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Forgiveness Frees Flow….how to forgive in a flowing way, and free flow up
Finding Self-Love and Flow Through Forgiveness…let me know what you think of these thoughts, and any thoughts or questions on this topic guys : )
…Pink misty Jesus gave me forgiveness fever. That candy coloured messiah had me out on the Galway beach free styling forgiveness over the Atlantic for weeks. I’d clamber over slumped spines of granite rocks till I was almost surrounded by water.
…..“I forgive myself for every day spent going against my heart’s ragged calls, for every obsequious self-betrayal and wasted day. I forgive everyone who ever raised tongues or fists against me. I ask them to forgive me. I forgive my body for this ill-health, I ask my body to forgive me”…..
I’ve dabbled in forgiveness before, but this was my first full-blown forgiveness bender. You know the saying ‘To a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail’? Well, the more I forgave the more I saw the need. It became addictive, triggering dopamine releases with pleasing symmetry, cleaning out cluttered painful patterns.
Forgiveness is always reciprocal, changing our relationship to the causes of pain. Symmetrical like a rorschach blot, a mirror.
To forgive ourselves is to forgive others and vice versa. Because it’s understanding why we act the way we do, why things happen. To forgive my body for its health issues is also to ask my body’s forgiveness for every misplaced mouthful of food, every day spent straining and neglecting my flesh.
“I forgive my body for this pain, this exhaustion, this forced pause. I ask my body to forgive me. I forgive my mother and father for passing pain on. I ask that they forgive me too.”
They say the Buddha said that holding onto anger with the idea of punishing someone is like holding a burning stone with the idea of throwing it at them. We burn only ourselves. Holding onto resentment is like swallowing poison to try to kill another. I’d already prayed some hard, fast prayers to let go rage at those who’d beat me, cursed or spat at me, and those I judged had let it happen. It helped.
But pink misty Jesus called for some next level shit. To get obsessively free style with it. My comedian friend Aidan Killian once had a pink mist come into his room and wash through him. He saw it as the spirit of Christ. We’re not Christians, but both dig the notion of Jesus, whether he’s a figment of history’s imagination or not. I was coaching Aidan on his show for Edinburgh, and we worked on not getting too filthy – ‘Jesus came inside me, pink and righteous’ – and letting the power of the moment stand up. So I heard the story over and over again. And couldn’t get it out of my head. He said the pink mist was born from his forgiveness practice.
How much remains unforgiven? Forgiveness is not about right and wrong.
It’s a daily choice not to swallow poison again, not to pick up the stone that chars the flesh of our palms again. It’s about walking away from fights that finished years ago. If any part of me is trapped attacking and defending phantoms in my nervous system, I have less self to live with.
Everyone wants to be happy and well. Every violent thought, word and deed flows from trauma. We don’t ever need to accept ill treatment. But we don’t need to attend the courtroom behind our eyes all day long either.
The more I forgave, the more resentment I discovered inside myself. I found myself forgiving God. I don’t even know what ‘God’ is, beyond all life being inter-connected. I have an image of God in my psyche though, a mummy-daddy sky figure my wounded child is fucking furious with.
Who could have guessed we need to forgive made-up people too?
“I forgive God. I ask God to forgive me. Or maybe G.O.D – Great Open-Source Dream. I forgive life for all its hurts. I ask G.O.D to forgive us, for straying so far from love. I forgive G.O.D for my childhood. I ask G.O.D to forgive me too, for every moment I forgot the truth.”
Forgiveness transcends logic. Free styling my prayers allows my unconscious to leap-frog unfiltered truths out my mouth, truths my head can’t wrap around. Hurts I’d never imagined existed pass my lips. Forgiveness is not defensive – if I’m holding pain for something I did or didn’t do, I forgive.’ No need to waste days in the courtroom.
A background hum of bliss often followed. It was easy to see the colours inside things, the kindness just under the taut webs of tension lines in strangers’ faces, the magical physics fizzing in neon signs along the sea-front, breathe the sharp punch of salt stink in the air.
I never met any messiahs, gaseous or humanoid, pink or rainbowed.
The need for forgiveness emerged as bottomless. Most of all, I needed to, still need to, forgive myself. Most of all I need to forgive myself for going against my body’s needs, my heart’s calls, and the cranky ambassador from the land of What The Fuck Are You Doing Dave?
For every breath wasted on hate. Every day spent not creating. Every desire, maybe even love, not named. Every little tyranny signed off on. Every day I didn’t meditate, exercise, write. Every day I didn’t wash my face in order to meet my loved ones. Every day I spent building dams against the unbearable beauty of life.
Not because I did anything ‘wrong.’ Nothing to do with the empty charade of the courtroom behind the eyes.
Because it hurts the heart when we don’t sing, dance, tell stories, love and play the way we’re born for. Hurts the heart when we don’t name the dying ghosts among us. Because, the cranky ambassadors cry, What The Fuck Are We Doing Here In This One Life?
I forgot the practice. I remembered. I forgot again. I remember now, and forgive myself for every day I didn’t do it. I forgive myself for forgetting tomorrow. Forgiveness is always available, plugging me into a flow that feels sacred. Nothing can’t be fed into the equation.
“I forgive XYZ, I ask XYZ to forgive me.”
“I forgive my poison-drinking mind, and I ask it to forgive me too.” -
5 Replies
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I’ve had something like this “I forgive” statement in a more constrained form, and just like the reciprocity or non-linearity that opens up with “I love my __ and my __ loves me” (rather than “I love myself”), your reframing changes it from something I’m telling myself, to somewhere that Life can have more access to me, to sort of ventilate whatever the old relationship was.
I forgive my superego and my superego forgives me
oof, that one might take a while to get fully ventilated 😂
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“Somewhere that life can have more access to me.” That’s it. For me, I realised when I first start practicing these things it was still from this limited, ‘I am broken and need to fix myself, I am lacking and need to get things’ place. Then I came to realise it’s not even just about ‘me’ it’s about opening up to the flow of life. About letting life move through me, and about reconnecting to the great flow of life. Ventilating the relationship. Love that!
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Yes! It’s never about “me” and I’m included in and belong to the wholeness of Life.
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I am so moved by these two missives. Other than that, I’m not sure that I have any words to express. I want to marinate in the freedom that forgiveness allows. It awakens the tender heart of sadness that is my heart and in that awakening I find joy along with sadness.
Thanks to all of you for showing up so fully as yourselves,
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Yes, exactly. Love to you in that.
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