Self-Forgiveness

It's often easier to forgive others than to forgive ourselves for the mistakes we make along the way.  As human beings, we are bound to make missteps - sometimes big ones.  If we are committed to birthing our ideals in the world, we can be very hard on ourselves when confronting our own contradications. Can we forgive ourselves? 

More often than not, our intentions are good.  Unfortunately, we can be inexperienced, naive, overly idealistic, and even triggered by our past wounds.  We can override our intuition and find ourselves in a shark pit.  We trust where we really shouldn't. We can say too much, and be too honest, when we should learn to be more careful and circumspect.  We can have too much blind hope in our ideals, and not be willing to face the way things work "in the real world" to disasterous ends.  We get jealous, frustrated, and angry. We can be so driven by our vision, that we lose sight of the here and now - forgetting that it is in the intimacy of the everyday that the world is transformed, moment by moment.

I've always loved that Gandhi's autobiography is called My Experiments with Truth.  That is what a conscious, committed journey really is - an experiment.  When we surrender to that which is weaving us, we glimpse the implicate order, the larger pattern of our lives...the larger story that weaves the pieces into a whole.  This quilt includes all the themes on the journey - big mistakes and all.  When we poke behind the mask of our mistakes and the faces of our adversaries, we find our greatest teachers and life lessons. 

In my life, Kuan Yin (the goddess of compassion) has often been hidden behind what Bill Taggart refers to as the 'blessed betrayers" - the people and experiences that have caused the most grief, hurt and pain.   If I can seek and find compassion for the other who has deeply hurt me, then I must be worthy of extending it to myself as well.

Life's Exquisite Promise

To believe that love is stronger than fear and hatred is the most radical idea to embrace.  I would argue that it is more radical than any political philosophical position.  How does one live this in a world so fractured?  How do we embrace this within our own wounded hearts?  What does this mean in the context of life's realities, and our personal and professional obligations and responsibilities?  How is an open heart lived within the paradox of the fundamental need to protect oneself and others from harm?  How do we allow ourselves to be inspired by transpersonal ideas and symbols, yet work to manifest these within the small and immediate realm of our human lives and communities?

From an early age, I have been asking questions centred around the reality of love, and its possibilities for transforming our world.  Rilke's words have helped me in this inquiry - an inquiry that has been (and I would imagine will continue to be) full of challenges, contradictions, pain and joy.  In Letters to a Young Poet he writes:

...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Now that I am entering early middle age, I revisit Rilke's words again with a more experienced eye, and a fuller and wiser heart.  I glimpse an implicate order where myriad manifestations of its stunning accuracy reveal themselves if I pay attention.  I recognize the capacity of life to bring me into situations that, if responded to from my deepest truth, reveal their brilliant tendrils forcing me, leading me, to greater wholeness and healing.  I am brought face to face with my deepest fears, my hidden wounds, and my unclaimed gifts.  I am brought face to face with my capacity to love, forgive and learn in the face of life's unrelenting force of will. 

Life is the most radical, transformative classroom of all, and its lesson, its promise, is so simple that it is always a learning in process, one that takes lifetimes to master:

Love.