How Can We Forgive?
Letting Go Of Guilt, Shame & The Past
Question:
I have had many visions from my past come up in meditation. How can we deal with this in our practice — and how can we forgive others and ourselves?
Answer:
This question has been on your mind for a long time, so I thought I would write a longer response. I hope you can find some clarity here.
The Past Clings Through Guilt & Shame
When we enter stillness, many mechanisms unfold. One of these is the arising of things from the past that are not yet resolved within us.
This is natural. As superficial functions of mind quieten, deeper aspects come to the foreground. This includes everything that we have buried and not been able to look at.
On first appearances, we tend to believe that situations from the past remain painful and unresolved within us because of the actions of others.
On deeper reflection, we realise that the reason is not because of the actions of others, but usually because of how we feel about our own actions.
The reason we cannot let go is almost always, at its heart, because of the guilt and shame we feel about the role we played, not because of the role played by others.
Human beings are fundamentally moral, and as we wake up from the self-induced sleep and disassociation that allowed us to function up to this point, suppressed guilt and shame often come up as well.
How Do We Clear Guilt & Shame?
The essential pivot is self understanding. The more we understand ourselves, the more we realise why we acted as we did, and thus the easier it becomes to forgive ourselves.
In virtually every case, our actions were the result of trying our best with the limited wisdom and strength that we had at the time.
In other words, mistakes and imperfect outcomes did not arise because we ourselves are fundamentally bad or broken.
Beyond this, the deeper that self understanding permeates, the more we realise that, actually, all narratives about ourselves are limited and, in an ultimate sense, untrue.
Subjective and dualistic conceptions of ourselves as such-and-such a person collapse when confronted with the direct experience of our perfect, whole and incorruptible true nature.
This is not something that words can bring us to understand; it is something that must be directly experienced by each one of us.
Such realisations in regard to oneself bleed over into others; if we first illuminate and forgive ourselves, then illumination and forgiveness of others occurs naturally.
How Do We Develop Self Understanding?
By guarding the centre, entering stillness and refining emptiness. In doing so, the heart-mind will be illuminated and we come to perceive true nature.
Relived emotions and trauma that arise within meditation are like the exhaust fumes of our process; the generation of yang uproots and clears the yin that had previously been locked in our system.
As yin is purged, it expresses into our field of consciousness. Like an ink drop falling into water, it momentarily blossoms and expands before returning to non-being.
This process is not easy, but you are not alone. You are experiencing what every master who has risen beyond the red dust has experienced.
On the other side lies ease, joy and transcendence.
道炁長存,
Oscar
“ As yin is purged, it expresses into our field of consciousness. Like an ink drop falling into water, it momentarily blossoms and expands before returning to non-being.” is a beautiful analogy of the proces, lightens the mind 😌
How interesting, Oscar. Especially this very clear idea of yin being purged by the effect of yang. Thank you.