How to find freedom in forgiveness

Looking from both sides now

What does it mean to forgive? To me there’s a clue in the component parts of the word itself, for + give. When forgiveness arrives there’s a layering of perspective onto life’s challenging events, which lets us see how even the most dark and difficult days as divinely designed for our benefit. They are “for” us and “given” to us.

Forgiveness shifts us out of victim consciousness, the mind trap of being subjected to unpleasantness. With victim mentality we imagine ourselves as the object, moved by external forces that seem separate from us. It’s a “poor me” mentality. While we will inevitably traverse hard times and challenging situations in our human journey, allowing ourselves to dwell in this state indefinitely is sheer laziness and abdication of consciousness. It is not about bypassing or denying hardship.

We just need to keep going instead of getting stuck there in that dark tunnel, just because our suffering feels cozy and familiar. We keep moving letting nature take its course, as it carries us through the difficulty. Meanwhile we are present to the experience, feeling everything, instead of pretending it doesn’t exist or trying to sidestep around it so it doesn’t touch us.

Forgiveness means giving up our role as the victim of circumstances and stepping into self-responsibility as we take on the creatorship of new realities.

With forgiveness, we recognize how we are forged by the fire of experience. We see our personal pain, as well as our existential pain as Personally Activating INformation (PAIN — one of my favored acronyms in Regenerative Purpose).

And in seeing things this way, we turn our wound into our offering. When it comes to how we relate to everything that we see as “other” and outside of us… at the moment that we are able to see how we’ve received benefit from the challenges we’ve endured, there’s no longer need to assign blame for it. With this shift in perspective, we carry gratitude in our hearts instead of resentment.

There is a big difference between forgiveness and bypassing. For forgiveness to have the impact of transmuting suffering, we must first allow ourselves to feel everything — the hurt, the betrayal, the violence. We need to have compassion for those who have hurt us, to see their innocence, and touch their suffering.

A part of forgiveness is learning to see the other person’s perspective on reality as equally valid as your own, even if you disagree. In this, there’s the notion that you are not automatically assumed as righteous and rigidly attached to the concept of the other’s moral defectiveness. In forgiveness there is the acknowledgement that you could easily do, or may have once done, the same as the other has done, while feeling totally justified in so doing. It is agreeing that other perspectives besides yours exist, and other people act rationally accordingly based on how they see things.

Someone recently told me a parable about a spider and a hornet. They shared how shocking it was to see the spider jump into the air as the hornet stung it, and then proceeded to consume its meal. Yet we can contemplate that in another completely plausible scenario, the spider could have caught the hornet in its web. In that case, the spider would have been the one consuming instead of being consumed.

As the Joni Mitchell song goes: “I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now”. It is not that the spider is good and the hornet is bad. Their relative position to each other in this story is in many ways, completely arbitrary. Both are acting out of their nature. The same way that humans act out of their conditioning.

We all feel the terror of death, externally and internally, as multi-generational trauma cycles move towards completion. Some face the brutal devastation of lives, homes, and families. Others face the slow erosion of long-held identities and ideologies. Still others are tormented as unwelcome thoughts bombard our comfort-loving psyches.

When we are in survival mode, we become the most dangerous and threatening to life. Because life is always taking life, in order to perpetuate itself. Fear of death is generally at the root of violence, not evil.

When we look at those around us, we might not share the same identity, nor claim the same ethnicity, nor agree on the same ideology. But for the sake of collective healing, it is critical for us to recognize there is innocence on every side of the story. We are all moving according to our own nature, as nature moves when subjected to a certain conditioning.

Such is the miraculous gift and the terrible tragedy of being born into a human body. May we forgive, but never forget. May we find benefit from the difficulties that have passed, as we learn from the moments when we felt transgressed.

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