i send my tears to heaven....

Miracle - Celine Dion

A Mother's Prayer - Rachel Aldous / baby lullaby, dedication song

You said....

Forgiveness...

Being lied to, being cheated on, being abused, not caring enough … the list of reasons we don’t forgive someone goes on and on. Interestingly enough the same reasons that we use to withhold forgiveness from others are the same reasons we tend not to forgive ourselves.

Forgiveness is a tough concept for many people. Many people were raised in an environment where forgiveness was not easily given and when it was it was often conditional. By conditional I mean that “I will forgive you if…” Conditional forgiveness is not really forgiveness is it? If we are saying that we only forgive you if you make amends and the person does not make amends to our satisfaction then we feel justified in withholding our forgiveness.
Withholding forgiveness for some gives them a sense of power over the person they are not forgiving. We also believe that by withholding forgiveness that we are erecting a wall of protection from a person hurting us again in some way. We sometimes come to think if I don’t forgive you then you will never be able to get close enough to hurt me again. In the end this is truly an illusion for while we hold on to our anger, while we hold on to our hurt and we don’t forgive we choke on that anger, we poison ourselves with holding on to the hurt and rarely are we having a negative impact on the person we refuse to forgive.

We sometimes create an illusion of forgiveness when we say things like “I forgive you, however I will never forget!” Have you ever been on the receiving end of this statement? Did it feel like you were forgiven or did it feel like you simply were getting a stay of execution, a shot across the bow that stated you better watch out because although I am saying I forgive you I am tucking this away in my mental files and I may choose to use it to my advantage against you in the future? This does not sound like forgiveness to me. It goes without saying that we won’t forget what transpired; we rarely forget those things that have hurt us in some way. Forgiveness is not about forgetting the past; forgiveness is about loving ourselves and others enough to see beyond the imperfections that make up our journey.

Interestingly enough those who we withhold forgiveness from are not usually strangers to us, they are usually family members and close friends whom we care deeply about, whom we love. We tend to not forgive our parents, our children, our siblings, our spouses, etc for things they have done or not done which have had a negative impact on us. Sometimes our anger/hurt and refusal to extend forgiveness creates such a rift in our relationships that we be estranged from each other, not speaking for months or years, not being civil to each other over something that no longer matters and in many case probably did not matter much when it happened. Sometimes we are angry over something major that took place such as abuse and while we should never place ourselves back into an environment of abuse this does not mean that we cannot forgive the abuser. The following quote by Mark Twain illustrates this beautifully:

“Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.”

 
 
 
 
 
 
Love even while it is being trampled upon forgives. Love does not withhold forgiveness on conditions, nor does love not forgive as an act to try to punish another. To truly love is to truly forgive.

When you forgive you release a massive weight from your soul. The weight of unresolved anger and hurt contribute greatly to the ills of our society. Wars, murders, broken families, depression, numerous emotional and physical ailments and premature aging of our body are often a result of carrying the weight of not forgiving ourselves and others for the imperfections of the journey we are all partaking in.

Remember that to forgive others we must first forgive ourselves! We must let go of any anger, pain or regret that we hold against our own being in order to be able to forgive the other people in our life.

Falling In Love – Again and again...

A friend calls me and tells me about a new relationship she is in and she excitedly exclaims that “He is the one!” and “He is perfect for me!” and then proceeds to list all of the positive attributes of this new found love which perfectly melds with her personal attributes.

It is not unusual to participate in this type of dialogue. People are out there finding the perfect person for their selves and falling in love. Are we really finding the perfect person for us? The answer is a big NO! We are not finding the perfect person because the perfect person for us does not exist at least not in the purest definition of “the perfect person”. What happens is what Sam Keen (Philosopher and Spiritual mentor) so eloquently explains in the following quote:

“We come to love not by finding a perfect person, buy by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly”

Sam Keen is correct; it is not that we find the perfect person for us rather we learn to see the imperfect person perfectly! Some call this the “rose colored glasses” phase of a relationship where at the beginning we seem unable to see attributes of the other person that we might otherwise regard as faults or traits which do not mesh with who we are and would normally irritate us.
It is often true, when we are in the first phase of “falling in love” we often do put on the blinders and we do disregard some aspects of the other person which could be red flags that in the long term could indicate the relationship could have problems. Often times the quarks that we find adorable in the beginning of a relationship are the very same things that drive us nuts in the latter part of the relationship.
When the relationship shifts from “Isn’t that cute” to “if he does that one more time I swear I am going to mount his head on the wall!” it is time for us to step back and take a look at what has happened. What we will find is that we have shifted from seeing the imperfect person perfectly to simply and only seeing the imperfect person and this is what is often the beginning of the end of a relationship.

I will grant you, once we get to the phase of relationship to where all we see are the imperfections of the other person there are often other factors that are contributing to our perspective. It is important for us to take a deep dive and to examine what is going on because sometimes it is just a matter of our perspective and by shifting our perspective we often find that we can re-learn to see the imperfect person perfectly again. When we re-learn to see the perfection of the imperfection of a person we open the doors to falling in love with that person again.

On a larger scale when we learn to see the perfection of the imperfection of all people we find that it is easier to love and be compassionate with all humanity. On a very intimate scale, when we learn to see the perfection in our own imperfection we learn to love ourselves on a much deeper level and of course when we love ourselves and all of our imperfections we open up the floodgates of love in our life.