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Week 28: Forgiveness, Part 2 (Q&A)

Some weeks, the content of my weekly email results in many thoughtful posts to the online discussion board. Other weeks, the discussion board is mostly silent, and my inbox fills with thoughtful private responses. This past week was a case of the latter - and over the next few weeks, I wanted to respond to some of the reflections and questions I received.

First, these questions about forgiving others and oneself:

How can you overcome anger that you should have felt but never did feel? How can you forgive another when he did not intend to hurt you and when you feel like you should not have been hurt? How do you forgive when there is no clear culprit to point a finger at, but rather poor circumstance? How do you relieve yourself of guilt and shame when you have done nothing wrong, besides telling yourself that you've done nothing wrong? 

The simple answer to all of these questions is, You let go of the story and make a choice to end suffering. You say, "I don't want to suffer any more because of what happened in the past, so I'm going to make a choice to breathe and notice the present moment." That's when the wish, "May we both be free of this," comes into play. 

I'll use two examples to try to explain this approach, one from contemporary neuroscience and one from a great Zen teacher.

Most of us have been taught that the way to resolve something is to figure it out logically, make sense of it. We may believe in a "just world", and struggle to understand why we deserved to suffer, or how it could possibly be right not to punish someone else for causing harm. So we think about the relationships and events that caused us suffering, playing over the details and our feelings, and try to make sense of it. Each time we do this, we rehearse and reinforce the memory for it. Each time we do this, we strengthen the samskara (conditioning) that causes our suffering. 

Research on memory and emotional conditioning demonstrates that mental rehearsal strengthens the suffering associated with past events. Without mental rehearsal of our memories, we lose the emotional conditioning and suffering associated with past events. The protein changes in the brain that create "fear conditioning", for example, take place during memory retrieval. The strength of our suffering is not determined by the original experience - it's determined by how, and how often, we reflect on it.

What does this mean, practically speaking? The more you check in, to see if remembering a painful relationship or event  still "hurts", the more you guarantee it will hurt. It's like checking to see if your hamstrings are still injured by trying to do split pose. The simple act of trying to do the pose will reinjure you. So the practice is to not rehearse the story that creates the suffering. Don't try to figure out a logic to it, a reason for your suffering, or a  reason to forgive someone else. Just make a choice to release yourself from the suffering of it. It doesn't require analysis. If it's not happening now, and you're not in a situation where it's likely to happen again, then it's not present moment. 

One response to this  I've heard is that if you don't analyze it, figure it out, or "process" it, you'll end up repeating it. Maybe, in some cases. I'd guess, though, that you're more likely to recreate a situation or type of relationship if you're still very attached to trying to figure it out, or still investing a lot of energy in the memories of it. Memory rehearsal creates identity - the more you rehearse, the more you don't know who you are besides a person who had this experience. And that identity will seek out a similar experience.

To explain how hard "just letting go" is, Zen teacher Cheri Huber uses the example of getting ready for a yard sale. The first time I heard this analogy, I laughed out loud -- perhaps because I have been through this process so many times, for moving and "de-cluttering", and consciously adopted it as a spiritual practice long before I heard Cheri's analogy. Here it goes (this student-teacher exchange is captured in the book Conversations with a Zen Teacher and her Students):

***

Student: We can't just let go, can we? Don't we have to look at what we're letting go of?

Teacher: We can just let go, but we don't want to. We like to examine it all first. It's like this yard sale we're having. You could just take home a big box and throw in all the stuff you want to get rid of...but that's not how we do it. We got to the closet and contemplate each item. Before we let go of these treasures, we want to look them over and ponder: What are the chances this will come back into style?....I think I'll just try it on one more time....

***

So the idea is, throw it all in the box and let it go, if you can. When the memory comes up, don't engage with the narrative. Come back to the breath, and the present moment. Notice what is actually happening now. I offer this approach not glibly, or as a person who has never struggled with the destructiveness of past memories and the difficulty of letting go. I offer it sincerely, as someone who recognizes the self-kindness in letting go and dis-identifying with the past.

Now this approach of just letting go is going to strike some people as being very wrong, or very naive. It certainly doesn't line up 100% with how I was trained as a psychologist. It can sound a little bit like denial, if you don't already have a commitment to being in the present moment as a way to end suffering. But the nice thing about this approach - is that you can always choose to put the "story" in storage and come back for it if you find you need it in the future. Giving up your rehearsal of suffering, your need to figure it out, can be like a vacation. See how you like it.

The practice last week described how we can be aware of this process - noticing how bringing something to mind creates certain emotions and feelings in the body, and cultivating the sincere desire to let it go and focus on what is happening, and can be done, in the present moment.

You could also practice this physically, taking the yard sale example literally. Take a look around your home for things you don't really need. Then, don't try them out one more time or try to imagine a future use for them. Throw them in a box and find something to do with it (donate, trash, etc.).

Discuss online at:

http://openmindbody.com/discuss/