Forgiveness and Peace - Last Thoughts, by Claire Genkai

Forgiveness and peace

A few years ago I sat a very extended retreat in my monastery on the theme of contemplative care of the dying. It was a collaboration between clinicians and contemplatives. It was also a very deep experiential process, using meditation practices to face into the end of ones life.  Despite this there was a lot of tender laughter and humour in amongst the silence, listening and exploration.

At one point in the process we were asked to walk very slowly and consciously though our lives and to focus on aspects of our behaviour and relationships that we would rather turn away from. As I write this now I realise that a meditation like this is not for the faint hearted! I spent a large part of three hours in a state of reminiscence and appreciation, captivated by emerging memories. Eventually as I settled I found myself facing into elements of my own life that frankly I would have preferred not to look at again.

The slow growth of sensations associated with regret emerged. Faced with no one to listen to my justifications, no ‘reasonable reasons’ to tell myself or others; I simply had to sit with the undefended truth of my behaviour. Regret had a certain palette to it I discovered. There were physical sensations akin to anxiety, heat in my neck and face, occasionally some tears and a feeling of smallness as if any ego or pride that might inflate me was absent.

I don’t know how long that went on for. I only remember that by maintaining simple focus and then alternating with bringing loving kindness to myself as much as I was able, there was a sense of regret dissolving away in me and eventually around some of the issues I faced into; I could experience an inner quiet.

In that moment I experienced a distinction between guilt and regret. I realised that guilt was a loud story focussed on my discomforted feelings about what I had done. It was compelling and rather self absorbed. Regret on the other hand had an altogether different quality of focussing on the other and on the unskilled nature of my behaviour. It felt less elaborate but quietly more painful. I came to think of regret as the core often wrapped up in my elaborate guilt trips.

Now you might be wondering at this point what all of this has to do with the theme of forgiveness and peace? Or maybe you have already seen exactly where my experience took me?

Over that three hours and for many moments subsequently I came to experience what it is to face into regret, to let the stories and self serving habitual sensations of guilt drop away, and to offer myself forgiveness for my lack of skill. Each time I was able to move towards that state of embodied forgiveness, the act of placing a metaphorical hand over my heart/mind, I noticed a deep peace. The kind of peace that comes from letting the life you have lived in all its hues, move through you.

It was only when I was able to experience an embodied forgiveness of myself by myself that my compassion for those who had treated me unskilfully could really flow. By flow I do not mean words or sentiments; I mean an undeniable energetic movement of warmth and care towards another who has caused you suffering.

I have sat with many people who are dying and with their families and friends. Firstly it is a mistake to believe that every dying experience is suffused with insight, reconciliation and love. If we wait for the dramatic phase shifts of our life to happen before we face into what we need to forgive in order to be at peace, we may not have enough time, or enough life force to do it well.

These days I make it a daily practice to face into the situations I would rather not look at again. I expect to feel difficult about them and I tell myself this is just natural. I expect to have to wade through my reasonable reasons and justifications before I can simply accept that ‘yes…. I did that’. With practice what has followed is more tenderness towards myself and others and as a result my state of inner peace has grown.  By doing this I deeply accept we are all imperfect. I can be at peace about that!

In gassho Claire Genkai

On the path of forgiveness we stumble across the stones of our shadow

By Marcos Frangos
Business Support Manager, Hampshire County Council

On the path of forgiveness, I believe we stumble across the stones of our shadow. And we stare at the bald reality that we have suffered and that we too have caused suffering. It is a humbling virtue, and as Karen pointed out in her blog on the same subject, it requires effort to keep walking the path.  

I suspect I often embody what Buddhists might name a ‘near enemy’ in relation to forgiveness. That is to say I assume attributes that look like forgiveness, but they are false selves masquerading as forgiveness and patience. The reality of my experience is that forgiveness is multi-faceted - a spiralling and deepening experience rather than a destination. It is entirely possible to partially forgive, yet to still harbour resentments.

Our ego is most adept at manoeuvring to avoid experiences that feel threatening, and require us to re-examine who we are. I am indebted to two family constellations facilitators (Clare Crombie and Sheila McCarthy Dodd) for the following analogy which I love. Our ego is like a superbly loyal sheep dog permanently on guard. As soon as it perceives that we’re close to an experience that might move us out of our comfort zone (forgiveness being a good example), it’s trained to nip our ankles and return us back to the fold, and to the territory of the known. Comfortable. Safe.

So what circumstances trigger my inner sheepdog to keep me from the challenge, the expansion, the greater capacity to love that are the fruits of forgiveness?

Here’s my forgiveness-avoidance list:

·        Preferring to stay in victimhood; if I keep the other person polarised I don’t have to own my part in the suffering

·        When the others’ pain and suffering so closely mirrors my own that I can hardly bare to witness it.

·        I cling on to ‘wanting to be right’, over and above wanting to be in truthful relationship

·        When I feel my anger or entrenched feelings give me energy and/or a sense of identity, and I’m reluctant to let it go. “Who am I, if I am not this struggle or pain?” In reality I am sure I consume more energy  holding on to unresolved hurt

·        When my inner resources are weakened, I fear that forgiving will drain me yet further – do I really want to turn the other cheek?

·        A fear that forgiving admits fallibility and weakness, and at times my arrogance, pride or fear make it hard to admit being simply human 

Recently I walked part of the Camino de St Jacques de Compostelle, in France – an old Christian pilgrimage route. I walked with awareness of some of the patterns mentioned above. I had allowed a gradual hardening within me, sediment by sediment and whilst my mind might choose  to forget painful episodes, my heart breathes with every detail.  

Heart and sheepdog, it’s quite a dance isn’t it?

So, on my walk I prayed and held the intention to soften and forgive and allow an expansion in which everyone can thrive. As issues came up for me, I just offered them to God. Some moments this led to my really experiencing my sadness, at other times, I felt incredibly supported by the extraordinary healing of nature, and of my companion pilgrims. Walking in nature was for me a wonderful activity to enable forgiveness. I experienced a gentle disentangling of complex inner knots, without real exertion.

I end this personal enquiry with a most beautiful approach to forgiveness. It’s from Hawaii and called the Hoʻoponopono prayer, based on an understanding that human beings are inextricably linked with all creation.

It asks a profound question around forgiveness: “what is in me that is causing an adverse condition to manifest in the other person's life?” and it goes like this…

I am sorry

Please forgive me
I love you
Thank you

Blessings on our paths of forgiveness, and in particular (what I find hardest of all) to expand into forgiving ourselves.

Forgiving Our Dark Side

On Saturday I listened to BBC Radio 4’s ‘The Bottom Line’ hosted by Evan Davis.  The topic was ‘leading in a crisis’ and one of the guests was Michael Woodford, ex-President of Olympus, who shortly after taking on his new role, exposed a major fraud at the company and was sacked for his efforts.

Following his appointment as President of the company, a contact tipped him off about a possible fraud involving the purchase for over $1bn, of 3 small, obscure companies, which themselves had virtually no turnover.  As he pursued the story, and was beginning to get close to the source of the problem, he was suddenly called into a meeting with the Chairman, Kiku Kawa, his mentor and the man responsible for his appointment.   As he entered the Board room, Kawa was sitting on one side of the table with a great platter of luxury sushi in front of him; opposite, in front of Woodford’s seat, was a ‘manky’ tuna sandwich, unadorned and just slapped on a plate.  The message, Woodford reflected, was that he was the ‘tuna sandwich’ of the food chain.

Undeterred, he continued to ask questions relating to the fraud trying to resolve the issue in private, but, on failing to achieve anything, his investigations culminated in him presenting his evidence to the board and asking for the resignation of the Chairman.  An extraordinary board meeting was called, and instead of acknowledging the case against Kawa, they fired Woodford.

The share price subsequently fell $7bn, 82% of the value of the company was lost and yet the institutional shareholders did nothing about the fraud or about Kawasan who continued as Chairman.  When asked what he had learned as a result of the affair, Woodford concluded:

“Most people don’t care a dot about anyone else but themselves and their nuclear families and that surprised me…after I was fired, people ran with the pack, with the new order and that still haunts me today.  Some of those colleagues in America, the UK and Germany had held my babies in their arms, they’d gone on holiday with me and there was no text message, they didn’t have to say anything, just “how are you”.  And that has left me feeling rather jaundiced about human nature’

When the other guests on the show demurred, claiming that this was an unnecessarily grim view of human nature, Woodford retorted, that most people are never tested and that none of us know how we will react until we are put to the test.  When put to the test his corporate ‘friends’ treated him as ‘persona non grata’ which, for Woodford, was “very hard to describe, it’s a horrible thing to go through”.

At this point it would be appropriate to talk about forgiveness.  But, something complex and profound happened to Woodford as a result of his experience.  He doesn’t have to forgive just one person who wronged him – that would be relatively easy.  He has to forgive ‘humanity’.  He has seen through the veneer of human nature – he has seen our dark side – the instinct to self-protect and to sacrifice the ‘other’ in our own self interest.  As a result of his experience he has lost his innocence; his view of human nature has changed and he has become cynical, upset and, I suspect, angry.   

I have written about similar cases to Woodfords in my book about leadership blind spots and I feel I understand a little about where he is coming from.  As Evan Davis and his guests pointed out, people behave differently when things go wrong and when they are under pressure.  None of us know how we would respond if a friend is sacked and we are made to feel that contacting him or her would endanger our own careers and jobs.  All of us have a dark side and none of us know exactly when or where that dark side will emerge. 

So rather than suggest Woodford ‘forgive’ those who wronged him, I feel that we need to learn to forgive humanity and to forgive ourselves.  The best way of doing that is to confront our dark side, to acknowledge that the instinct to protect ourselves and to sacrifice the other is deeply embedded in our psyches and to hope that when we are tested we will not be found wanting.  And when the reality of humankind’s cruelty, selfishness, greed and ruthlessness all gets unbearable, a period of silent reflection, in retreat from the world, contemplating some of the beauty we have been gifted might help to soften the pain:

The peace of wild things by Wendell Berry

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

 

 

Forgiveness and Peace

Forgiveness and Peace

The great forgivers – Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King.  Perhaps more recently we remember Gordon Wilson, whose daughter, Marie, a nurse, was killed by a bomb during the troubles in Northern Ireland.  This is from Gordon’s Wikipedia entry:

In an interview with the BBC, Wilson described with anguish his last conversation with his daughter and his feelings toward her killers: “She held my hand tightly, and gripped me as hard as she could. She said, ‘Daddy, I love you very much.’ Those were her exact words to me, and those were the last words I ever heard her say.” To the astonishment of listeners, Wilson went on to add, “But I bear no ill will. I bear no grudge. Dirty sort of talk is not going to bring her back to life. She was a great wee lassie. She loved her profession. She was a pet. She’s dead. She’s in heaven and we shall meet again. I will pray for these men tonight and every night.” As historian Jonathan Bardon recounts, “No words in more than twenty-five years of violence in Northern Ireland had such a powerful, emotional impact.”

* * *

What strikes me about the people mentioned above is how they are great world changers and how their achievements (bringing about peace, reconciliation and freedom) are all associated with forgiveness.

I have not had great wrongs done to me, I must admit, so I am not well qualified to write on the topic of forgiveness, but I, like most people, can think of people I find it hard to forgive.  Virtually anything you read on forgiveness states that by forgiving others you free yourself of the crushing weight of bitterness, resentment and anger.  I see this but forgiving is so much easier to say than to do.  I can think of someone now who I resent and I have spent a lot of time ‘forgiving’ that person in my mind. It is only when something catches me off guard that I suddenly find myself thinking resentfully again about the person that I thought I had forgiven.  Clearly, forgiveness is not something you just achieve by saying to yourself ‘I forgive that person’.  There is an emotional scar which has to be healed and the only person who can heal it is yourself.  This is stated here much more powerfully by Dr Fred Luskin, a Stanford University psychologist, director of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, and author of the book Forgive for Good. Alternatively, if you respond more deeply to a sensual rather than analytical treatment of the subject, this is an inspiring video.

 
Forgiveness is a ‘work’, like all the virtues; as Aristotle pointed out, the virtues come from repeated practice.  Forgiveness is a discipline that requires courage, persistence and great wells of compassion. Gandhi said ‘The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong’.  It also takes time for forgiveness to sink deeper and deeper into our consciousness.   But from forgiveness, true peace emerges – both for the forgiver and for the wider community, and even for the nation.

I am struck quite often by how some newspapers enjoy stoking up the opposite of forgiveness – blame, anger, bitterness, resentment. These emotions apparently sell newspapers.  A friend told me recently how he asked why the campaign being conducted by his local political party was so negative.  He was told that ‘Central Office’ had conducted research that showed how blaming other parties has a much stronger ability to get people out to vote than positive campaigning.  There is something quite ‘stimulating’ about ‘hating’ and ‘blaming’.

If you have someone in your life you find it hard to forgive,  I really hope that you can further your journey towards healing.  You might find Fred Luskin’s site helpful.  It is full of resources, interactive exercises and further information.

If you are in a leadership position, you may find it harder to forgive. Remember the research by the Daedalus Trust that demonstrates how power is often correlated with high levels of testosterone and low levels of compassion.  Visit the site and learn more about how exercising power can affect your ability to relate and forgive.

If you feel relatively unaffected by this debate, you might like to think of our current societal scapegoats – the bankers, the politicians, the leaders of NHS trusts, BBC Boards of Governors and government quangos such as the Care Quality Commission.  How do you feel about these people?  What effect does hearing about them and others’ misdeeds have upon you and those around you?  Is it time to forgive and move on?