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.”
We do suffer by reliving experiences that brought up negative feelings. Suffering though, is not limited to reliving the pain. If your reaction to having your trust broken is to be less trusting in future encounters, then this is also something suffered from the pain of a broken trust.
ReplyDeleteBefore I go off to medicate my own pain in the way I see fit, I have other questions. Is suffering really optional? I understand that each of us decide how much we suffer from any given pain, but is that suffering optional or is the amount of suffering the only option? If there is no suffering, was there pain? Is it possible to have pain without suffering? Can I experience pain and have a reaction of happiness or joy? Is it pain if it brings happiness or joy? Is masochism the joy of pain?
Before my brain explodes, I do not preclude that pain can be experienced without suffering. However, it is not in my current paradigm. It is inconceivable to me to have pain without suffering. It's mind blowing for me to consider pain bringing happiness or joy. Then again, the more I know, the more I know I don't know. As always Rev., you've given me much to think about.