Forgiveness. Forgiveness has been the theme of the day for me today. I know in my heart that I must let go of the blame, or as Buddhist/psychologist scholar Tara Brach says “put down the story of blame”, in order to have an open and free heart. I know in my heart that this is what I need to do to move on in peace. My head, however, has been telling me a different story over the course of the last two months since the devastating and traumatic end of my relationship.
After I returned home from Bangladesh and I allowed myself to begin to feel the pain and hurt, the anger, bitterness and hate also arose. So much so that I was lashing out at my generous parents, who just wanted to help me get through this, and I would weep out of fear that I would always feel angry. I thought of all those who live in a state of constant anger and I thought how horrible that must be. How did this anger and bitterness manifest in my thoughts? I was thinking things like “I hope he ends up alone forever” and “I just want to put a curse on him”, or something stupid like that. However, I recall writing about these feelings of anger in my journal and I wrote that letting go of this anger and forgiving him, forgiving myself and feeling forgiven for the part I played in the downfall could only happen if I made the choice to engage in forgiveness; to make forgiveness my intent. Interestingly enough, I actually had a very difficult time deciding to start making my intention to let go of the anger and begin the process of forgiveness. Because I generally try to be dedicated to being an “adult” and try to stay away from making childish decisions based on my emotions, I finally rationalized that I must make the choice to forgive because the alternative is childish and poisonous. And as someone who desperately just wants to move forward from this, grow from this and, for christ’s sake, learnt SOMETHING from this, I understood that harbouring this negativity would definitely not be conducive to moving forward as a more compassionate, open, loving and engaged human being.
What has helped me immensely on this journey of forgiveness is the compassion that has been born out of the experience of pain. This compassion began emerging shortly after my return home to Alberta and my mom came home one evening to report that a beaver had been hit by a car and was still alive with his little paw and head grasping at the air as if he was saying “oh god please god somebody help me I’m in so much pain, I am suffering!!!”. I started crying. Then it further emerged as I took on my new job at a local greenhouse and, at first, I viewed the 4 other staff members as pre-menopausal, post-menopausal, middle aged, irritating-as-all-hell and as a homeschooled religious fundamentalist teenager. After lunch time conversations with them, I began to view two of the women as amazing breast cancer survivors, one of the women as simply sadly insecure, and a lovely teenager who is intelligent, confident and craving conversation regarding local, global and moral issues. After understanding their individual contexts , how I approached them changed dramatically. So how has this helped me in beginning the letting- go- and -forgiveness process? When I take the time to understand the context of another person, a fellow human being, perhaps an ex-partner who has hurt me, the empathy and sympathy and compassion emerges in ways unimaginable.
This morning the forgiveness began. During my meditation I was drawn to the idea of highlighting specific memories in which either he or I was hurtful, and for each one asked for forgiveness from him, asked to forgive myself, and gave him my forgiveness. I chose to undertake the process in this manner because it seems to me that as I’ve watched myself in moments of dwelling on things that he should have done different or I should have done different or should have responded differently, they always are rooted back in specific memories or instances of hurt. I felt the need to individually acknowledge my role and his role in each situation, to forgive myself. And for each situation, I acknowledged that we both did the best we could with the tools we had considering our individual contexts; all the baggage that comes from childhood and adulthood. Although me and him will never directly make amends as I’ve committed to starting a new chapter of life, I acknowledge that this process is for my heart only.
I know I will likely have to repeat this process a number of times over the next months and maybe even years. I suspect I won’t wake up one day and feel like I’ve let it all go and I am all good now. Khaled Hosseini, in his beautiful book “The Kite Runner “, described it poetically and wrote:
“I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away in the middle of the night”.
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