scottobear | Insight from Spence

Below is compliments of a great guy, and a solid thinker -

Sometimes the things people do cause us pain. Sometimes we cause ourselves pain and attribute it to things that other people have done. Regardless of the reality of the situation, a relationship with someone who is “unforgiven” is one that constantly consumes our emotional energy until we forgive. It consumes our time, our thoughts, limits our actions and attitudes. It keeps things stagnant that could be evolving. It freezes infinite possibility into one set of ideas. When we are “wronged”, we will often connect up one “wrong” that is “done to us” with another and make the whole elaborate knot of transgressions harder and harder to untie. Sometimes we even create an unforgiven relationship with an imagined or real group of individual people and that makes things even more complex and, in my opinion, insane and irrational.

A lot of it has to do with our ego defending a small, limited sense of who we are and the need to be “right”, often by subsequently making someone else “wrong”, but that’s a topic for another blog. Let’s get even more primal than that…

These things are all part of human nature and are in our design to protect us. They keep us from being in the same situation again. They give us an increased level of energy that ramps up our survival defenses when we are around the unforgiven. My dog hasn’t forgiven the container that his food comes out of because I dropped it on the floor one day and it made a loud noise. He leaves the kitchen every time I feed him and comes back in once I put it away. I can tell that fear makes him a tiny bit miserable every day. He is slowly becoming desensitized to his fear over time, but he will not be conscious of that process. We humans have a conscious capacity that my dog does not. We can consciously forgive.

The blessing of forgiveness is as beneficial to ourselves as it is to those we forgive and our ability to do it consciously is something that our culture only has a cursory understanding of. It has taken me years to figure it out this far and I’m sure I have more to learn. I hear the word “forgiveness” hurled in anger and I even recently saw a talk the Dalai Llama gave on forgiveness interpreted as a justification for killing, so let me share what I have worked out and maybe it will be of value to a reader or two. If not, please forgive me. (Heheh. See what I did there?)

I have looked into Buddhist, Hawaiian and Western notions about the highest expressions of forgiveness and what they mean to the forgiven and the forgiver. The reading , listening and lecture learning were the easy part. Where the rubber met the road was in the practice of what I learned. I have had some partners in forgiveness that have given me, let’s call them, “rich opportunities to learn.” For those opportunities and the perfect humanity of my partners, I am grateful. Forgiveness takes practice and practice makes perfect. From that practice emerged three principles…

Let go of the past,

adapt my behavior,

believe in the future.

Letting go of the past means that we release our attachment to ideas that are keeping us stuck in the past, frozen in pain, limited in our perspective. This can mean letting go of the need to be right about something and allowing for someone to have a different opinion. It can mean looking at it through another person’s eyes. It can mean releasing the tendency to revisit the same thoughts and stories that we made up about what happened that cause us pain every time we think them. It can mean distinguishing the simple facts of what happened from the ideas we created around the events. It may mean adopting a new story about the past or simply paying the past no mind. This can be a challenge, but facing this challenge is such a ripe opportunity to face many things about our own mental and emotional addictions that I have found it worth the challenge.

Adapting my behavior means that I put in place reasonable boundaries. Boundaries are what we say “Yes” and “No” to. If someone stole from you, you may want to say no to them having the keys to your home. If someone physically abused you, you may say no to being alone with them or even near them. If someone hurt you with spiteful words, you may tell them so and say no to passively receiving that kind of language in the future. If someone lied to you, you may say no to accepting their word without checking up on the truth of it. These boundaries may not be forever. The forgiven may earn our trust and those safeguards and countermeasures may evolve over time, but they are important to our well-being. Negative emotions are in our design for a reason. Could nature be so cruel as to put pain and suffering into our experience without a good reason? I believe they are there to spur us to action to protect our well-being. They are there to tell us,

“Hey, someone is running over your boundaries! They are hurting you! You need to do something about that!”

…or

“Hey, wake up! There’s something to learn here! You’re leaking well-being with the way you’re choosing to relate to that person or the way you’re viewing them.”

When we respect the message that negative emotions like fear, anger, sadness and guilt are sending us, we can take reasonable steps to make sure those boundaries regain their integrity and make certain our well-being and self esteem are protected. Then, our deepest self has room to begin turning down the volume on the negative feelings that it has been broadcasting in the interest of protecting us. My dog has every right to leave the room when I get the food container out. So, whether adapting our behavior means keeping our guard up or changing a way of thinking, we find what is necessary to be at peace and safe. It is our right to discover and practice that.

It’s important to remember that we need “yes” portals in the walls of our boundaries to let people contribute to us in ways that support our happiness and health. We can say yes to many things like compassion, listening, help, comfort, constructive challenge, teaching, truth, love, support and all the things that give us more resources from which to draw the power, courage and vitality to contribute back to the world.

Letting our “enemies” contribute to us is one powerful path of forgiveness. Remember when Darth Vader picked up the Emperor and threw him over the railing to protect Luke? I remember a giant, jubilant cheer erupted in the theater. They were all celebrating that we could finally get behind the ominously evil and undeniably cool bad guy. This is the same dude who, up until that moment, blew up planets full of people and choked folks with pinchy fingers for kicks! We’re cheering for him. Contribution is also a powerful path for the forgiven enemy.

Believing in the future means that once we are safe, we can hold a new idea for what our relationship can be to the forgiven. We can see them as the possibility that they hold for themselves to be and safely support what they are striving to become. We can boldly see them as complete, healed and perfect. They may not instantly morph to become that image, but it gives a strong direction for them to change and opportunity for our own perspective to shift. They may have setbacks and we can be steadfast. Safe within our boundaries, we can avoid the defeat of possibility that is,

“I told you so! I knew you wouldn’t change. I was right.”

…and instead make a stand for,

“You can do it. I know you are more than your past and this setback.”

We may benefit from talking to the forgiven and really finding out what they would like to be. We may want to contribute a vision of what we see is possible for them. We may also find that a part of ourselves needs to be forgiven in order for there to be room for something new. We are secure and free to fully consider and agree upon a new potential that will benefit us, the forgiven and the world. Sometimes, they cannot find that potential without our help. I like to say,

“Friends give us as space for us to create our best selves within.”

This place is even more needed for those we have called,

“enemy”
“liar”

“thief”
“murderer”
“jerk”

“selfish”
“cheater”
“moron”
“terrorist”

“pig”
“greedy”
“cruel”

In the space of forgiveness, these may become labels of the past, the stuff we passed through as we grew and worked with others who were also growing and doing the best they could with what they had. We can recognize how those labels limit and trap us in ideas that have caused us pain. We can comfortably move beyond them and ultimately forgive ourselves for having created them.

Originally published at The Scotto Grotto. You can comment here or there.