I read this great article on forgiveness in a magazine, Yoga Journal, and wanted to share it with you guys, because it is powerful and inspiring. The article is very long, so I will post some of the highlights that sum up the powerful healing effects of forgiveness. I hope this will inspire you as it has inspired me.
“When you forgive a long-held grievance, you open the door to true freedom”.
Each of us holds countless ancient grudges in our cells, ready to be triggered by a chance word or careless glance. Shifting those patterns requires more than practice and choice. It requires intervention from your own depths form the awareness-presence that you cultivate in mediation. During meditation it helps to drop your attention into the heart, then to imagine an opening through the back of the heart. There, you will find access to a spaciousness that seems to have no limits.
Heartfelt pardon is an opening of the soul. The point is, heartfelt forgiveness – the natural, spontaneous opening to someone who has hurt you- is not something the ego can make happen. The separatist, culturally conditioned ego-self, formed thousands of years of judgment and vengeance, demands punishment as the price of forgiveness. When your heart forgives, it has stepped beyond the ego to grasp your innate kinship- even your identity – with another person.
Level 1: Formal Forgiveness
Forgiveness is formal and is nearly always given in response to an apology.
Level 2: Psychological forgiveness
The kind of forgiveness you can access though inner work and the cultivation of empathy. It’s way more demanding than formal forgiveness, because it requires compassion and a degree of inner processing. Most of the “work” you do on forgiveness begins at this level. You might start this process by looking beyond your own reactivity to ask yourself whether the other person actually meant to hurt you.
If you can step outside your assumptions and implicit unenforceable rules, you have a chance of seeing the situation from a broader perspective, and immediately you view is more forgiving.
Often the qualities we find unforgivable in others are qualities we reject in ourselves. There is a power in recognizing how “unforgivable” traits in others mirror the qualities you find “unforgivable” in yourself. Forgiving someone else can lead you to forgive the grudges you’ve held against yourself.
Level 3: Soul Forgiveness
Sometimes when you engage in these processes, you start moving into a deeper level. At this level forgiveness is not something you “do” but something that opens up within you. There is emergence of a powerful and essentially spiritual emotion that comes not from the personality but from that deeper level of being that’s something called the “soul”. At this level we connect with others on a deeper level and our heart is moved by the sheer humanness of the other person.
Recognizing Oneness
The third level of forgiveness comes from the recognition that no human being, however terrible or hurtful their actions, is without basic goodness. This requires an extraordinary act of loving imagination, or a heroic change of heart.
This level of forgiveness morphs into an even deeper level of forgiving: the recognition that you and the person who has hurt you are both part of a greater whole.
On the level of our true nature, which is pure awareness and presence, there is never anything to forgive. Once you’ve intuited this, your heat can never permanently harden to another person. On the level of pure awareness, you know that you and the person who has injured you are both part of a single fabric of consciousness.
By Sally Kampton
* You can read the full article in Yoga Journal, Issue 212.