Session 040: Why We Must Forgive Ourselves
Why We Must Forgive Ourselves
Dhamma Talk + Guided Meditation
Session 040: Oct 7th, 2020, by Sophia Ojha Ensslin and Cristof Ensslin
Banner Photo by Gus Moretta - Thank you!
Handout
This week we have prepared a multi-page handout for you. It is posted left/below as blog content. Plus, you can download it as PDF by clicking on the following button:
Introduction
A little while ago, I sat in meditation as the memory of a friend from the past kept coming up, along with how I had hurt her with my words and actions.
When we sit in meditation and our mind settles down, it is inevitable that this kind of defilement, namely regret, remorse, guilt, is going to come up. That is very normal in the process and you are likely to have experienced it yourself already.
How can we handle a situation like that? How can we heal ourselves, a relationship, or any other kind of hurt that happened on the way?
Before we come to address these questions, I want to tell you a story.
The Promise To Go Mountain Climbing
When I was a child, maybe 8 or 10 years old, one of my uncles was an avid climber and mountaineer. One day, I asked him lots of questions on how to rock climb and how to mountain climb on a via ferrata. A via ferrata is a climbing route with fixed metal ropes which can range from easy to quite challenging, making it possible even for beginners to climb fairly steep rock faces. I was intrigued as he told me from his recent expeditions in the Italian Alps, and in the course of our talk we agreed that he’d take me climbing one fine day soon.
As the months and years passed by, neither I nor he followed up on the understanding. He had been suffering from alcoholism and therefore wasn’t really in a situation to act on his promise. I didn’t feel any hard feelings whatsoever, because I went on my own excursions into the mountains with friends and other family members. In fact, I had never even seen it as a big promise, but rather just as a potentiality.
While in my 30’s, I had completely forgotten about this issue. I always quite liked him, held no grudges. We had a good relationship. He had even succeeded to win over his addiction with the help of AA and their guiding principles. At one of our family meetings, he came up to me and apologized to me. For what, I asked him back. For not having gone climbing yet despite his promise some 25 or 30 years prior.
He really wanted to show me his world of hiking and climbing and make up on his promise. Apologizing for hurts caused and making up, if possible, on failed promises, is also one of the key ingredients in the AA recipe to become and stay sober. So, a few months later, I found myself on a train to the Italian Alps where we’d go on a 3-day tour along via ferratas and scenic hiking trails, sleeping in mountain huts along the way.
The Guilt Is In Our Head
No, don’t get me wrong: it was very special to go hiking with my uncle. And I’m very proud of and happy for him that he’s been sober for many, many years. But, for me personally, it was never an issue of him being guilty or anything like that. The guilt was in his head the whole time. For a quarter of a century he lived with this sense of indebtedness towards me, while I had never held blame for him.
Sometimes it’s quite obvious if we have caused hurt and the person we hurt is still hurt. Sometimes it’s not. And sometimes, like in the story above, there isn’t even any hurt left, but the guilt is still there.
So why do we hold on to guilt? Why do we not rather forgive ourselves? Because we may feel that we do not deserve forgiveness unless the other person forgives us. So, we make our own sanity dependent on external circumstances.
What if the person is out of our lives? What if she is not reachable or doesn’t want to talk to us anymore? What if he is dead or incapacitated? To expect that forgiveness from another, an “authorized power”, is doomed to fail us.
Forgiveness Is Our Own Responsibility
The only reliable source to let go of guilt is inside of us. We are our own forgiveness authority. We are responsible.
How to go about it?
Pardon yourself unconditionally. In meditation, while the defilement is present, we can send loving kindness, feelings of compassion and forgiveness to ourselves. We allow ourselves to be joyful and happy despite our past mistakes.
Vow to not do it again. This can be in mind or in writing, for example in our own journal.
Make it ok. If possible and appropriate, apologize for your mistake and make up for it, like my uncle did. An apology can and should also be done energetically in your mind, especially if the other person isn’t in your life anymore. Send metta (loving kindness) to them and wish them well-being, peacefulness, and happiness. Visualize them happy and content. Important: do not expect anything in return, for the other person may never forgive you. Their forgiveness is not in your control.
Make it better. Take positive action that creates the opposite of the hurt caused before. That goes beyond just making up for a mistake and especially useful if it is very hard to forgive yourself. Say, you have a hard time letting yourself off the hook for slapping your child fifty years ago, go volunteer in an orphanage or your local child advocacy center. Here, too, is important: do not expect anything in return. Just observe how, over time, your daily happiness on the one hand and your meditation on the other other hand develop.
Conclusion
To assume that the other person is still hurt, is rude. To expect that the other person must forgive us for us to be happy, is unreliable. So, we begin healing our past mistakes by forgiving ourselves.
Forgiving ourselves doesn’t mean that, suddenly, all is well with the other person or the relationship. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t say sorry (and really mean it) to the person we hurt or not vow to never do it again or not make up for it or not take other positive, karma-balancing actions. But self-forgiveness, letting go of guilt, is an absolute necessity to create peace in our mind.
Peace in our mind is powerful. It allows us to make the right choices about all things in life, including the hurt that we have caused. It allows us to make the right decisions for our intentions, words and actions in this very moment.
With peace in our mind and forgiveness in our heart, for others as well as for ourselves, we can go deeper in meditation and learn more and more about ourselves. Like this, we purify our mind layer by layer, defilement by defilement. Some impurities in our mind may take several or even many rounds of applying the process described above until they taper down, fade away, and cease to come up anymore. The effort is worth it, I promise. The deeper we get, the more peace we’ll be able to find and experience.
So, let’s dare to practice and face our inner world now in meditation.
