One of my mentors, Mary Morrissey, emphasizes in her teachings the power and importance of forgiveness. As does Jack Canfield, Wayne Dyer, and many other teachers and mentors that have blessed me along my path.
Whether I am holding onto feelings of anger or resentment or disapproval of another, or of myself, I am creating my own suffering. No one else gets to think my thoughts but me, yet the thoughts I think have everything to do with the quality of the life I am living.
The practice of choosing my thoughts and noticing when I’m holding onto judgment and anger became vitally important to me when the news of Michael’s death reached me. As I moved along the journey of healing, I kept running head on into Forgiveness. She would remind me to let the judgment go. Drop the resentment. Find another way to perceive what is causing the anger and pain.
I would think I had put those negative emotions behind me, my heart felt at peace, and then a memory or an event would present me once again with the evidence that I still have forgiveness work to do. The same names kept popping up whenever I was presented with the question “Who do you need to forgive?” I would think I had whittled the list down, but when I looked with an open heart and an honest eye, the same names kept reappearing. All of them, I noticed, in my opinion had inflicted harm or pain onto one of my children. And, the most challenging for me were the ones Michael spent his last hours with. The ones I felt could have listened and prevented the tragedy from ever occurring. Twenty-twenty hindsight is always perfect, or so the saying goes.
One of the last times I was struggling with the anger that erupts when I dwell on what a more nurturing situation could prevented, I received a message from Michael that made all the difference. This was thirty-six weeks into my journey and I had just received a copy of the police report, so the sadness and anger had been thoroughly triggered.
A few days passed, and I was still feeling the sting of it all. I decided to ask Michael for support. I tuned into his wave length, after preparing myself in silence to hear him, and I asked him, “Michael, why did you leave the way you did?” His answer, “It was an opening in time and I had an appointment to keep. If I had stayed home with you, I couldn’t have gone. I actually needed Dad to not listen and to leave me so I could take my exit. Try to let him off the hook. I know you carry anger towards him.”
And with that, I vowed to do my best. So, whenever the conversation in my head tempts me to blame his father, I remember this message from Michael and I turn towards the light of acceptance, trusting that Michael’s soul was calling him home and he was listening, even though my human awareness cannot fully understand this.
I do my best to remember “forgive everyone everything.” I do it for me, not for them. I do it so I can move on. I look under the anger and find sadness—a deep ocean of emotions that this loss added to. I say “loss” because I miss Michael’s physical presence so much. I miss his laughter and sweetness of spirit and his amazing beautiful voice. I miss his messes and his music. I grieve for what he still had to bring to the world.
And, I celebrate what he did do in such a short time. I know he never uttered an unkind word or intentionally harmed anyone or anything. He would gently take spiders outside and literally wouldn’t kill a mosquito or a fly. So, when I feel the pain of unforgiveness in my heart, I turn to Michael for inspiration and support. I remind myself of the power forgiveness graces us with, and I do my best to “turn the other cheek”—to find another way to see it, to cast a kind eye on the perceived perpetrator. I take myself by the hand and gently lead that part of me that has forgotten back to grace, to love, to healing energies and expansive thoughts.
Mary Morrissey tells a story I love about her conversation with the Dalai Lama that illustrates the power of forgiveness. She wanted to understand how he could generate compassion and exude happiness when his home country of Tibet and the people of Tibet were being destroyed by the Chinese government. When she asked him how has been able to keep this experience from dominating his daily awareness or affecting his daily happiness, he had the following answer. “Everyone of us has friends. Friends easy to love. Friends make mistake, even easy to forgive. Then we have what we call sacred friends. Oh, sacred friends. Very difficult forgive. Very, very difficult. Chinese government my sacred friend. I would never have developed compassionate heart absent Chinese government. Chinese government makes so difficult to forgive that I had to get very, very big heart and have to keep very, very big heart and it’s a big challenge.”
I love that story and the lesson it has for me as I run into my sacred friends. Are they safe to roam the streets of my mind? Do I want to attack them? It’s quite a practice and it does develop the heart muscle. I know my heart has expanded and grown in my capacity to love because of my sacred friends.
I have also learned the power of letting myself off the hook for all of the shoulds I’ve placed on myself over the years. Am I safe to roam the streets of my own mind? Forgive everyone everything includes me in that circle. My life is what it is today because of all that has happened here in this earth school. Another Mary Morrissey-ism, “The circumstances of your life are the curriculum for your spiritual growth.” My life is sweet because of my adversities, not in spite of them. It’s sweet because I have learned to look for the seed of what’s possible and good in that which doesn’t appear so on the surface. My life is sweet because I ask when I remember to, “What have you come to teach me? What is the blessing in this?”