BLOOD LEAF

FORGIVENESS

This very powerful word, FORGIVENESS  keeps showing up for me lately. It is a concept I have been dealing with all my life, for one reason or another. It is an uncomfortable word for me to say or to ponder because it usually brings up some form of guilt or regret I try so arduously to tuck away.

Somehow in all my experiences I have understood FORGIVENESS to mean I have to do all the work, very one sided to be sure. I recently read another new concept about FORGIVENESS that makes perfect sense and frees me up enormously.

Whenever I experience grief, blame, confusion about something that has happened to me as well as others, I seem to project my feelings outward to the other person and I’m left hanging with this incomplete feeling inside. In reading about FORGIVENESS, the author put the whole dynamic into perspective for me.

“ Only FORGIVENESSS can stem such pain in us. An apology alone can’t possibly do it This kind of pain, held to the breast all these years, licked and nurtured, fed by time and polished by ages, can be healed by the wounded, not the offender, because it is the wounded who has maintained it….It is mine, I own it, have fostered it. I am suffering more from the person I hold responsible for the hurt.”  Joan Chittister

“Finding a way to extend forgiveness to ourselves is one of our most essential tasks. Just as others have been caught in suffering, so have we. If we look honestly at our life, we can see the sorrows and pain that have led to our own wrongdoing. In this we can finally extend forgiveness to ourselves; we can hold the pain we have caused or have been hurt by, in COMPASSION. Without such mercy, we will live our own life in exile.

For most people, the work of FORGIVENESS is a process. Practicing forgiveness, we may go through stages of grief, rage, sorrow, fear and confusion.  As we let ourself feel the pain we still hold, forgiveness comes as a relief, a release for our heart in the end.  FORGIVENESS acknowledges that no matter how much we may have suffered, we will not put another human being out of our heart.”

Jack Kornfield

I could not resist sharing these quotes with you because they are succinct and ‘a way out”. With love and compassion soon on the way if it isn’t present already.

This has helped me become AWARE of another perspective for myself I never knew was available to me. I am a different person since I no longer carry the baggage on my back and in my heart I did before. Every once in a while if we are AWAKE, the solution, the answer, the OPPORTUNITY will come to us in right timing. We do have to do our part that is being OPEN and relaxing into the new information showing up.

I recently lost an earring. It was too daunting to ‘retrace my tracks’, so I let go of it rather quickly. This was Thursday and this morning (Sat. ) I was in the kitchen making a smoothie and looked down and there was my earring neatly placed between my feet. Then reaching for an eye glass cleaner I laid my hand on a pliers I had been looking for days! This is what keeps happening to me lately! Ah, I even found a teeny tiny eye glass screw driver I knew I had tucked away somewhere! I laughed with glee! Voila!!!

So I will close with a huge heartfelt bundle of HOPE and OPPORTUNITY to us all for resolving hurt and disappointment. It takes time, it is a PROCESS, but there are ‘way’ more rewards to be had than sloshing through the way most of us have been.

Looking inside

Loving what is there

Enjoying a softening.

BLESSINGS