There Is Nothing to Forgive

Written on December 22, 2009 by Tom Stine

credit:
Katie Tegtmeyer

This article is one of five articles on forgiveness posted today by several different writers. At the end of this article is a list of links to the others. Forgiveness is an excellent topic for the holidays as, to me, Jesus exemplifies forgiveness more than any other spiritual teacher. And while we have no idea when he was actually born, thanks to history, we celebrate his birth in three more days.

I have a somewhat radical perspective with regard to forgiveness. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say, “I can forgive, but I’ll never forget.” Well, I’m sorry, but that isn’t even within a hundred miles of forgiveness. As long as there is any perception of wrong doing, any perception of injury, any perception of being hurt by another, then you have not only not forgiven, but you, yourself, are trapped by your own inability or unwillingness to forgive. Even worse, the only person who is suffering from your unforgiveness is you!

Why is this so? Why would my unforgiveness be a cause of my suffering? The cause of my suffering is what the other person did to me! That certainly sounds reasonable. After all, one would argue, if the other person hadn’t hit me, yelled at me, abused me, raped me, left me, abandoned me (and on and on), then I would not be suffering. I think it would be hard to find 5 people that would disagree with that position. It is simply how the vast majority of the world thinks.

But let’s look at this situation for a moment. At the moment the incident took place, you were experiencing pain. I grant you that. There is no question that in the moment, really, honest pain, anguish and hurt occurred. I do not mean to imply that this is not the case. Pain is a hard thing to endure, and it is often difficult to get through. But as soon as the incident is over, what is happening now? Well, something different. Something without the pain. As always is the case, life moves on to something new.

So, where is the painful incident now? In memory. It is now a thought. It is also a feeling attached to the thought. More than likely these thoughts and feelings will form beliefs, such as “I must be a terrible person for such a thing to have happened to me.” And as these thoughts are repeated, as the feelings are regenerated, as the experience gets ground into the psychological-mental-emotional system, a whole complex of suffering gets built around the memories of the experience. But please notice, because this part is very important, all of it is now 100% in your mind. The incident may have occurred in the seemingly real world, but now that it is over, it is gone and exists only in the mind.

This state of affairs is both a curse and a blessing. It is a curse because an event that happened once in the past is now replaying in your awareness over and over and over again. It is traumatic in every sense of the word. But it is a blessing because you can now let it all go since it exists only in the mind. It won’t be easy, and recovery from memories that are traumatic are some of the toughest to let go of, but you can let it go. And letting it go, completely letting it go, is forgiveness. True forgiveness. The kind of forgiveness that matters.

Believe it or not, you can let go of a traumatic memory and all the emotion and beliefs attached to it to such a amazing extent that you will have a hard time even remembering that the event took place. It will feel as if it was a movie that you watched once upon a time and are now recalling. There will be nothing really left of it. It won’t be repressed, supressed, denied, or any of a dozen other psychological methods to try to get it out of your mind. As a matter of fact, almost surely you will have to re-experience a major portion of the traumatic event, even to the point of feeling all your anger, shame, guilt, fear, horror, etc., again. It can be brutal and rough. But on the other side is a freedom like nothing you’ve ever seen or felt. Believe me, I know from my own experience.

And that is why I can make the bold claim that I did in the title of this argument: “There is nothing to forgive.” EVER!! When you truly forgive, when you finally let go of something to the extent I’m describing, you will see in no uncertain terms that there is nothing to forgive, and, more shockingly, there never was!! You are healed in a way that is absolutely miraculous. The past is past, gone, never to return. It was only in your mind and now is gone! You are truly free.

Can there be any doubt that those strange words of Jesus, while hanging on the cross, came from a man who knew, really and truly knew, that there is nothing to forgive?

Forgive them for they know not what they do.

How true! How perfect! Jesus could look at his tormenters and have nothing in his heart but true forgiveness, a forgiveness that sees nothing to forgive, ever. To have that utter openness of heart is the greatest blessing by far.

If you want to read more about this somewhat radical view of forgiveness, I would suggest A Course in Miracles. The main theme of The Course is not miracles, as the title would suggest, but forgiveness. The Course says that true forgiveness as I’ve defined it above is the key to freedom, awakening and, ultimately, miracles.

The Other Forgiveness Articles

• Daphne Lim: The Gift of Forgiveness
• Albert Foong (The Urbanmonk): Our Innate Innocence – Reflections on Forgiveness
• Takuin Minamoto: The Wound of Forgiveness
• Davidya: Deep Forgiveness

Beyond the Known

And last but not least, my good friend Takuin has produced an amazing e-book, “Beyond the Known.” It is a delightful, easy to read and stunningly beautiful book. And it has a great price: free. Please head over to takuin.com to download a copy.

Layer After Layer After Layer

Written on December 14, 2008 by Tom Stine

credit: Frank Bonilla Abstracts.tv

For most of us, a part of the journey of awakening will involve a process of letting go of layer after layer after layer. You sit, you see through something, you feel this tremendous release, and your mind says, “Wow, I’ve really seen through this thing. I’m getting pretty free.” But are you free? How can you tell if you are or aren’t?

A friend of mind just help me to see how you can tell whether you are free on a subject or not. It’s so simple, I really can’t believe I missed it. Ready? Here is it:

If you still give a hoot about it, then you aren’t free. There is more to be seen through.

Let’s use an example. Let’s say you are madly in love with a woman. Not that that has ever happened to any of you, but let’s pretend, shall we? You sit, you look at the situation, you let go of your feelings about her, you look at your beliefs, you challenge yourself to see her from any and ever angle. You reach an incredible place of clarity, peace and love. You feel incredible joy and love for this person. You find that, amazingly, you feel more love than you could have possibly imagined regardless of what happens between you. Your heart is wide open, and you feel better than you’ve felt in years. Yes, you’ve really opened and experienced great peace, joy and love.

All done, right? You’re free right? You might be. How can you be certain. Simple. Do your thoughts go to this person frequently? Do you still find yourself “drawn” to her? Do you find that you can’t get away from your thoughts about her? Ah, well, congratulations, you’ve discovered another layer. Time to sit down in your chair, open your heart, and be open and present with all the thoughts and feelings that arise within you. Round 2 or 8 or 20 has just arrived.

The layers will arise, one after another, until you are done. There is no way to tell how many there are, or when they will be finished. But a simple thing to do is to be utterly grateful to each one and to their seeming source, the worldly object that appears to give rise to them. And when your mind is finally quiet, then you will know you are finally free. You won’t give a hoot. And you will be supremely happy.

Dedicated to my dear friend M. Namaste.

Love What Is

Written on May 27, 2008 by Tom Stine

I had a client once who asked me to explain further a comment I made to him during one of our sessions:

When you can for just this moment, just for this one moment, completely, utterly totally, beyond accept, love your experience right now, then you have the power to do something about it.

I have seen, in many contexts, the idea of accepting, allowing or welcoming one’s experience. It seems to me that this is a crucial step to letting go or healing any issue. But these terms, welcome, allow, accept, really don’t go far enough in my experience. They do help, but they don’t have the force, the utter radicalness that brings incredible freedom and power. The more radical approach for me is to love my experience.

credit: dodoco

Let’s say that you experience a bit of hardship or unpleasantness, something like a break-up in a relationship. You are experiencing sadness, unhappiness, a sense of loss and rejection. The question I would often ask a client is “Could you accept or welcome the sense of rejection or loss?” This question helps the client to get in touch with the feeling, to experience it more fully. From there, it is possible to feel a spontaneous release or freedom around the feeling. And that is very good.

However, as I have discovered in my own experience, if you can go beyond welcoming or accepting, and actually go to loving the feeling, even more power is unleashed. For in the moment that you love something, you are saying in effect, “I am 100% happy with the way things are. I don’t need to change a thing.” And that seems to me to be the source of something miraculous. I think it was Eckhart Tolle truly means by The Power of Now.

The Surge of Peace

Every time I do this, no matter what it is I am loving, I feel an incredible surge of peace, happiness and well-being. It is truly remarkable. It goes far beyond feeling a little better about an issue. It transcends releasing or any other process. It feels as if I have activated some hidden power source deep within me, one that goes out into the world through me, liberating me and everything else from suffering.

I encouraged my client in this instance to go beyond just accepting his problem and feelings about it because of the incredible power of love. But it has to be genuine. It requires a bit of radical thinking. It requires a huge leap. Or maybe not. Maybe it just requires a willingness to see what truly is the Truth. The truth that love is all there is.

Loving What Is and Change

credit: mobology

Right about now you might be saying, “But Tom, I really do want to change an aspect of my life. How can loving something to the extent that I’m, in your words, ‘100% happy with the way things are,’ allow me to make changes in my life?” I’ve heard these questions before. The answer is quite simple, really. Nothing, repeat nothing can change if you first don’t accept it as it is, at least to some extent. And the more you can accept it, ie, go beyond acceptance and love it, the better.

Think about it: let’s say that you are wanting to lose weight. You’ve tried and tried, but to no avail. You have done everything, but nothing works. Why? The odds are pretty good that you are experiencing a massive internal conflict that is locking the weight in place. You are fighting reality. You are fighting life as it is right now. You are overweight. That’s reality. That’s the truth.

Subconsciously, you can almost hear the battle. “I hate being fat, I don’t like myself,” and on and on. And then there’s the other side: “I want to lose weight, I must lose weight, I should lose weight, I want to be thin!” Accepting things as they are drains the fight out of you. It weakens the battle. Your feelings relax, subside, and you feel more peaceful. And loving things as they are, well, it takes this process an order of magnitude further. The fight is gone, the battle forever done. You love yourself as you are. Nothing to change.

Change Can Be Effortless

My experience is that when I do this important step, change often just happens, with little effort on my part. Things simply improve. You might get on the scale and find that 10 pounds of anger and animosity has been shed from your system and your waist by shifting to love. Peace brings harmony and flow. I recall reading one time that “retained hate = overweight.” Could be, don’t you think? It is easy to see how this process would work if that were true.

So, pick an area of your life that is stuck. Look at it, examine how you are not loving things as they are. Make an effort to drop your criticisms, your judgments, your struggle against it. First accept, then move toward love. For now, simply identify what isn’t working and see how you are not being loving to things as they are. It will make a profound difference if you do nothing else. In future posts, I will talk more about how you can work this process on any issue.

In case you can’t tell, I love working with my clients and helping them to experience radical growth in their lives. I personally learn a great deal from them. I’m glad to be able to share this learning with you. Namaste.

Affirmations? None for Me, Thanks

Written on May 23, 2008 by Tom Stine

credit: Jacob.Enos

I’ve never been a big fan of affirmations. Many spiritual people are, and I respect that, but I’m just not certain they work. The first time I ever tried doing affirmations, probably 15 or more years ago, I felt, well, incredibly fake telling myself something that just didn’t seem true. As they say around here, you can dress a pig in a bonnet, but you still got a pig (you just gotta love rural America). So, I rarely if ever used them. And I never use them now.

Of course, affirmations are probably the most ridiculed aspect of the entire self-help movement. Remember Stuart Smalley? I loved Al Franken standing in front of the mirror on Saturday Night Live and saying, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and dog gone it, people like me!” There seems to be a almost cultural bias against affirmations. So, maybe it isn’t just me.

So what isn’t quite right about affirmations? It seems to me that affirmations are fundamentally flawed. They always have an underlying assumption that says “something is wrong with me.” For instance, lets say that you are Stuart Smalley and you think you aren’t very smart. Every time you look in the mirror you say to yourself, consciously or otherwise, “God, I’m stupid.” You have come to believe this statement, deep down, with all the attached emotions and feelings associated with it.

Affirmations would have you start repeating to yourself, “I’m smart enough.” The idea is to counter the negative statement with a positive one. But does it work? Not for most people. Let me give you an illustration to show you why I say that affirmations don’t work. (Thanks to Hale Dwoskin for the following illustration which he often uses at Sedona Method retreats.)

Affirmations start with the negative statement, “God, I’m stupid.” Let’s represent this negative statement with a frowny face:

When you say an affirmation, you are attempting to change the negative to the positive belief, “I’m smart enough.”

Everything should be good now, right? Well, no. While you may repeat the affirmation, the negative belief hasn’t gone anywhere. It is still firmly planted in your mind. So what you get, in fact, is this:

And if you keep repeating the affirmation, day after day, it will get more and more in conflict with the old belief until you end up with a mess:

Is this what will always happen with affirmations? No, of course not. Sometimes they are successful. But millions of people have attempted to make changes in their lives with affirmations and, unfortunately, they quite often do not work. You simply end up with a subconscious mess. So, what can you do?

credit: peresebastian

It seems almost obvious to me now that the better approach is to root out the negative belief instead, to let it go. If you look in the mirror and say, for instance, “God, I’m fat and ugly,” you are making a whole series of judgments about yourself that may, in fact, not be true.

Have you ever questioned these basic assumptions? Have you looked at the feelings that hold these judgments in place? Have you asked yourself what you might be gaining from believing that you are fat and ugly? Have you looked at your fears about being overweight, or your fears of being thin? What messages did you hear as a kid about being thin or good looking? You could ask a dozen more questions about yourself and thereby call into question your mantra, “God, I’m fat and ugly.”

In fact, you may discover that there is absolutely nothing wrong with you. Nothing. You aren’t skinny. So what? I mean really, right at this moment, are you any worse for wear? Are not all the negatives you’ve heard about being overweight somewhere off in the future? Are any of them here right now? Are you going to die right now if you don’t lose 50 pounds?

Whenever I get firmly rooted in right now and out of the fearful future, I quite often find that I’m far more capable of acting, far more motivated to make changes. I’m more open and more willing to try, to risk, to dare. And you probably are, too. Losing weight, exercising, whatever your personal challenge may be, suddenly becomes less daunting and more doable.

In a recent article, I wrote about the Sedona Method, a great program for helping to undo the negativity and judgments that we carry. Another program that I’m a fan of is Byron Katie’s “The Work”. Both of these techniques can be useful tools in letting go of the judgments and negative beliefs that keep us stuck. And they are, in a certain sense, valuable tools to have on the spiritual journey. They help us to uncover a much truer perspective about ourselves that helps us to see the fundamental truth about who we are.

And one last thought for you: I have a hunch that every time affirmations seem to work for someone, it is because at some level the person actually let go of the original negative belief. The success stems from the letting go, not the affirmation. That’s just a hunch, so I could be wrong. You never know!

I’ll leave you with a funny video that I watched this morning that got me thinking about affirmations. If affirmations work for you, then by all means, use them. But if not, I think you will get a kick out this video. Enjoy!