Practicing Forgiveness — Everyone Has Something or Someone to Forgive
A single act of genuine forgiveness carries tremendous power. Holding on to injustices enslaves us to the past; forgiveness frees us from the past. We conceal feelings of anger and vengeance beneath the virtuous covering of justification to protect us from losing these feelings. Anger can be used as a defense against our deeper feelings of pain and despair. Deep resentment and anger reinforce our feelings of separateness.
Everyone has something and someone to forgive. Guilt and blame are endemic today. Negative emotions like bitterness, frustration, agitation, anguish, vengeance and resentment are all linked to our need to forgive, and yet they may be less conspicuous when everyone shares them. But in spite of our pressing need for forgiveness, we can be reluctant to truly forgive.
Sometimes we don't really want to face up to the complexities and surrender of genuine forgiveness. So we 'fake it'. Denying our feelings of blame and vengeance, we may indulge in 'fantasy forgiveness'. Pretending to forgive is a shallow by-product of superficial thinking: a virtuously intended but misdirected attempt at healing, or simply the denial of our repression.
Often spiritual seekers want to be further on in their process than they really are. Forgiveness has become one of those benchmarks of inner work that confer 'spiritual rank'. Some people practice 'quasi-spiritual forgiveness'. We are impatient to forgive before we are ready. Our spiritual journey is an earthly journey that requires firm grounding. As we develop spiritually, we deepen in our humanness. We honor our feelings without judgment, notice our thoughts without always having to follow our desires and practice awareness of ourselves and others. We should never use spiritual principles like these to hinder our personal process. Our awakening conforms to natural laws. If we try to get ahead of ourselves the results are usually disastrous. Often we want to be somewhere we are not, someone other than ourselves or in a life situation other than our own.
We may try 'wish-fulfillment forgiveness', hoping that, if we wish deeply enough, we will be able to forgive our oppressors, wipe the slate clean and live in a haze of imagined virtue, as if it never happened. Wish-fulfillment forgiveness is an attempt to bypass the process of forgiveness. But however much we wish to forgive, forgiveness is only genuinely attained through certain necessary stages of inner healing.
Alison was a client who had a problem with revenge. She had a dominating, super-critical mother. She had grown up in an atmosphere charged with hate. As a child she had fought against her mother in stand-up rows and open resentment, mirroring her mother's hate for her. Now, as a young woman, she had so deeply repressed this hatred that the inner voice of her mother had taken almost total control of her life. Nothing she ever did was good enough and she nursed an almost total sense of her own worthlessness. When she discovered this in her therapy, it came as a shock. She had read in a self-help book that we should forgive our parents, so she immediately decided to take the easy way out that the book offered. When it didn't work Alison asked me for help. I explained that there is no easy way to forgiveness, because genuine forgiveness is a matter of heart-searching and deepening. Alison's work became my reference point for the crucial stages of forgiveness in inner work. For me, she epitomized the predicament of the modern day seeker who has too much knowledge, too many 'easy ways out' and who is burdened by too much knowledge and too little wisdom. Forgiveness is a dynamic inner process which consists of a number of steps.
Relationships and Marriage Counseling: A Way to Knowing and Loving Oneself (20 mars 2025)
In primary love relationships—marriage and partnerships—there are three possible stages. These stages are progressive and sequential; you must pass through one to get to the other. Although most of us are stuck in the first stage, to achieve your full life potential you should try to experience all three for the deepening degrees of happiness and fulfillment they offer.
Have you noticed how unhappy people seem to be today in their relationships? Everyone you meet seems to be dissatisfied, discontented, unhappy. We have euphemisms for the series of events that inevitably seem to lead to the relationship breakup: "She and he are going through a hard time just now," "She says she need some space from the marriage," "He's always working late at the office."
Plus we tend to be judgmental about our friends when they enter into a new relationship. More euphemisms: "He's not good enough for her," "I don't know what he sees in her," "They make a very strange couple."
Or critical. Euphemisms again: "I think they deserve each other," "What an ugly pair," "He deserves all that she gives him (sarcastically)," "I don't know why they stay together."
The only ideal couples are the actor and celebrity ones - and this in a week when Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are breaking up (no surprise there) and Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are not (big surprise there) - but then again, they are actors of course!
In the real world of ordinary, emotional, physical, flawed, vaguely neurotic, sensitive and insensitive, actual individuals, the Beatles and Le Morte d'Arthur comprise the philosophy we live by. Whether we know it or not. So, when John Lennon sings, "Love is the answer" or when we, in dreams both waking and sleeping, meet the partner of our dreams we are embarking on a preordained, archetypal journey into love. But love has three distinct levels or stages in the full human experience.
These three stages are self-love, love of another and, finally, spiritual love, and this is what this article is about.
The first stage is the one in which relationships show you yourself. This is true whether you are aware of it or not. This is why marriage and partnerships do not have a good success rate. We think that relationships are fun, the partner an object of desire, and that pleasure and satisfaction can only follow. Some or all of this may be true, but far more potent and relevant than all these is the mirror the relationship holds up in front of you. People do not like to see themselves. They shy away from the accurate reflection. When your partner tells you how moody you are, or how impossible to live with, or nasty, unforgiving, or insensitive you are, your first thought is to leave the relationship. Preposterous though this may sound, isn't this why relationships usually finish? We don't like what we are seeing in ourselves.
The way to approach relationships is as a learning experience, learning about ourselves so that we can grow in awareness and insight about ourselves and, over time, become more the person we would like to be, less reactive, controlling and controlled, less subject to automatic impulses and more liberated, awake and expansive, more loving, happier and more fulfilled.
The second stage is the one in which relationships help you to grow in love. Once you have got over yourself and your repressed emotions and unfinished business, you have some inner space for the person you're in the relationship with. Time to be with them, to listen to them, to act selflessly sometimes and to love them. One of the primary functions of love in outward expression is to give time. When you love somebody you find that you have time for them. And you want to spend time - quality time - together. As you learn to relate more deeply to your partner, you find that your heart expands and you feel the flow of love within you. Loving is a circular flow, irresistible and endless, and the more you love your partner or spouse, the more love you have available for yourself, for others and for the world about you.
The third stage is the one in which you live as companions in God or your Divine nature. It bears repeating that you are a spiritual being having a human experience. You don't have to wait for time to convince you of this. Although as you age, it will become more apparent to you. In middle years and old age (even within this predominantly pro-youth culture) you increasingly orient yourself to the immaterial world and your approaching demise. The spiritual, inner world becomes more real for you and your relationship to the spiritual backdrop and forms in which you live and exist become more central to your life. You are growing in love, knowledge, and inevitably, wisdom.
If you are fortunate enough to have a loving relationship and a life companion alongside you, you look with the eyes of the Divine upon him or her and you celebrate your partner, along with all the other gifts of this divine world. Passing through the spiritual and transcendent realms of truth and reality, you turn your face to God, to the Divine, together.
These are the deepening stages of love in marriage and partnership.