The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

by Pete Walker

When inner children are not shamed or rejected for catharting, they eventually feel safe enough to talk about other lost aspects of themselves, such as their dreams, needs, desires, joys, and enthusiasms.

Extenuating circumstances are outside factors, beyond the control of individuals, that influence and mold their behavior and character.

The pain-into-rage syndrome is rife in our society, and is customarily passed down from generation to generation. It has created great gulfs of unwept tears and huge chasms of enmity between the generations.

A bodily-felt sense is a profound knowing and unshakable certainty that resonates throughout the body with intense feeling and sensation. When it is particularly intense it may be accompanied by tingling, chills, flushes, goose bumps, or an outpouring of emotion.

grieved deeply for him and for the him in me, and then once again felt the wonder of forgiveness welling up in my heart for him.

When people are treated like machines, they become heartless and soulless. They lose touch with the natural human sense of empathy that normally serves to warn them when they are treating others abusively or neglectfully. The epidemic of child abuse and child neglect in this country is denied and tolerated because of this lack of empathy.

The pressures of life in industrialized societies force us to live at a harried pace to keep up with the complex demands of modern living. Many modern families cannot survive without both parents working, and many of these parents are constantly overwhelmed with stress and fatigue.

When we grieve deeply for our parents, this feeling of sorrow for them sometimes expands into genuine feelings of forgiveness.

Our parents’ mistreatment of us was not a response to some essential flaw or badness in us, but rather another awful example of how human beings ignorantly repeat the past when they haven’t learned from it.

Be forgiving of yourself in this as well. Forgiveness cannot be forced; it cannot be artificial. – Jack Kornfield

Forgiving feelings cannot arise in the face of abuse because fear automatically drives us out of heart-centeredness into hypervigilance or dissociation.

Spiritual awakenings, as healing and wonderful as they are, do not magically create an authentic forgiveness of our real-life abusers. Spiritual forgiveness is not an alternative to the grieving that must precede authentic, interpersonal forgiveness.

As part of spiritual practice, prayers and meditations on love, compassion, and forgiveness can be quite helpful, as long as we do not trick ourselves into believing we are feeling something that we are not. As paradoxical as it may seem, we reduce our capacity to feel genuine love and compassion when we try to force forgiveness.

The most important forgiveness in recovery – self-forgiveness – is found in the sanctuary of the self.

Real self-esteem remains intact in the face of failures as well as successes.

For each of the ways I have hurt myself through action or inaction, out of fear, pain, and confusion, I now extend a full and heartful forgiveness. I forgive myself. I forgive myself. – Jack Kornfield

All of us have in the past, especially via repetition compulsion, committed blameworthy acts. Once we fully apologize for these transgressions, we need and deserve our own forgiveness.

Allow your heart to open to you. Let that light, that care for yourself, grow.

Hating yourself for hating yourself is one of the most stalwart bastions of toxic shame. It is a process that quickly spirals downward into despair.

As in childhood, we often accept others’ harsh judgments about our inadvertent wrongs without standing up for ourselves – inwardly or outwardly. Instead, we commonly retreat into silence as our inner critic adds its choruses of shame to whatever condemnations we have unprotestingly accepted.

If we react with unbridled anger, we are unconsciously purging our unprocessed anger about childhood hurt onto each other.

To make the most of these opportunities, we must recognize when we are embroiled in an emotional flashback. If we do not, we are likely to summarily transfer old upset feelings onto our current intimates instead of redirecting them to their original source in the past.

You will see that forgiveness is fundamentally for your own sake, a way to carry the pain of the past no longer. – Jack Kornfield

Commiseration then expands into compassion which in turn blossoms into forgiveness.

Out of the mud of grief grows the lotus of forgiveness. – Robin Bishop

Nonetheless, we can achieve a relatively constant position of forgiveness even though we cannot continuously feel forgiving.

The same is true about love. Although we cannot always feel loving, we can always return to love. With sufficient practice, grieving consistently moves us through disappointment and alienation back into love.

I believe Love is the home we live in before incarnation and the home we return to when we die. This, for me, is one of the deepest meanings of the adage God is Love. I also believe that the more we recover our emotional natures, the more we are able to revisit this home throughout our lives.

Love is the one absolute that can transcend the apparent duality, paradox, and ambivalence of all human experience. Love, when we are graced enough to experience it in its deepest spiritual and emotional manifestation, expands our awareness to perceive the essential unity and perfection of all things.

When the opposites are realized to be one, discord melts into concord, battles become dances, and old enemies become lovers. We are then in a position to make friends with all of our universe, and not just one (the positive) half of it.

When love expands my heart in this way, I see the cogency of everyone’s extenuating circumstances and I find everyone forgivable.

Love at any level is so marvelous that we repeatedly fool ourselves into believing we are feeling love when we are not. It cannot be overemphasized that covering up a disowned feeling with a counterfeit one merely moves us further away from love.

It would appear as if the art of loving is not whether you love or not (we all do in our present way) but whether you trust that when love leaves, it has a reason and it will return again. Always

We shall remember love in our hearts and wait tenderly and compassionately with ourselves as we wander in question and doubt until we remember, “Love always returns.”