Takuin and Albert (Urban Monk) decided to post on the subject of Forgiveness on the same day. They invited me and others to do the same. It’s an important subject and a good time of year to consider it.

I’ve spoken here a few times about forgiveness. It is a profound part of the personal journey to wholeness.

But before we understand forgiveness, we need to understand the origins of what we seek to forgive.

True forgiveness is not a concept. It’s not something you do with your mind. In fact, it’s not something you do at all. It’s something you undo, something you release. It is the letting go of what we have long held.

You see, when we have an ego, a sense of being separate from others, we work to feel safe. One of the ways an ego feels safe is by making itself right. And to make oneself right, we have to make other wrong. This is the seed of conflict.

The other aspect of ego is to make it personal – what happens is about ME. It’s happening to ME. When events arise in our life that make ME feel uncomfortable or  threatened, the ego will make it wrong or bad.

The cumulative effect of taking it personally and making it wrong is that we resist life. We push against what shows up in our life, not realizing this resistance is not a prevention. It is a holding on. It keeps what we don’t want with us. Not understanding that like attracts like, we unintentionally amplify what we hate. The world comes to appear as messed up and unsafe. The inner narrative (monkey mind) about this I call the shadow story. This is what keeps it going. The result is what Eckhart Tolle calls the pain body.

The solution to this drama is forgiveness. But to understand forgiveness, we have to see this a little deeper still.

When an experience shows up in our life that we deem “bad”, we’ll find two things happen. We will react emotionally. i.e.: we’ll “get” angry or fearful or similar “negative” emotion. And we’ll resist the experience of it, how it feels. We don’t want to feel bad so we push against the “bad” feelings. This mutes the feeling somewhat but does not actually stop it.

This process feeds on itself. Next time a similar experience comes up, it is deemed bad automatically. And we push against what we’ve always pushed against.

We’ve missed 2 key points. It was our reactivity that caused the emotion in the first place, not the event. And in resisting that feeling we caused, we leave the experience incomplete. Unintentionally, the feeling we didn’t want we carry forward with us, unresolved. Do that many times a day for a few decades and you begin to get an idea of the kind of baggage we carry.

All of that resistance requires a lot of energy to sustain. We’re holding back the dam.

It’s no wonder our emotions are a muddle, we don’t know how we feel, and our intuition doesn’t work so well. We’ve been filling the place with trash and most of our emotional energy is spent avoiding.

The less you feel how you feel, the more you are avoiding feeling. This does not mean you are not feeling, only that you are tuning out how you feel to avoid what you’ve resisted. But in avoiding feeling, you also avoid happiness. Oops.

When we begin to connect with who we are within, we begin to find safety without blame. The ego begins to lose its grip. We begin to be able to allow the experiences and feelings that arise. Rather than resisting and holding them, we let them go. We stop adding to the pile.