How to Forgive

How to Forgive

What do you think about forgiveness? It’s a big idea, full of lots of stuff, lots of emotional stuff, most of it not very nice. There is an old saw I like, “Resentment is letting someone live rent-free in your head. Now, I must say, I have never figured out how to get someone who lives in my head to pay me rent. If you have, please drop me a line and tell me how.

Resentment and forgiveness are quite the pair. Resentment is simply the re-feeling over and over of the bad feelings we get when someone does us wrong by our estimation. Forgiveness is choosing not to re-feel those bad feelings and replace them with peaceful feelings. This is sometimes very easy and sometimes ridiculously challenging.

It’s been my experience in life that a lot of how easy or challenging forgiveness is depends on how righteous we feel about holding onto our resentment.

Why do I forgive? What makes me let go? How have I changed from resenting to forgiving?

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that we should just forgive and forget willy nilly. A lot of what I have now managed to forgive were egregious wrongs that no one should do to nobody. I mis-learned stuff from those experiences about how the world is, how I should be in it, and how I should expect to be treated. I needed to sort that stuff out. I needed a really good teacher. It took me a while. But I wanted to clean out my emo-basement. I needed to work through them, remember them, feel the feelings all the way through, notice what I had mis-learned, and then I could start thinking about forgiving.

For the stuff that isn’t so dire, though, forgiveness is a nice tool. It’s a good thing to practice with because we all experience stuff that gets our goat, so we get lots of things to hone our skills on.

It’s important to remember that resentment mostly just chews on us. That’s why forgiveness is so nice. I have had the experience several times where I found out that someone wasn’t speaking to me because they resented something I had done. No idea. No impact on me. Dang. What’s the point of resenting if it has no impact on the other person?

How do I forgive? You know me, I like to give you specific and easy instructions that work for loads of people if I can. So this is how I do it.

I check to see if I have work to do around the resentment I feel, and if there is, I do it. If not, I become aware of my thoughts. That’s a good habit to cultivate anyway, noticing what we are thinking. We spend an astonishing amount of time thinking the same thoughts over and over. If I’m gonna do that, I would just as soon they be supportive, uplifting thoughts, thank you very much.

As soon as I notice that I am resenting, I think something else. If I can, I will go to compassion for the person. That’s kinda high-level stuff and it took me a while to get there. It’s also good practice. I like to silently sing, “Let it go, let it go, let it go” to the tune of Let it Snow. I do something to distract myself. That is it. Usually, after a few rounds of this, I’m done with it. Nice. If I’m hanging on to the bad feeling, I will look at it a bit more to see where it’s hooked me. Surprisingly simple. Very effective.

The more I practice letting go of something that really only hurts me, the more room I have for nice stuff. I like nice stuff. I like feeling peaceful and happy instead of angry and seethe-y. I like spending my think time on nice stuff like how do I want my life to go? What do I want to accomplish? Why am I successful? So much better than rehearsing all the shit. Heh.

How have I changed from feeling the same bad feeling over and over to letting go and feeling clean?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2016 all rights reserved 01222016

Wise Guys

Wise Guys

I have been privy to a very curious phenomenon recently. I talk to a lot of people over the course of a day, and many of them are reporting variations on doubting themselves. Riffing on notions is fun, but I don’t think self-doubt is on that list.

The thing is, we are wise. Effortlessly. We accrue wisdom by just living our lives, experiencing our experiences. Sadly, for many of us, we listen to people who tell us we aren’t wise. They may even tell us we are stupid. Depending on who they are, what our mis-learnings are, we buy into that idea and believe we are dumb.

Poor we!

How do I know I am wise? How do I feel when I own my wisdom? What makes me trust my smarts?

In the dark ages, I was in so much pain. I bought into the idea that I didn’t know anything about living, but a tiny part of me trusted my wisdom. That wisdom told me to find a good teacher. My first brilliant teacher whom I found on my own was a shrink named Dan. He helped me to begin to see that my emotional pain was based on past events I was holding on to, and by habits that kept me stuck.

I trusted my wisdom more because of my time with him and started to clear out the negative, abusive people in my life. I made some big changes.

I sought out more teachers. I found good ones, sometimes they were there to teach me one lesson, sometimes more. I found a wonderful teacher who worked with me for many years. She created a space for me to find my way, my wisdom, my self.

We all need teachers at different times in our lives. They always show up when we need them. Our job is to trust our wisdom enough to spot them, and then to trust them, and ourselves enough to learn the lessons they are meant to give us. Sometimes we have a topic that is a bit treacherous, and we need to address it with more than one teacher.

Our Personal Doubt is that kind of lesson.

Our Personal Doubt is our first mis-learning. We mis-learn it very early in our lives, and we buy into it wholeheartedly. For some of us, it’s that we are wrong. Or that we hurt people. Or that we are bad. Or that we are unlovable. There are many others. It’s that bad feeling that has been with you for your whole life. We may not even be aware of it.

My Personal Doubt is that I am garbage. It informed many of my choices for many years. I have worked on releasing that belief for a long time, and bit by bit it has gotten much less powerful. Like all our really important stuff, no one else can fix this for us. Like happiness, the truth behind our personal doubt will come from inside us.

The more we practice trusting our wisdom, the easier our lives will get, the less our Personal Doubt can flatten us. The wonderful teacher I mentioned above, Vi, would say, “You do know.” Oh, I hated that phrase! But she was always right. When I relaxed and calmed down, I always knew what I needed to do.

How have I changed from denying my wisdom to believing that I do know?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2015 all rights reserved 04112015

Discharging Guilt

Discharging Guilt

Floods, fire, famine, earthquakes, volcanoes, meteor strikes; natural disasters causing all sorts of bad stuff. There is one more that should be on the list, and that’s guilt.

I’m not talking about the guilt we feel about not calling our moms, or sneaking out of work early, or hanging onto the extra change the clerk gives us, the stuff we can easily correct.

I’m not even talking about fooling around with your neighbors wife, or stealing, or even murder. Those are actions with consequences, ways we can atone, pay that debt to society for a lapse, however serious, in our good judgment.

I’m talking about that deep rooted guilt we feel for being alive.

The professionals call it Existential Guilt, I tend to think of it as  “the Universal I’m sorry,” and boy oh boy does it make trouble. I started getting called on saying “I’m sorry” all the time when I was twelve.

When we feel guilty for being born, for being alive, for breathing, or taking up room, our thoughts are going to cause us trouble, our feelings are going to make us suffer, and our behavior will often just make things worse.

It can go several ways. We might try really hard to prove that we aren’t guilty, striving to do good works, going into helping professions, tons of volunteer work, and still feel like it’s not enough, we can’t make good, and we are still guilty.

So, then what happens might be that we get crabby, or perfectionistic, go to negative emotional judgments, thinking on some level that if I’m guilty, so are you, and you should try harder, and you are bad and sinful, and we spew it around like puke off a tilt-a-whirl.

Was that too gross? It is pretty gross.

Another possibility is that we withdraw. We may try to numb the guilt with drugs or alcohol or pain or food or exercise or sex or working too much. We pretty much disconnect from our loved ones, hiding away how bad we are and how bad we feel about being so bad.

Or we might decide that, since we are sinners, we may as well sin. I don’t have to give you examples, you just have to turn on your TV to see this one playing out; dramas, sitcoms, the news. Oh, yeah, the news. How much of the awful stuff you see on the news happens because someone feels guilty for taking up air.

How do I know I am pure? Why am I clean? How do I feel when I feel like a good person?

The mis-learning of existential guilt is one of the worst ones we get. We may pick up intra-utero that our mom doesn’t want to be pregnant with us. Yes, we are conscious and learning, even in the womb. We may feel that we have caused her pain or ruined her life, or that we are somehow evil in our mere existence, and down we go. And the thought burrows deep into our unconscious mind until it seems like it is simply part of who we are; personality DNA.

Yeah, that’s hooey. At our core, we are perfection, spotless, clear and divine. Existential guilt is just another bad habit, even if it is one of our earliest bad habits, and we can change it with Creative Questions, and practice. I just have to choose.

How have I change from feeling guilty to feeling my innocence?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 10192013