How to forgive…when nothing else works
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on
“You need to let it go!”, they say. “That shit will eat you alive, like a cancer!”, they say. But no one tells you how to let go, and so the cancer spreads and soon the physical body itself begins to suffers.
Here’s what they don’t know to tell you: Forgiveness doesn’t come from changing your mind. It comes from stopping identifying with it.
Our minds, by nature, like to dissect, compartmentalize and solve problems. A handy tool no doubt for scientific pursuits which has also served us well throughout history identifying threats like scorpions on the path and panthers in the trees. Now, like a washed-up gladiator, the mind occupies itself with Sudoku, conspiracy theories and figuring out why our family is so damned dysfunctional.
Thoughts flutter through our minds like migrating monarch butterflies. Their incessant chatter is not unlike the grumblings of your stomach after Thanksgiving. It’s what minds do. Unlike the noises of our stomachs (or other body parts), we give the noises in our head more credence because they grumble in our native language.
Imagine your mind like a pool table and your thoughts the balls. Before the game of life really began, you may have been lucky enough to be alone, on an empty table, gently rolling a ball and watching it slowly bounce off the cushions before coming to a stop. Then, the hustlers appeared in our lives, loaded the table with a fresh rack of balls and then scattered them with a violent break.
The thought energy from balls started in motion during childhood travel with us into adulthood, colliding with shots of new players who recently entered the game. You notice how the movement of these balls disturbs your peace. Every time you try and gather your thoughts and compose yourself, they return and ruin everything.
Your mind seeks to track these thoughts back to their origin and assign blame. At least this will provide the mind what it wants: finality, answers or a scapegoat. Perhaps your mind settled on a parent, family member or the church who you now can’t forgive. Maybe it started when someone you loved killed themselves or died too young. Or maybe a spouse cheated on you and broke your heart. Now you have new thoughts flying around: “Why did this happen?”, “Could I have done something different?”, “Did I deserve this?”, “Why couldn’t these people just get their shit together?”.
These thoughts are the noisy upstairs neighbors in your apartment complex and the train whistle at 3:00 am that soon become background noise, a part of life in your neighborhood. After a while, they have become so familiar that you need them to feel normal. A quiet stay in the country makes you antsy. You see them as a part of you. But, these thoughts cannot be you, and you know why? Because, like your upstairs neighbors, you can observe them. And, whatever you can observe, requires an observer. That’s Observer is You.
Eckhart Tolle’s classic work The Power of Now describes how most people reside in a state of spiritual sleep, unconsciousness of the conditioned patterns of behavior which govern their thoughts and minds. They are unaware of why the balls continue to careen or how to stop them. They’ve inherited patterns of thinking from their parents, religion, culture, schools, and traumas which govern their lives and they are as powerless as a dreamer in a nightmare. Tolle puts it this way,
“Similarly, if you are one of the many people who have an issue with their parents, if you still harbor resentment about something they did or did not do, then you still believe that they had a choice — that they could have acted differently. It always looks as if people had a choice, but that is an illusion. As long as your mind with its conditioned patterns runs your life, as long as you are your mind, what choice do you have? None. You are not even there. The mind-identified state is severely dysfunctional. It is a form of insanity.”
The only cure from this type of “insanity” is to train yourself to observe your thoughts from the present. You must learn to operate from the vantage point of the Observer. Some prefer the formality of setting aside a designated time during the day to meditate. They sit quietly, without judgment putting some distance between them and their thoughts, simply observing them like passing cars -rather than Ubers there to give them a ride. The more you observe them, the more you understand the traffic patterns of your conditioned mind. Others simply steal moments throughout the day when a thought arises to pay attention to the fact that there is a “you” who is observing the thought while it happens. This is the vantage point you are looking for. I speak about my first moment experiencing this perspective during my encounter with EMDR therapy.
This increased reflection and understanding is the process of cultivating consciousness and the beginning of true choice. You are waking up, regaining your sanity. It also comes with an unintended side effect. You realize that those who you could not forgive were, like you, acting largely in a diminished capacity of choice, slaves to their conditioning. In the same way that you feel compassion, rather than blame, towards an animal at the Humane Society who tries to bite you after a lifetime of neglect and abuse, your need for forgiveness is transformed into sympathy for those who suffer.
