
We All Struggle To Forgive To Begin With
I struggled with this for quite
some time.
I thought forgiveness meant
hugging the person that hurt you
and loving them unconditionally
forever.
I thought forgiveness meant
letting go of pride.
I thought forgiveness meant
laughing about the whole thing over a glass of wine.
It doesn’t.
Or it can. But it doesn’t have to.
Ideally, yes. But it’s a hell of a big ask to do all of those things, especially
at once.
Also, the other person involved
may not even like wine. Or hugging.
Or they might have a lot of
pride to deal with too.
You Can’t Rush Forgiveness
Sometimes we try to rush
forgiveness without looking at the other stuff that’s mixed up in it,
and that doesn’t really work.
We try to rush into it for a
variety of reasons.
Because we think we are
supposed to.
Because we think it might feel
better.
Because that’s what nice girls
(or boys) do.
None of these are very good
reasons, except for the middle one. But we think that’s selfish.
Don’t get me wrong. I want us all to play nicely. As children and adults.
As a spiritual principle, I am a huge fan of forgiveness.
Forgiveness Is A Gift To Yourself
Forgiveness is the best thing we can do for ourselves, and for the other person,
as long as it is real and
meaningful.
But I worry that we have gotten
awfully confused about how to do it,
which makes it ineffective for
both parties.
If we think we are just
forgiving to make ourselves feel better and that is selfish,
that’s not going to work.
True forgiveness however
is not selfish. It’s demonstrating a love of
yourself,
and that has to be present in
the equation.
There has to be an
understanding that it is okay at first to forgive
in order to make yourself feel
better. So that you can let go and move on.
That’s the whole poison
drinking part. If you don’t let go, you suffer
– and by the way,
the other person is often
blissfully unaware and not suffering at all.
It’s okay to let go so that you
don’t feel bad.
There has to be some
acknowledgement of HOW and WHAT you really feel,
rather than a denial of what
you really feel.
But it’s not as easy as just
waving the magic wand. You can’t just go through the motions.
You have to go through the
corresponding E-motions.
It’s Ok To Be Angry For A Short
Time
Sometimes, in order to forgive
someone, we have to own up to the fact that we were really,
really angry at them.
And that’s not easy – in large
part because we think that nice girls and boys don’t get angry.
Nice girls and boys get plenty
angry. They just may not want to admit it.
Anger has become the poster
child for all bad things.
When it’s bottled up and the
lid DOES come off, anger results in rage,
assaults and other bad
behavior.
Conversely, sometimes people are so good at keeping the
lid on that anger
has to find something else to do. That often equals
depression.
Anger in and of itself is not
the problem. It is the suppression of anger
and then the resulting
explosion or implosion that is the problem.
Tim’s Note: That was an excellent point. It was widely
believed that people who bottled up anger
and occasionally let it all go
in one mad rush were mentally healthier. This has now been proven
to be incorrect and they are
the kind of people you hear about on the news going postal. Expressing controlled anger for a short time and then letting it go,
is far better
for your mental health than any
other option. Bottling up without resolution
or having occasional
uncontrolled outbursts can lead to a great many issues.
From a spiritual perspective, we have lots of insight
into this, but it has been interpreted
or filtered in a way that would suggest that if we get
angry (especially as women), we are bad.
What Would Jesus (or The Buddha) Do?
Jesus never said don’t get
angry. Or at least I don’t think he did.
And the Buddha got angry on a number of
occasions when he saw the poor treatment of others.
For example, Jesus threw stuff
around the temple at the tax collectors and yelled.
That would suggest to me that
he did get angry, and therefore it would seem a bit hypocritical
for him to say Never Get
Angry.
I think what Jesus said is that
anger is never JUSTIFIED. (A Course in Miracles)
That’s a very big difference.
He didn’t say deny it, suppress
it, or stuff it down.
He simply said don’t bother
hanging onto it or justifying it
because it won’t serve you or
anyone else dude. That’s paraphrased, obviously.
Buddhism tells us the very same
thing.
It points to anger as one of
the three poisons in our lives, but it also clearly acknowledges
that everyone gets angry – even
monks that have been meditating for years and years
and years. It teaches us to observe the
emotion, whatever it is, and to fully acknowledge it.
Honesty Is The Key
You must be honest with
yourself about what you are feeling
if you can ever hope to deal
with it effectively and fully.
You have to say, “I AM ANGRY”,
at least in your head, before you can let go of the anger.
Emotions are just like kids. You ignore them and they’ll come back to haunt you.
They’ll pour purple toilet
cleaner all into your bathroom drawers while you’re not looking,
draw on the walls with a
sharpie and feed the dog filet mignon from the fridge,
and then tell you it was Mr
Nobody.
Anger doesn’t deal well with
being ignored,
and it doesn’t deal well with
being bottled up minus an antidote.
The answer seems pretty clear. Observe it and then let it go.
You can run it out, scream it
out, throw rocks, beat pillows,
whack a swimming noodle in the garage
(Tim’s Note: Fuck knows what a swimming noodle is!), or do whatever else
you need to do
so that it’s not hurting you or
anyone else and you are controlled in your anger.
For goodness sake, just LET IT
OUT.
Once you get better at
observing it, you won’t even have to do those things.
You just acknowledge it and
just let it go.
This is a wonderful concept. I’d love to say I do this all the time. I don’t.
Husbands have a very special
method of button pushing
that teaches us to learn ever
more about observing and letting go.
Just Breathe
The point is, whether you can
breathe right through it, or whether you need to leave
the situation, once you
let anger go, the Universe can take care of it.
You don’t have to deal with it anymore.
THEN you can take a good, hard,
real look at forgiveness.
THEN you might be able to see
the other person’s point of view,
or thank them, or at the very
least come to terms with what lesson you were supposed to learn, however
difficult that might seem.
THEN you can put the good
energy of forgiveness to its full and real and meaningful context
and put the poison down.
Hallelujah.
Love and Blessings, Sonia
http://www.adaringadventure.com/guest-posts/the-power-of-forgiveness/
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