The necessity of forgiveness
We fantasize that life with a significant other will be somewhat like a rom-com. We get a taste of it early in the relationship — what we call the honeymoon phase. “New Relationship Energy” is a very real drug and it's incredibly addictive.
But when the downside comes, and we first experience some kind of pain, we get stuck because we haven’t yet developed the skills to bloom the relationship back open into something greater. It seems gravity will always pull us back down.
The truth is, every relationship will endure some kind of pain.
It’s impossible not to — we live in a materialistic realm that’s governed by the continuous cycling between birth and death.
Nothing stays the same; in fact, everything is in a continual state of change. The desire to create some happy state and then cling to it, like it's a life preserver in the ocean of pain and stress, actually misuses our creative ability to see things as they are.
A scenario I commonly see in relationships is that something painful or fearful occurs once, and then the anxiety, fear, and pain around that occurring again suddenly become so pervasive in the relationship that neither partner can be present with opportunities for happiness anymore.
Out of this seed of suffering is where I believe the need for forgiveness comes from. We just don’t know how to start that process — it isn’t modeled enough for us in our lives, especially not in healthy ways.
We have to relearn what forgiveness is, and how to apply it as an internal practice.
We have to learn the secret of forgiveness so that we can have abundance in our lives.
The ability for forgiveness must be learned in adulthood
Forgiveness helps us move through the inevitable sticking points where pain arises. The instinctive place where we look for a source of forgiveness is outside ourselves; it’s an external desire. In the same way that we look for validation, acceptance, and kindness from those around us; we turn to others when we desire forgiveness, apologies, or expect them to demonstrate remorse.
Most of us have built our experiences with forgiveness from a model we experienced in childhood, where we could look to our parents for the answers, or for help with our pain and struggles. But now, as adults, we haven’t learned how to generate and cultivate that help ourselves. In many cases, there’s a lot of expectation and projection that we put on our intimate partners, expecting them to do what our parents did for us all those years ago, and we might expect them to know how to forgive when most likely they don't know how to either.
When we feel wronged, and when we thus expect forgiveness or an appology, we find ourselves in a place of actively fueling separation. Forgiveness is the healing of that perception of separation. It is the ability to overcome our own closure and to instead stay relaxed and open when things are going wrong.
There are two ways we can generally find ourselves in a situation that requires forgiveness. Either our partner feels hurt, and we want to help heal the situation, or we feel wronged and we believe it is the other’s responsibility to acknowledge our pain and extend an olive branch of forgiveness.
In either case, both partners will feel a separation of some kind, and therefore, the process of coming to forgiveness is the same.
We can only be responsible for our own internal space
We cannot be responsible for any action our partner takes; we can only regulate ourselves — understanding our own inner world and controlling how it interacts with our projections, assumptions, and expressions. Thus, the first thing to be aware of is that we need to connect with the energy of the separation we feel.
The separation has an emotional tone — there’s anger, sadness, malice, or a number of other potential feelings that are present in our body, and we must sit with those emotions to understand what they are and where they come from. To do this, imagine how you would have wanted to be received at the moment of crisis. What would have been your desired outcome, in a perfect world with unlimited powers?
Once you’ve connected with that energy, practice softening your body. Allow the emotion to be felt, and allow it to move and change within you. Our ego typically tries to objectively analyze emotions, so that we can label them and translate them into words that will get our meaning across most efficiently, but this process often leads to the emotions themselves getting stuck in an analytic vortex. Stuck emotions feel like cramps, and relieving this cramp requires an overall softening of your being around the emotions to allow them to flow better.
Note that this practice of softening your body might be best done, in the beginning, in solitude and privacy. It’s an own-body practice, requiring you to connect to how deep the hurt feels and requires your awareness to stay with the body sensations, below the level of analysis, judgment, and rambling thought.
When we’re alone and we allocate time to truly go deep into this feeling of separation, we can more clearly see the pain inside of us. The judge and jury inside of our mind are trying to assign a cause, so when we connect with it on the emotional level rather than the analytical level, our feelings and emotions will be able to rise and flow in a dynamic way, changing from moment to moment. Softening helps us realize that our emotions are not as scary as we thought; they don’t need to be pushed away, and they deserve to be heard and felt. When we understand this, we can begin to emotionally access the sensation of what it would be like to have received what we wanted. We can already feel that relief, so we pay attention to where these emotions are arising from.
We sustain our own pain
Love for ourselves is the first thing to fall out of our consciousness when we are in pain. We often turn away from self-compassion in these moments because we don’t realize that we deserve it. We have to own that our internal experience is ours, and ours alone. We don’t have to always turn within to solve it ourselves, but we do have to be able to recognize the validity and reality of our pain. We have to acknowledge that we hurt.
We can’t share from a place of separation. In fact, until we’re aware that we’re the ones sustaining our pain, that we are the source by constantly looking at it and trying to analyze, we won’t even think of forgiveness because we’ve dissociated from the actual source of the pain.
Without awareness, we are in limbo.
Awareness has to include the body and emotions, and it must downplay any significance of what we believe things “should'' be.
Getting stuck in the “shoulds” is only ever a judgment of the past or a projection onto the future, and is not a realistic place from which to find forgiveness. Instead, we have to learn how to own what we had wanted to experience instead, and then be able to express that as an invitation to our partner. There’s a maturation in being able to lead from a state of what you know is possible, and being able to invite our partners to join us there.
To do this, find what you know is the optimal outcome for both of you. Hold that view and extend it as an invitation or a gift.
But in that invitation, you must be completely unattached to whether or not they pick up the gift. You may know there is a better way, but you can only invite them to join you in that way — you can’t make them accept it; love is only love when it’s genuinely offered without obligation or expectation.
In accepting this fact, we allow time for the inevitable ups and downs to be integrated into the overall value of our relationship. We temper our reactivity so that we can see more clearly. We don’t suppress emotions or sensations in the present; we invite the light in them to move through us. We realize that we are the vehicle for light and for life, and it is this realization that aids us in becoming closer with our partners through the act of genuine forgiveness.
Why wouldn’t you forgive?
What could you possibly gain by not forgiving?
And what is it costing you?