tending the garden

I think about forgiveness a lot.

I’ve done a lot of forgiving in the past two years, of myself and others. Big forgiveness, the kind that shakes you as it leaves you and is given to another.

The kind of forgiveness that hurts, because it undoes the anger, fear and shame intertwined with the insides of my chest tightening to hold on, because familiar pain is preferable to the unknown.

I think that’s one of the things I don’t hear as often about forgiveness. It actually does hurt, to forgive. It’s hard to let go of the harm someone has done to you. It was for me, and it is still. I lose part of my story when I let that go of harm. Most of my life, harm and trauma have been an integral part of my story, my identity, how I oriented to the world. Not just through my conscious narrative, but my unconscious as well, even my physiology. I was living a paradox, sleepwalking through my life extremely reactive, moving constantly and as quickly as I could through chaos so I never had to STOP.

Reacting keeps you from being able to understand.

Sleepwalking keeps you lost in your stories.

To forgive, you have to understand. You have to be able to see. To step back from the reaction and see what’s there, in that space Viktor Frankl wrote about, the one between stimulus and response. He says that’s where growth and freedom lie. That’s where forgiveness lives too, I’ve come to know.

Another thing I don’t hear too often about forgiveness is that it’s not only a process, deeper the deeper the harm, but it’s also something that doesn’t just end. Even if I forgive someone who has hurt me, truly, with my whole body and intellect and heart, I have to tend that forgiveness like a patch of garden.

I think part of this is because that as we change, our understanding changes and hopefully grows, and we realize there’s another layer to the forgiveness that we thought we had fully given. The depths of the forgiveness I have capacity to give grow the more compassion and loving-kindness I cultivate in myself.

It’s humbling to realize, over and over, that I am not nearly as kind or loving or compassionate as I need to be, and that I can be. I get overwhelmed sometimes, and frustrated, when I’ve told myself a story that I’ve reached the end of my negative energy with someone, only to find there are more weeds in my garden of forgiveness. But, then I remember, for me there is no Eden, there is only heaven on earth in the moment of this, and to experience the gift of being able to continue to learn how to forgive is paradise.

The last thing I want to share is something more practical, and the most helpful practice I’ve learned for cultivating love and compassion for someone who was incredibly harmful to me.

This is how I started, and what I go back to when I feel the weeds furl about the ankles of my understanding. I see him as a child. I don’t know what he actually looks like as child, but I see his true nature, his innocence and his desire to love, to be loved, to be in wonder. When I can see him like that, my chest becomes less tight. I can pull him close, hold his face in my hands and tell him I see him as he is, as he always has been. Forgiveness is not about absolving accountability. It’s a gift, for me, for him, and for the world.

Thich Nhat Hanh said, “Happiness is here. Help yourself to it.”