Episode 005 Forgiveness – Releasing dark emotion to step into the light

Rumi said, “People want to be happy. Don’t keep serving them your pain.” Forgiveness can be one of the most difficult things we get to do. Stay tuned for why that serves us, not the offender. And how holding onto the dark days means that we keep serving up our pasts to everyone we come in contact with. Stories are our lives in language. Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast.  I’m Lori Lee, and I’m excited for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. Power serves you best when you know how to use it! Last week we looked at personal narrative research project I did and what I discovered about how we engage with risk. This week we are going to look at some ideas on forgiveness. At an emotional intelligence conference I attended mid-year 2016, I and a couple hundred other folks from around the country, found ourselves doing work to release old wounds, old stories that didn’t serve us, events of the past that had caused us to put up walls. It was a particularly vulnerable exercise where the lights were off and people were allowed, in fact encouraged, to scream out their anger, to vocally set free and release pains they had carried… always with them over the years. As I watched and listened and participated I wasn’t as wigged out as I thought I was going to be if, as my friends and I had discussed earlier, “there was screaming involved.”  In fact, what struck me so profoundly was how much pain everyone carries. Here was a large room filled with a hundred and seventy-something people from all across the country. Different races, religions, genders, states, socio-economic status, etc… but when the lights are down we are all the same – we are all carrying deep, deep pain. I was so struck by the human struggle taking place in the room when an idea suddenly became phenomenally clear to me, for the first time: Forgiveness is NOT about the other person– The one who hurt you. Forgiveness is about ourselves. When Christ said, in Matthew in the New Testament, that we are to forgive seventy times seven, I believe he was stating that there is never a time when it will be okay to burden our souls with pain, resentment, and hatred. There will never be a time when that will be good for us. No matter how many people do crappy things to us, or how many times a person hurts us, it is never enough for us to give them license to crush out our light and our love, which is exactly what carrying around anger and bitterness does to us. Let me repeat that… he was only stating that there is never a time when it will be okay to burden our souls with pain, resentment, and hatred. There will never be a time when that will be good for you. No matter how many people do crappy things to us, or how many times a person hurts us, it is never enough for us to give them license to crush out our light and our love. He doesn’t want us to have to be standing in that room screaming out the pain we have held onto. He doesn’t want us to carry around pain and anger and hatred that block out the light in our eyes and the lilt in our step. Isn’t that a clarifying thought! All these years forgiveness was a difficult-to-implement concept that focused on people not being mad at each other and working through things that felt unfair. But this commandment, this practice of forgiving isn’t about allowing someone else to get off the hook. It has nothing to do with that. I know it feels like it, but it’s not about justice or mercy, (those things get worked out later) It’s a practice to free our own energy from the dark emotions that cripple and crush us right now. And even though sometimes it feels like forgiveness is letting the other person...