Forgive me

Tonight's talk by R. Lew absolutely blew my mind. I won't even try to summarize - he packed in so many earth-shattering concepts, I'm still trying to sort them out! One pithy line I can repeat, "you can start to forgive when you move from the injury that someone has done to you, to the pain it has caused."

In that vein, I'll post an excerpt that he read by Charlotte Joko Beck. I don't have a citation, but would be thrilled to find it.

Forgiveness
In our culture the term "forgiveness" is a very loaded word. The idea "to forgive" usually implies that there is some form of magnanimous acceptance of another even though the other did wrong. This understanding of forgiveness is not what forgiveness practice is about; forgiveness is primarily about seeing through our own emotional reactions - seeing what stands in the way of real forgiveness. Real forgiveness has to entail experiencing first our own pain, then the pain of the person to be forgiven; and it is from this understanding that the barriers, the separation, between two beings can dissolve.

She goes on to describe these steps in detail, which is far too long for this post. She concludes by saying

We have to first see and experience the degree to which our own emotional reactivity is what stands in the way of real forgiveness. We can then, and only then, truly understand that the other person was simply doing the only thing that they could do, given their beliefs and conditioning. We can then say the words, "I forgive you. I forgive you for whatever you have done to cause me pain. I forgive you because I know that what you did comes from your own pain.

R. Lew concluded, "when we realize that our pain comes from the same pool, we can begin to forgive."

This is so powerful for me. When Amberly & I started talking to R. Lerner about our marriage, we asked him for some spiritual advice in our path. He said simply, "develop a practice of forgiveness." We started by sitting in bed every night, lightly saying we forgave each other for this and that. After a couple of days, though, it started to feel more like blaming than forgiving, so we stopped. We did, and do, find a way to forgive each other every day. The process is not dissimilar for us, and is part of the amazing bond that we have together. Is it too corny to say that it makes our love stronger?

Having this practice spelled out for me by R. Lew made me realize that true forgiveness has the quality of being with a loved one, which ties back to R. Lerner's worldview. He preaches creating a more loving world by stopping the "repetition compulsion," and not passing on the pain that has been passed on to you, while acknowledging the pain and fear that has caused the other to want to treat you ill. These are one and the same thing. Imagine, then, truly forgiving your family members. Your work nemesis. If we take it to a global scale, imagine, as R. Lerner does, Israelis forgiving Palestinians, and Palestinians forgiving Israelis. What would that be like?