The Heart of Forgiveness Redux

This past Sunday, we were blessed to have Charles Holt as our guest speaker, singer and workshop presenter at Unity Spiritual Center Denver. During his lesson, Charles shared his compelling story about his strained relationship with his father and his process of forgiveness, which he details in his book, Between Me and Dad: A Journey through Forgiveness to Freedom, available on Amazon. Charles further shared about his process and offered guidance for the participants during his afternoon workshop.

I was intrigued by his story, and inspired to explore the topic of forgiveness more deeply for myself. I am now in the process of contemplation, meditation and deep inner listening, as well as reading what others have taught, to gain greater insight and understanding of the subject. Therefore, I don’t yet feel ready to share what I am discovering and realizing.

Forgiveness is a complex and multifaceted subject and one that I do not take lightly or wish to treat in a cavalier manner. My hope is that through thoughtful and prayerful consideration I will be prepared to share more clarity in my lesson, “The Heart of Forgiveness” this Sunday.

Rather than write a new post attempting to express my evolving perspective on forgiveness, I have chosen to repost some thoughts I shared on the topic in July 2014. More than three years later, I am still in alignment with what follows. And, as Unity cofounder Charles Fillmore famously said, “I reserve the right to change my mind.”

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I have been studying and practicing Nonviolent Communication (NVC) since 2004. NVC, created by the late Dr. Marshall Rosenberg, is a process that helps one connect deeply with his or her feelings and needs and opens the space for connection with others.  When I consider the practice of NVC and its implication on forgiveness, I realize that forgiveness is more than a spiritual practice that we engage in for the purpose of freeing ourselves from the pain of holding on to the past. At the heart of true forgiveness is the freedom that we can attain through the practice of empathy and compassion.

Empathy is our capacity to connect deeply with feelings and what NVC refers to as “needs,” the things that we value and desire, whether our own or another’s. I prefer to think of what NVC calls “needs” as aspect of our Divine Nature that each of us longs to experience and have reflected to us from others and the world around us.

 

NVC teaches that everything we do or say is an attempt to meet a need. I reframe that to say that everything we do or say is an attempt to express or experience an aspect of our Divine Nature, such as love, connection, or well-being. Further, in keeping with NVC philosophy but stated in my own terms, that when our actions or the actions of others do not help us realize an aspect of our divinity, we experience feelings that we might term “negative,” feelings that we would rather not feel, such as anger, sadness or guilt. Conversely, when we do experience an aspect of our divinity as a result of our actions or another’s, we have feelings that we often call “positive,” those that we enjoy feeling, such as peace, joy and love.

When we operate with the understanding that we are all attempting to know and experience our Divine Nature through our actions and interactions, we can more clearly see that we all have the same “needs.” However, the ways we have learned to meet those needs may at times be contrary to our highest intention, and unfortunately may stimulate pain in others and ourselves.

Empathy is our path to the authentic connection that is required for true forgiveness to occur.

Compassion is our capacity to face our pain, and to meet another in his or her pain. 

The best definition I have heard for compassion is from Cindy Wigglesworth, author of SQ21, The Twenty-one Skills of Spiritual Intelligence. In her book, she defines compassion as “the capacity and willingness to join another in his or her pain with the intention of helping to relieve suffering, while not contributing to or joining in the suffering, thus maintaining inner and outer peace regardless of the circumstances.” I would add that compassion also includes our capacity and willingness to connect with our own pain, while not contributing to or exacerbating it. 

To achieve true forgiveness, we must be willing to engage in the practice of compassion for the one we are holding as guilty for stimulating our pain, whether ourselves or another. It is often, if not always, challenging to face our own pain. Most of us would rather do whatever is necessary to medicate and avoid it. Some engage in psychological denial and refuse to admit they have pain.

As the Buddhist proverb says, “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” The experience of pain, emotional, physical and spiritual, is part of the human condition. We all have pain. Suffering, however, is the result of the story we tell about our pain. We suffer when we continue to relive, in our minds, the events that originally stimulated the pain, and continue to tell our story about what should or should not have happened. If you would like to learn about one way to end the suffering, please read my post from last week on The Work®.

Compassion invites us to connect with our pain, meet it face-to-face, and understand that our actions or the actions of another are not the cause of our pain. Our pain is caused, at the deepest level, by our unmet needs, or from my perspective, the unexpressed, unexperienced and unrealized aspects of our Divine Nature. We can compassionately connect with the pain, without engaging in suffering, and allow it to inform us of those beautiful aspects of Divine Nature that we are longing to connect with.

Empathy and compassion are not intellectual exercises; they are heart-centered practices.  They require that we engage with ourselves and others from a deep connection with our feelings and with our most precious heartfelt desire to experience our Divine Nature. When practiced authentically, empathy and compassion open our hearts and allow us to experience the outpouring of Love that is the foundation of the Divine expressing as us. They open us to the awareness of not only our shared humanity, but our shared Divinity, as well. 

With open hearts, we are able and willing to connect with each other beyond our stories of right and wrong, good and bad, victim and perpetrator. We are able to understand each other as spiritual beings who are living a human experience and doing our best to remember our Divinity, albeit sometimes through methods that are in diametric opposition to that intention.  Connecting in that understanding with empathy and compassion for ourselves and others is at the heart of the consciousness of true forgiveness.

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Join on Sunday at 10:00 as I share from my heart some of what is bubbling up in me as I explore “The Heart of Forgiveness.”

Additionally, if you are blessed or inspired by these posts or my Sunday lessons, which are available on YouTube, I encourage you to make a donation  to support the ministry of Unity Spiritual Center Denver. Thank you!