a deep delve into forgiveness: why we can’t just throw around love

photoI’m all about Love.  I have two teensy love tattoos on my wrists to remind me to ask for Love each time I bless something out.  I am all for the underlying Universal Love and the acceptance of this Truth and the inadvertent, unconscious pull we have to rejoin with this Love.

But I’ve also been seeing a lot of blind black and white regarding Love and Its pursuits.

Reaching for love?
Rather than being: the best!  We are now substituting achievement for being guided: to be love!
Slighted?  I choose love!
Forget fear, you can have love!
Americans are ambitious and successful.  As we open and awaken to a new paradigm and consciousness, a brighter way of living, we are using old concepts to uncover our light… We are trying to ‘win’ love

So, I just wanted to say:

You can’t choose love.  Love chooses you. 

Throwing a tent of muscled (perhaps hopeful, yet inauthentic,) ‘love’ over a situation can be just another layer of mind or ego, escaping the suffering in heart, at hand.  Unfortunately we can’t just skip over all the icky stuff and go from zero to love.

Specifically, the concepts of love and forgiveness have been musing inside me and whether they need to go hand in hand, and it might surprise you to hear, I don’t think they do.

Forgiveness is not about getting to a space of love, it is about getting to a space of neutral.  Of awareness and acceptance.  Forgiveness is a spontaneous Universal action.  One cannot draw from it or use it, if it doesn’t naturally show its face.  Love and forgiveness show up on their own time and dime.  We build it; they come.

The problem with suffocating something with love is it doesn’t go away.  It will come back, in the form of another situation, another person, your mom with the same fight, a new boss with remarkably the same douche-tardiness.  The harder you push it away, the fiercer its response.

Of course, forgiveness is a cornerstone of any spiritual practice, but what we need to understand is that it is not ours to offer. 

It is easy enough to say ‘I choose to forgive’ when we are slighted about someone or something we don’t know or care about.  In the belief system that ‘everything that happens to us, happens for us’ it is much more difficult to wrap our minds around forgiveness when you bring atrocities into the mix:  senseless murder, abuse, holocausts, accidental deaths… On a level we can’t comprehend, these did happen for us, and here is where we need to redefine forgiveness.

I feel like there is a general pull and overlying assumption that we need to love everything in order to heal.  We don’t have to love it, or love someone, we just need to take the charge (our charge, our reaction) out of the situation and deal with it.  In order to do that, we have to truly feel those ugly things that we’d rather throw under a blanket of ‘love and forgiveness.’

We need to accept that it happened and sometimes, in the case of very deep trauma, know that we may never understand a reason why.  The ‘why’ is unnecessary.

As inquisitive, bright, delvers of our own psyche, we can drive ourselves bananas with ‘why.’  What if the ‘why’ no longer mattered?  What if all you ever needed to do or know was that it was there for you, to grow you stronger, to stretch you to your most remarkable Self, and forgiveness is not for the other person, it’s only ever for you.

We need to own that any emotion present is for us, and only us… forgiveness happens only when we have the courage to face how we truly feel.

We can only be responsible for ourselves.  In the most difficult and traumatic states I have seen, ironically enough, the forgiveness that most needs to happen is forgiveness of the self.  We are much harder on ourselves for having allowed whatever happened, than even on the supposed perpetrator of said abuse, slight or attack.

There are times when it can be empowering (if safe) to contact or confront whomever is the object of your intended forgiveness.  However all forgiveness has different levels of healing, and you do not need someone else’s participation to do your work.  If anyone is in a space of insisting you need to hear them out for “your mutual” healing and understanding, that is more often than just another level of the mind/ego:  look how great I am, that I am able to confront this situation, embrace its ickiness and release you into your freedom.  Um, that’s a lovely suggestion, but everyone, please release people into their freedom on your own time.  That’s a higher spiritual practice than dragging them out to a coffee shop and hearing what you think is wrong with them, just so we’re clear.

Healing and spiritual work don’t happen in a linear manner.  So, go ahead, do your chosen healing voodoo with that person’s picture on your makeshift altar.  We can intend, we can ask for forgiveness, and until we feel neutral, we keep asking.  Healing is rarely a one shot deal.

We cannot muster forgiveness or love any more than we can sprout grapefruits from tomato seeds.  These are gifts of Grace.  They are little packaged miracles of fruited effort:  the effort is the awareness, the fruits are the gift.  You don’t produce the fruit, you only tow the hoe.  Ya?

My interest has never been in “solving” this moment; in lightening it up or making it more palatable.  My interest is and always has been for the overarching, inherent, hidden, muddied bliss that lies within us.  That is not to be caught or achieved or attained—it is only ever to be discovered and released.

“Knowledge cannot be achieved from outside, it is always within you. Happiness cannot be achieved from outside, it is always within you. Purity and piety cannot be achieved from outside, They are always within you.” -Yogi Bhajan

Each place we hold on is putting a stopper on this inherent bliss.
Yes, our reaction is a choice.
Yes, our activities and how we respond and offer ourselves to the world must be conscious decisions that are in our hands as we fumble, stumble through it all.

But Love is not a choice; it is a benediction.
Be with what is.  And then it will come.

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Feb 9th + 10th, I am facilitating a two day course in NYC.  Its sole purpose is to unearth this muck, face and ask for forgiveness so that we can awaken to our inherent bliss.   Bring your pain, and drop it like it’s hot.  Hope to see you.

http://margaretnichols.com/awakening-course/