Forgiveness

Meditation truly is a gift I give myself.  This morning I took my 20 minutes and extended it by 30.  I was wrestling with understanding what is Truth.  As I went deeper and deeper, the contradictions became more intense and then they melted away.

I have written previously about the several spiritual statements or affirmations that I recently adopted.  This morning as I meditated I found myself lingering on one: "Forgiveness is how I return to God/Love."  I thought I'd forgiven those in my life for what they'd done to me. Then the questions came. Have I really forgiven if I still carry resentment? Have I really forgiven if I still guard myself or am wary?  Of course not.

Then I attempted to forgive; I wanted to get to the place where I could feel nothing but unconditional love. As I went deeper, I found that in each of the two relationships I lingered with I had accountability. Hmmpf.  :-) Did I not know this part? 

For several years I provided spiritual coaching in three-day, one-on-one intentional living intensives.  Each was unique to the person with whom I was working, and my guides would give me unique coaching questions and exercises for that person.  Most were used only once.  However, for most a similar exercise on forgiveness was given to me.  It always involved three levels of forgiveness: acts which the client needed to forgive others for, acts for which the client needed to ask for forgiveness, and acts for which the client needed to forgive him- or herself.  Finally, we'd explore the gifts that had resulted from hurtful circumstances.

As I meditated on forgiveness this morning, these three levels kept intertwining. Back and forth, I went from offering forgiveness to asking for forgiveness to forgiving myself and back again. Then I drifted deeper.  I'd written two books on fear and courage: were fear and courage not really about forgiveness?  If there were always gifts, why would I not have courage?  Why would I be afraid?

Almost when I felt like I'd gotten to the bottom of understanding the relationship between fear and courage and forgiveness, I found myself going broader.  I've always thought that my purpose was to help people find the place of pure Love that dwells inside themselves and connect to the place of pure Love that dwells in each of their fellow human beings.  When I had been meditating on my new affirmations a few weeks ago, what had come was that my purpose was the forgiveness of all human kind.  I thought I'd just go with it since that is what came, but thought my real purpose was connect us to and through Love. 

Only this morning in this meditation did I realize that they were the same.  Only this morning did I realize that the reason the forgiveness exercise was always given to me for clients while other exercises were unique was that my purpose was forgiveness.  These clients wouldn't have been brought to me if they didn't need to learn forgiveness. The Aha! moment for me was that forgiveness is my gateway to Love; it is the gateway through which I lead others to find pure Love. Without forgiveness, we will never find that place in ourselves where we are Love, and we certainly will never find that place in others where they are pure Love.

This knowing didn't come printed on bulletin boards: it came from listening to what I know in my heart. This wisdom came because I showed up to listen and floated through lots of clutter to the crystal clarity of what I know.