Closing the Harbor on Resentments

Closing the Harbor on Resentments

What do you think about forgiveness? Is it something you do, or do you nurse and nurture your old emo stuff, refeeling old hurts, rehearsing betrayals, let-downs and disappointments? Does forgiveness strike you as something lame, for dorks or dummies?

Forgiveness was a tricky one for me. If someone was cruel to me, how could I not be mad at them? If someone betrayed my trust, how could I not just feel betrayed forever and ever? If someone stole from me, or cheated me, or lied to me, how could that not just be part of my sordid and miserable past? Wasn’t that the reasonable response?

Why do I forgive? How do I let go?

An analogy I really like is thinking of my unconscious mind as a basement, full of stuff. Some of if is nice, carefully packed with tissue paper and lavender, or cedar balls, but some of it is shoved willy-nilly into rotting paper bags, stuffed in a damp corner picking up mold.

One of my tasks as a grown up is to clean up my emotional basement. I need to spend some time there, paying attention to what I find, and, at the very least, identify and let go of, my old emo crap around you. My resentments, in general, have very little impact on you, but a huge impact on me. They can screw up my sleep, knot up my guts, give me headaches, and wreck my relationships.

What makes me dump my resentments? Why do I choose to live clean? How am I free?

In some cases, I found that I had to work through and complete some kind of traumatic experience around an old resentment. Sometimes, I needed help to do that. I tells ya, it was so worth it.

Do you know how to let something go? Is that a skill you’ve been practicing? This is a very useful skill in general, but if you have trouble sleeping because you can’t seem to shut off your thinkin’, you will benefit greatly by mastering this skill.

I am the boss of my thinking. I am not the boss of my thoughts. My thoughts just flow, like stuff on the banks of the river. That’s the job of the mind, to make thoughts, but I get to decide what thought I will follow, if I choose to follow any at all. A meditation practice helps develop this skill, so does just sitting, being aware of thoughts moving through, noticing when I follow one, and bringing my attention back to just noticing them.

When I need to let go of something, that means it is flowing into my awareness, I latch onto it, and think on it, usually getting myself all worked up and mad, scared, or something. It gets in the way of what I’m doing, it gets in the way of my feeling good.

So I will do something like, imaging the bad thoughts as turning into dandelion fluff, and blow them away, thinking “let it go, let it go” and imagining the seeds taking root and blooming into beautiful flowers.  Or I will imagine them as a bunch of balloons, and release them, imagining them floating to the sun to be turned into good energy. Then I ask good Creative Questions, especially ones like, How to I feel when I feel light? How do I feel when I feel happy? How do I feel when I feel clear and right?

I love making room in my emo basement.

How have I changed from giving safe harbor to bad feelings to allowing my center of light to grow?

(c) Pam Guthrie all rights reserved 03012014

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