Forgiveness - John

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Excellent posting John, blessings and thank you for these truly wonderful insights into this most overlooked and avoided area. - chrism <...> wrote: refers many times to 'safeties', one of which is to get the emotional neutrality and maturity that can only be gained by forgiving others and ourselves for mistakes made. SELF-FORGIVENESS I've often asked myself, when is self-forgiveness finished? How many re-runs must there be of one's life's personal blunders before closure? Are our mistakes best forgiven and corrected through dreams, self-talk, gleaning wisdom from others, praying, blank meditation, screaming, crying, laughing, dancing, creating, grounding, alternative healing? Many members in this Group have talked wisely and on the back of first-hand experience about these therapies. Not so much has been said about self-talk. Counsellors call it cognitive therapy which is said by Wikipedia to be: "gaining insight into our unconscious emotions and drives to identify and change "distorted" or "unrealistic" ways of

thinking, and therefore to influence future emotion and behaviour ". First, my own experience is that guilt comes in quite a few different types of self-accusation, each needing its own healing approach. Applying a few bandaids and dropping the worry into subconscious invisibility gets most of us through. In some self-accusations shown below, I've guessed at what those bandaids are and then I've looked deeper to try and take myself into real self-forgiveness. Here are the scenarios: "I'm blaming myself because I just stood there and did nothing !! " Examples - I didn't rescue/didn't fight/didn't talk/didn't give - when I was called........ Bandaids: I won't run that risk again, wasn't trained, wasn't my

place to interfere, couldn't afford to do it - reason(s) enough for me to move on with my life...... Repeated instances of this haunts and destroys long-term. Any small start in SKILLING-UP has started my forgiveness process. "I had to fall into line to keep up appearances" Example - I agreed with all the gossip, could have bitten my tongue afterwards, but I needed to feel on the moral high ground. Bandaid: I'm just acting out a role - thank God my family knows me better. In my case, self-forgiveness of this gutless compliance comes from resolving NEXT TIME to jump ship, lose popularity and if necessary agree to disagree. "REALLY I did my best in good faith, but I took the wrong options ......" Our chief politician is coping with this now. A few years ago here in Canberra Australia, we had a bush fire that burnt down a few hundred homes and killed about 10 people. Our man was grilled by numerous legal commissions "You knew the fires were coming why didn't you warn everyone ?". Reply: "I didn't want to panic the City when I thought our fire-fighters could cope !!" Then there was the local Dad who bought his lovely 17 yo daughter a new car for her birthday. She killed herself in it the next night while speeding. Then you can get into the emotional minefield where you implicate yourself as the doomsday factor in a chain of events that leads to tragedy. It happened to me last week....I went to an elderly gent to take him for

coffee - scheduled outing. As I let myself in, I heard him tell his daughter he couldn't see her that day as I was on his doorstep, so he said he'd see her soon. 2 days later he's at her house - a door falls on him. He died. Was I to blame? if there were no me, then there would be no death !! My grandmother blamed herself for her son's death in a Japanese POW camp , because if she hadn't asked him to repeat his final school year, he would have been in a different theatre of war or none at all. And so the list goes on..... Bandaid - If only I had hindsight - but I don't, nor does anyone else - c'ést la vie. I'm a fatalist, it would have happened anyway. My involvement was purely coincidental. . Self-forgiveness (?) - my guess would be if the guilt lay SQUARELY

on my shoulders, I would become an activist to warn others. But otherwise I think the bandaids make a lot of sense - I try to be gentle with myself, exactly as I would, if needsbe, to soothe someone else caught up in this guilt trap. "On the swings and roundabouts of fairness, I was entitled to .. because he/she did......but maybe I should have turned the other cheek? " Examples: She cheated on me. I'm cheating on her. The boss pays peanuts - I'm ENTITLED to sickies. Bandaids: Morality is always relative - the inequality in the world today has got nothing to do with any law of natural justice. Everyone's doing it !! Self-forgiveness - I've

learnt to quit situations where get-squares are tempting or are the done thing. Then I only need to forgive myself for being a poverty-stricken loser! "I made lots of mistakes, hurt people and betrayed peoples' trust when I was young and silly......and I can't replay these events." Examples: Too numerous to mention !!! Bandaids: I was so young and naive, the school curriculum was out-of-touch with my needs, why wasn't I WARNED about new life stages such as rent-sharing, neighbour tiffs, car smashes, credit card crashes? My parents were too self-preoccupied to warn me, I had to battle - my peer group had it easy, my hormones were running my life, I was swept away by rebelliousness, I was a slow learner.

Basically I was just a very DIFFERENT person then. I shouldn't be nailed to my past. Self-forgiveness - Hey not all those things happened to me but they were pretty commonplace for teenagers and twenty-somethings of my time. And yes IMHO there are and always will be 2 types of people in this world - those who are on a continuous learning curve and those who were born mature and steady, who learnt very early from others' mistakes rather than their own. For the excesses of our youthful years, it would be lovely to track down every person on our damage flight path and say I'm SO sorry, handshake/hug. My own version of reconciliation with my own past is to see that younger person... simply as an earnest, idealistic mistake-prone beginner, who I now fully forgive. Karma may have a differing verdict !! "Why aren't/wasn't I a real somebody, an amazing achiever, a creative genius, a leader. ALTERNATIVELY, why aren't/wasn't I a better team player ???" Bandaid: Most people are ordinary. Why should I be a celebrity? ////// If I don't get on with other people, it's because I'm an individual, not a robot or sweated labour !! Here I think self-forgiveness lies in newly sitting back, exploring talents, slowly seeing where they lead and ignoring that greener grass. If money, notoriety follow (neither has in my case), then sobeit. Kundalini people seem to thrive on creativity for its own sake and are amongst the happiest, I've had the pleasure to know. As to not having been a team player, perhaps self-forgiveness sets in when it is finally recognised that frictions

arise when we can't conceptualise virtue in well performed, mediocre/trivial tasks. Also, in seeing that the "I did it my way" approach is capable of bringing down entire organisations. Very ego-dissolving or enhancing prospects !! My last 3 years spent part-time as a reviled junk mail courier, have taught me all about humility and I recommend anything similar as a self-forgiveness pathway. Things said, emails sent in haste and anger: Examples: Flame wars, trigger-happy car horn use, frustrated messages left on phones, stress-driven insults behind closed doors, drama queen body language in queues. Bandaids: Had an off-day - out-of-character for me; about time I stood up to be counted; I had every right to

blow up when I got such rotten service. Self-forgiveness: maybe none necessary, but the up-tightness I get in my forehead when I rebuke, always reminds me there must have been a '' better way''. Yes, so self-forgiveness goes onto my agenda. Apology when cooler head is prevailing, resolving to be stoical and letting future tensions pass over my head, like rolling under a wave. FINALLY: We're not as "good" as the best thing we've done BUT NOR will we EVER be as "bad" as our WORST mistake. Humans are far too complex to weigh character on a set of value scales. Your life's value isn't gauged by arithmetic. It's not a self-assessed balance of good and evil. Instead, each wise act of your maturing self, starts a new day and changes you and the world

forever - IRREVERSIBLY. Forgiving Others: Contemplating a vision of forgiving and forgetting? - never !!! No, no; remember and remind.........Relive and reconstruct what I SHOULD have said and done and remember always the aching, the agonising, the throbbing, the tormented feelings of hurt and anger - yes, in my hurt, are the feelings of humiliation, shame, let-down and crushed ego. I attribute to you, arguments and power-plays that caused your objectivity and cynicism to crush my naivety and optimism, your knowledge to mock my inexperience, your power and independence (and perhaps your gender) to exploit my

vulnerability, your self-confidence to swamp my time-and-place feelings of inadequacy. Ah.........the drama. As time passes and memories fade, I've explored putting up a new sail to investigate the inner frailty of the person who hurt me. Frailties include obtuseness, tiredness or weakness, peer pressure, acting under instruction and duress, insecurity and numerous other jigsaw pieces. For me, closure WITHOUT receipt of an apology or explanation, starts from that point of image reconjuring and takes me through the following stages: - Yes I forgive you in a public sense, but I'm going to track

your life's events, vicariously waiting and hoping for you to go amiss. - In my need to restore my self-esteem, I will position you outside of myself to drain your potency but you STILL invade my thoughts and dreams. - Now, with new inner wisdom, I've entered your being, walked in your shoes, see myself as you see me and ah....... I fully understand your processes, love you, and will be thrilled when your self-perceived fulfilments occur......but physical contact will remain awkward for some time yet. - Your image and all the emotive things that I used to see have faded - there are no scars, no resonances. Again I love you and wish you well.

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