Reclaiming Our Power, Forgiving Others

Photo by ~Sortvind

There is a person I know, everytime would I meet her, she talked about this old hurt caused by her friend. She always told me, that it was hard for her to move on and she had been struggling to forget. She had tried everything, but even after 5 years of parting, she was still feeling stuck. I listened closely and nodded. I noticed the pain in her eyes and gently said, "did you try forgiving her?". She was startled, "what?". I gently repeated, "did you try forgiving her?". She looked at me and thought before saying, "no".

Anger is a funny thing. Even though we are trying to let go of a person, in reality, we end up dragging them along. Imagine this, they are vacationing somewhere in an exotic place, while you are sitting under a beautiful sky, recalling whatever happened wincing and cringing, literally hurting yourself again and again in your mind. Its only when we find forgiveness in our hearts are we truly free of the perceived burden.

We all have been hurt. As I often say, life happens which means yes, there have been friends who hurt us, some of us have had bad childhood, been abused physically, had ugly divorces, feel abandoned by God, everyone has been in a situation where we felt victimized one way or another.

When we feel victimized, we go in this role of the good me and the bad you. Somewhere we are the innocents ones and crimes were perpetrated against us. No matter what the situation it is, its always the same story, we close our hearts down, encapsulate the injury, refuse to empathized with the other, want revenge and set our mind on an automatic replay so we never forget what happened to us.

It makes evolutionary sense, our minds and our bodies remember it so that we don't go through it again. Its a nature's way of signaling danger and avoiding it in the future. So blaming others somewhere keeps us safe. Some of us, I'm pretty sure, are ready to take these grudges to the grave, rather than letting them go. There's an inner satisfaction that comes from pointing fingers and saying, it's your fault, you did this to me. We justify in our minds that we have a right to be angry and gather every single evidence that we can and then wish something terrible to happen to them, so we can finally be at peace. But like they say,what we can't be with, won't let us be.

There's a twist to this story, when we blame others and refuse to let them off the hook, we literally give our power away. We are waiting until they change, until they apologize, until they admit that they were wrong to end up feeling better. Ofcourse, there's a payoff by avoiding responsibility for being part of the situation. We end up getting to say, "Oh I can't be happy because this this happened to me." "My life is screwed up because my parents were mean to me." And my favourite, "Nobody wants to see me happy, they make me miserable". You get the drill.

Perpetuating these stories keep us in a limited belief of who we are and the other. There's an underlying feeling of separateness and constant fear. We retract in defensive postures, ready to attack at any minute. We look through a filter at the other person, searching for any faults we might find so we can make them look bad, but in reality, we are the only ones suffering. The Buddha said, "Anger is like drinking poison and wishing the other person to die". We are the ones getting ulcers.

Forgiveness is a purification process. Those TV commercials showing all those cleaning detergents clearing out all the gunk from the dishes and leaving them whiter each time its used, yeah, that's forgiveness. Forgiveness is acknowledging that people change, situations change. Its painful, because it means we let go of who we thought we were or who we thought the other is and move on. Its literally like dying because its saying, you and I am not the same anymore. This very death frees up all the energy that was stuck in the past and allows us to live our present lives. We have to give up our identities to let go.

This possibility can not come from living in our minds, rather it comes from living in our hearts. It comes from connecting to others and acknowledging that yes they too are humans. It comes with the understanding that they are only a product of their own conditions and this injury does not entirely define them. Our hearts would open up if we knew, how much pain and suffering, they've had in their lives.

Even though there might be some wounds that we can't forget, but there's always a healing and a closure  that comes from forgiving others. Even though, your relations might not improve over night, it opens space to reconnect. Forgiveness is a seed. If you don't sow a seed in the ground, you can't really expect any plants, but yes, if you sow a single seed, it could bear you fruits overtime.