Forgiveness – Support

In order to fully understand Forgiveness, we need to look at it in a larger context.

Doug Kraft says:

The story [he presented earlier] didn’t use the word “forgiveness.” But awareness and patience are essential to the process of forgiveness, whether we use the word or not. So let’s look at what these tell us about forgiveness.

Anytime forgiveness is an issue, something painful has happened. Sometimes we blame a person for the hurt we feel. Sometimes we blame ourselves for a hurt they feel. We get stuck in blame or guilt.

Forgiveness helps get us unstuck. When awareness goes deep enough to see the source of hurt, it releases. Conversely, lack of forgiveness is a blindness that makes it difficult to see and release a hurt.

We can come up with several feelings that are similar to Forgiveness, to support Forgiveness, and maybe have the same ‘flavor’ or result in our practice.

As Doug mentions, awareness and patience are essential. Some of the other concepts we discussed were:

Acceptance – of things as they are, with no desire (or ability) to change the past.

Equanimity – resting in the balance arising from not judging, good or bad, right or wrong.

Allowing – Letting experiences be just as they are.

Compassion – Seeing others as just like ourselves and wishing them to be free of suffering.

Love – The wish for others to be well and happy in their lives.

You can see that these are all close in feeling tone and frame of mind. We accept our experience as it is, allowing our awareness to release any hurt or holding, resting in the equanimity or peace that arises from the release, then extending that wish for others to be well, happy, and free from suffering.

And, along the way, we are releasing our habitual patterns of thinking and reacting, revealing more and more of the nature of our own mind: the spacious awareness that has the capacity to accept and allow, rather than reject or suppress.