Ep 1: A Place of Forgiveness

So, how do we get to a place of forgiveness? How do we get to a place where we've been in situations that may have, maybe, be in resentments. Situations where we've been angry at somebody who's hurt us. And these are very old wounds. These are very old things that have happened to us from the past. It could be our parents, teachers, friends, family members. And I quite frequently encounter, uh, people wh’t know how to work with the pain they've experienced.

Perhaps their parents or certain family members, they still want to have a relationship with them. They still want to auto these folks. How do they work through what they have to work through towards a place where they can then sort of seek or offer forgiveness to the people that have hurt them? And I think that this takes a lot of work, to understand what we've done to ourselves.

It's a lot of what people don't see and are blind to: that we are the ones that put ourselves into harm's way. Based on childhood strategies and the way that we experience our upbringing and things that have happened to us can cause us a lot of hurt. Because of how the people that were supposed to take care of us have treated us.

So it's not so much about blaming our parents as much as it is that we had an experience that hurt deeply and when it happened, we really didn't have any outlet for that hurt to go. So what we do is we stuff it. And it's really at a much more tactical level. It's our systems or our nervous systems are reacting to something that's threatening, reacting to something that's holding us back.

And that tension that's created locks us up. And that experience of being, that's sort of aroused in a way where we're freaking out, but we really have no place to go because the surroundings won't permit it. People are yelling, screaming, we get lost in it. Someone's yelling at us. So we bury what it is it's happening to us and it gets stored in the body.

So this is stuff that is readily known more and more now. There are many experts that talk about this: Bessel van der Kolk, Ariel shorts, Peter Levine, a gab Mormon, Tay. These are all people that I have used to learn about these things. I also have studied with Brenda Schaffer. But the idea that this really important idea of the body and how people store pain that becomes an emotional memory and it's in the body and we don't really know what's going to trigger it. And when it will come back up, but once we're an adult, we do have to understand that what we experienced back then hasn't gone away. I was on a trip recently, and the captain of this ship that we were on said that where we were visiting, the footprints will disappear. However, the memories will endure and persevere. It's kind of the right words. And that's the way I think it is. We aren't back there anymore. We aren't back when things happened originally, when we were hurt, beat, yelled at, screamed at, accused, whatever it was.

But yet here we are essentially attracting the same emotional dynamic in our life as an adult. And now it's for all intensive purposes, it's just as painful as it was back then. But now we're an adult body. So now we can do something with it. Now we can act out on it, if we're not careful and we can either stuff it until we're ready to explode or we can start taking out on others.

So that's difficult to work through so that we can understand that. We then turn that on ourselves and we beat ourselves up because of the way we feel. We beat ourselves up. We sort of attack ourselves for being inadequate, being weak. And these are again, part of it. It's the meanings that we probably will place on what we're feeling.

So we have an, a particular sensation. We have a particular feeling. We don't even realize it's non-verbal. And then as we grow, develop, we get to adults, we've created a particular meaning around what it is we're feeling. And then that compounds the problem. Because now we have a particular script, a particular way of talking to ourselves, thoughts, beliefs that then trigger what's in our bodies, our bodies trigger themselves to replicate or create these meanings that we have created to make sense of what's happening. And usually they're negative. And usually they're against ourselves. So to move through that requires realizing that a lot of times we start working on this and we start to realize it.

The stuff hurt back then. And the people that did it, we either will say, well, they were doing the best they could, they didn't know any better. And there's a lot of truth to that yet at the same time, sometimes I wonder: people know what they're doing. People pick up on that. They knew that they're hurting someone and they keep doing it.

And people that are vulnerable will be at the mercy of those people.

To get beyond that -what I would call loyalty to the dysfunction of their environment that they're carrying - you have to break that and you have to get angry and sometimes you have to get angry at the people who were there to supposedly take care of you and did it in ways that they weren't fully conscious of what they were doing.

And they were conscious. So was both, nothing is absolute here. Each of us uniquely experiences this stuff. So we have to work through that. Really experience that pain that's been stored. And detach ourselves from the meeting to the best of our ability and observe what's happening to us, the sensations and see them as sensations apart from the meetings, because then the meetings will have to change.

Part of it is allowing what you're experiencing to flow. And that's where anxiety, depression, PTSD, trauma symptoms come up, this association disconnection, and to find someplace at safe where you can be honest with what you're experiencing, what you're feeling, to another person to open those back up in order to allow them to heal.

So it's a little bit to use a metaphor. You know, you put band-aids over yourself. When you're a kid, when you cut yourself and you have to cover those bands, you have to cover those cuts up when you're out in the world. But you'd have to find places to open them up to let them breathe because we have that healing mechanism within us, but it does require opening them back up.

Sometimes there's no anesthesia. You just do it. No spiritual anesthesia. It's tough. It is spiritual work again without the anesthesia.

So once we can kind of start to see what's happening and move beyond the anger, into the places where we were fearful, terrified, and rageful too, to a place of sadness and grieving, because we are essentially in my view, one way to think about it is we are angry about what we got and we're sad about what we didn't get, because there's a lot of things we don't get the ability.

We lose our innocence. There's nobody to help us, there's not guidance, ways to learn how to manage our emotions, how to develop a sense of purpose of acceptance of self-acceptance of course, in our sort of feeling of being okay and comfortable in our own skin while we're also learning how to overcome a very challenging and sometimes painful adversity.

So the forgiveness part comes after we've been with our own stuff and work through it and allow it to release enough so that we realize that we're all using that to hurt each other in some ways.

That would then move it into the place of compassion, which I think is really important here. In my practice of meditation, a big principle would be equanimity developing some balanced mind, some even temper. And then to be able to offer that compassion to myself and to others without making demands upon them, to be a certain way in order for me to move forward because then I'm essentially holding myself hostage to another person.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit walkthelinenow.substack.com