I dedicate this to my dear friend zain, your comment on my last post brought me to tears. On the contrary my brother, it is I who owe you the deepest of thanks.
Today was a day in which I realized the profound power of forgiveness.
I woke up today and followed through with a commitment I had made to a good friend. The same one that I had several times bailed on before. To go do yoga. I love yoga, and when I had decided to go and then cancelled so many times before, it was not for lack of love of the activity, but the escalation of self doubt and regret over not having been doing this all the while. Why did it have to be some big step, just to go do something I love, in a wonderful environment, with good company? Why was doing something so easy and so wonderful instead transmuted into something so contrary to the activities" very essence? But somehow I managed to go, despite these useless feelings pulling me back to my cozy bed of indolence.
It was with great joy that I saw my friend arrive, yet I was still distracted by these negative thoughts as I attempted to warm up, feeling the vestiges of the various old injuries I have inflicted on this precious body of mine. We began the class in meditation, and the instructor led us in calm introspection. 'Think on what you want this class to guide you to.. does one word float to the top of your consciousness? Is it compassion.. is it..' She lists a few words that tend to already be pretty active on my mind. But a word she didn"t say did rise to the top. Forgiveness. And so I thought upon that word for those few moments, and proceeded to have a wonderful class and day, even though it wasn"t long before the past clouded my view of the wonderful gift of the present.
Forgiveness. It seems to take so much these days to attain something that is fundamentally a gift only you can give to yourself. We seek it in certain aspects of religion, in substances, in posessions...justifications for the things we have done are instead what we seem to get when we continually look for it in an external source. Its sad that the knowledge of the beauty and truth that links every religion that has ever been is within us yet we still seek more elsewhere. In our actions lie a motive, a premise, and in so many of the things that plague our society it is clear to see so many varieties of pains we have all endured which cause us to now do harm to ourselves and to others. We try to turn ourselves and others into martyrs, and for what?
Until this hour upon reading Zain"s comment, I found it so difficult to forgive myself for the things I have and have not done. I have broken laws, noses, and hearts. Taken pleasure in others pain and my own. I have lied, cheated, and stolen. Turned my back on people I"ve loved and betrayed trusts and sacrificed relationships for nothingness. Oh the abstractions I can derive from the many mistakes of my past... my list can go on and on just as perhaps yours can , and these together trickle together into the great pool of collective sorrows of humanity.
I count myself to be truly blessed to have all of you in my life, however distant in time and space our relationship may be, my heart is forever with you. It brings me the deepest joys in the simplest of things; a heartfelt comment, a phone call from a friend whose multiple calls I had missed and never returned and a conversation that is still full of joy at being able to talk and with no mention of the missed ones of yesterday.
If there is one thing that I can do, it is to forgive you. We can stay together and laugh and cry and compete over the wrongs we have done and that have been done to us. But what is my forgiveness truly worth? Nothing in itself, except perhaps planting a seed of the utmost value... one that will grow into the capacity for you to forgive yourself. And that seed is too precious for words.
Even if it starts with what may seem like the smallest of steps, loving yourself, forgiving yourself, the consequences bring the love all the more strong to the rest of the world.. for none of us are apart from another. There is nothing I can tell you that is truly of me, I am but an expression of all of us, as are you. So forgive yourself, and you forgive us all. Know yourself, love yourself, and no life form will be without that strength you bestow.
We have so much that we must do in such a brief moment allotted to us. We can turn inwards to the shallowest of levels and think about this body as alone, this life as everything, and in doing so attempt to sever yourself from our pervasive collective existence. Or we can look deeper and smile at the recognition that this body is borrowed, this life is illusory, and no matter how hard we try to defy it, we are all one, always have been, and always will be.
I forgive myself.