This is a reflection I wrote for another project I’m part of. For more information on more things like this, wander on over to The Three Gardeners and check us out.
Just what is forgiveness and how does it shape and guide us? Regardless of the etymology, there are these two obvious words conjoined into this singular expression: for & give. Ultimately, in this conjoined fashion, these two words speak to something that we at first hold onto, and then once we feel able, we give these feelings back out into the ether, away from ourselves. While we often refer to forgiveness as something that we hold against someone else, the only person who suffers from not forgiving is the person who is in the position of forgiving.
How aware are you of the things you hold against yourself?
How many times a day do you hear the inner narrative of the things you haven’t done “right" or “well”? Or maybe even a narrative that you aren’t capable of doing things right or well?
How many times per day do you hold yourself in contempt for not being “enough”? And enough for whom exactly?
Do you ever consider how much energy it takes to support these kinds of internal messages about yourself?
It’s tiring to not forgive ourselves, to be so affected by the ways we feel we don’t deserve to be part of some conversation – with the world, with others, with ourselves, or with whomever – that we end up getting stuck as that “insufficient” version of ourselves because we don’t have the energy to do anything but focus on our own inadequacy.
Forgiveness is an important component of the intelligence of Love. When we forgive others, we express a kind of Love that invites them into an ongoing conversation. We both honor and address the ways they have harmed us, but we don’t turn our backs on them.
Similarly, self-forgiveness is an important component of the intelligence of Love. It is a refusal to continue oppressing oneself. It is a choice to continue a conversation with ourselves. It is a decision to allow mistakes to be made for the sake of learning and growth. It is a creating of space for all different forms of expression of ourselves so that a fuller expression may come to be.
When we withhold forgiveness from ourselves, it is self-imprisonment. We keep ourselves captive to a past self that couldn’t have known certain things. It is denying that we did the best we could with what we had and what we knew. Self-forgiveness, on the other hand, is an act of compassionate integration– an allowing, a generosity, a hospitality toward ourselves. It is a recognition and practical response to our own innate value with an invitation to educe more from previously-undeveloped spaces in ourselves.
Just as a more beneficial response to disease might be to promote the body instead of fighting the disease, so our focus beneficially changes when we shift from fighting our past selves in the form of unforgiveness to a place of promoting expansion given what we learned from those choices that didn’t best serve us. The Irish poet Pádraid Ó Tuama says this about self-forgiveness:
If we are holding enormous things against ourselves, it can be very difficult to be present and loving in those moments. If you are spending so much of your energy putting yourself at the center of your story and hating yourself, it can be very difficult to be present with other people, because we do tend to give to others what we’ve given to ourselves.
One could say, based on this wisdom, that when it comes to forgiveness we must offer it to ourselves before we can offer it to others. One could also say that choosing not to forgive yourself is choosing to make yourself the center of your world far more than if you do forgive yourself.
May we commit ourselves more to a practice of giving this gift to ourselves and others to bring ourselves into a greater place of wholeness.