Forgiving Others, Forgiving Your Mind | Ven Canda

Ven Canda shares some reflections on forgiveness and the meaning of forgiveness as a complementary quality to patience. In this talk, she shares about both self-forgiveness and forgiving others, and the process of forgiveness we can engage with as a way to let go of resentment and ill-will. A Buddhist nun since 2006, Ven Canda emphasises kindness and letting go as a way to deepen stillness and wisdom.

Transcript

How it's going to be.

So I thought we'd start this afternoon by reflecting on forgiveness and the meaning of forgiveness as a complementary quality,

Another aspect if you like of patience really and of course patience is very helpful in the forgiveness process too because we can't always forgive our own or others mistakes,

Things that have happened in the past.

We can't always just let it go straight away.

It is possible but it's harder than that for most of us.

So as I said earlier the forgiveness is an aspect of letting go,

You could see it as a type of renunciation and of course you have to be wise about what you renounce in life.

So we renounce the things that hurt us,

We renounce the things that are no longer serving us to hold on to.

Right,

We renounce those resentments,

Grudges,

Hard feelings from the past or at least we can develop the intention to renounce.

Yeah that's what right intention means,

It means it's an intention so we can't perfect it overnight.

And forgiveness also involves a lot of metta and a lot of compassion,

The other aspects of the right intention of the Eightfold Noble Path.

And as I said it's strengthened by understanding causality that we are a product of causes and conditions of all our past experiences in life.

There's a very lovely quote that I read,

Have I written it down somewhere?

Sure I wrote it down and I think yeah here it is.

It really helps me to understand how we are just a product of our conditioning and this is about trauma but you could actually replace the word trauma simply for conditioning.

And this is by somebody called Resmaa Menukem,

I didn't have a chance to look who that actually is.

But they say trauma decontextualized over time looks like personality.

Trauma in a family decontextualized over time looks like family traits.

Trauma in a people decontextualized over time looks like culture.

But as I say you could replace that with conditioning.

Conditioning decontextualized in a person,

In a family or over time in people looks like personality,

Family traits or culture right.

And I think this is very liberating because it sort of implies to me that if we would have had similar situations happening in our life we may be just like that person.

Maybe a person who we can't understand,

A person who we can't forgive.

You know sometimes we can see in the news terrible things happening all over the world and we think how can people behave that way?

You know how can there be so much delusion and hatred in the world?

But we don't know how these people have been brainwashed,

Have been conditioned,

You know have been instilled with fear.

So when we understand that I think the process of forgiveness becomes fairly easy because we know that people are basically trying to do the best given the conditions that they're in.

Even people you know involved in in genocide sometimes they actually think they're doing the right thing.

Of course this is great delusion because they're really missing the fact that they're harming so many beings and harming themselves.

But sometimes the conditioning is so strong that we're conditioned to see our fellow human beings as threats or even as terrorists right?

I read of one military member in Myanmar and he actually defected having realized you know the massive harm that's been perpetrated on peaceful protesters and he said that they are conditioned,

They're brainwashed by the leaders of the military to perceive the peaceful protesters as terrorists.

So you can see how this gets very complicated and now some of the peaceful protesters are joining the ethnic armies so they are then going to be in the eyes of others and actually in reality terrorizing some other people.

So it's a very there's almost nothing that really divides ourselves from anyone else in this regard you know sometimes we can just consider ourselves fortunate that we've never had to be in situations with such heavy ethical choices.

But before I get into any of that which was totally unintended I wanted to just define what forgiveness actually is and the best definition that I came across is from somebody called Piero Ferrucci.

He was a disciple of the person who founded psychosynthesis,

I forget their name now,

But he has this lovely definition he says forgiveness is making peace with the past and finally closing accounts.

That really touches me because it's the act of making peace you know with the past and finally closing accounts we're not keeping score anymore and it's important to understand that forgiveness is not for others forgiveness is for ourselves.

Other people don't have to deserve our forgiveness you know by forgiving we're not condoning the harm that's been done we're not denying how hurt we are we're not excusing them or dismissing our pain trying to pretend it never happened none of that but we are making a conscious decision to release feelings of resentment feelings of anger and ill will and consenting to the process of forgiveness embarking upon a journey and being open to that journey no matter what unfolds along the way.

So the process of forgiveness is not always going to be easy because you will have to encounter your pain your hurt and find a way to respond to that with a great amount of compassion and patience right a generosity of spirit a generosity of heart so forgiving is also one of the most beautiful ways of giving we forgive others we have this we forgive others we have this spirit of generosity of trying to put ourselves perhaps in their shoes and understand that perhaps they were doing the best they could with the conditions at that time and it's the same thing with ourselves another lovely quote I came across is from Maya Angelou the author and she says forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn't know before you learned it and it sounds kind of like huh forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn't know before you learned it how can you know it before you've learned it and it's because you didn't learn it that you didn't realize so it also changes our attitude towards making mistakes right because mistakes are where we do learn where we do grow and as I say you know if we can have compassion towards ourselves self-compassion lower our expectations and you know meet failure with a sense of loving kindness a sense of compassion towards ourself it's actually teaching our nervous system to recognize failure as safe yeah so most of the time we're afraid to forgive we're afraid because or we're afraid of making mistakes because we know that we won't be able to accept ourselves or maybe others won't accept ourselves you know or maybe we'll react in such a way that makes us very tense very stressed but if we can instead meet those mistakes with self-compassion with charity with a sense of amnesty goodness me I mean even the Buddha harmed others even the Buddha was not liked by everybody right so who are we to think that we can never make a mistake that we can never cause hurt or harm to another even enlightened teachers they say things that you know maybe they what does that inform say the more you speak the more you put your foot in your mouth the more opportunity there is right I do it too you know I mean it's impossible not to do it even if I was completely purified and never had any trace of anger or ill will there'd be no way that I could avoid hurting others simply by through being alive but that doesn't mean it would be my fault that doesn't mean I would need to beat myself up about it right because I too only know what I know after I've learned it and I think that brings us to the point that you know anything in samsara is only going to be good to a certain extent because just the very nature of being alive and living in this body living in this very unpredictable unruly mind and the nature of the world with all its you know impermanence all its laws of nature you know even the environment even the world itself is being destroyed you know we're going through a mass extinction I think is it the third mass extinction nothing can really be reliable can really be relied upon so how can we expect this world to be perfect and for me certainly one of the impulses or things that I don't know it's hard to say because I think ordaining is a calling like I can make a story about why I ordained but to be honest it was a calling from the heart but I do know that I went through a logical process of trying to look into the world and say is there anything here that I can really do something with is there really anything I can make out of samsara if you like and to me it looked as though we can only really have happiness to a certain degree because ultimately we're going to lose those we love we're going to meet misfortune if even if we have a perfect life perfect marriage perfect job and family which I don't know anybody who has that even then we're going to be parted at death and even if we help the hungry we you know try to reduce say child abuse or all the beautiful charity work we can do still there's going to be suffering just by virtue of being alive and that is in no way meant to say that we don't do our best we do our best to help relieve suffering wherever we see it and we shouldn't turn our eyes away you know you can say oh well I just won't see it then and look in another direction but that's not the path right the Buddha told us to turn towards suffering and to learn to respond compassionately but for me it was like I was very clear that a total end of suffering would come by actually going getting out of samsara getting out of this repeated cycle of birth and death you know if that doesn't resonate for people here because you may I mean you're not monastic so perhaps you wouldn't go so far but even this idea of the cycle of birth and death can be interpreted in different ways the Buddha was very clear in saying that this means physical birth physical death but even in our lives we go through a cycle of birth and death but even in our lives we go through phases we go through cycles you know we might get depressed then we cover then again get depressed again and then find a little way out so we're going through these cycles all the time and eventually I think you know there comes a point where we realize that the only place I'm going to find true happiness is deep inside you know my mind through trying to overcome eradicate to whatever extent we can this greed hate and delusion within ourselves yeah but that doesn't negate the fact that in that process as we're purifying our mind we can do more and more good and that's the other meaning of life for me you know so samsara is not perfect but while I'm here as long as I'm here I can do the best I can and forgive my mistakes it makes me a lot more courageous about what I'm willing to attempt to do yeah if you can only try to do things where you're assured of success then your life is going to be very limited very diminished in many ways so overcoming resentment towards ourself requires a lot of self-compassion you know there are all kinds of practices on self-compassion you know which involve meeting our pain meeting our suffering with an open heart and and actually wishing for ourselves may I be free from suffering you know realizing that that is possible that freedom of suffering is something we deserve and something we can actually experience and then of course overcoming resentment to others is something that many of us will be struggling with or working with a lot of the time because there are people in our lives who we feel a natural affinity towards there are others who we simply don't get along with and find it difficult to find any good in them sometimes it's those people who are so dear to us who when they do harm us the resentment goes even deeper you know if you're hurt by somebody who you're really close to that can be very hard to get over and the Buddha likened this resentment and ill will to kind of boiling water you know he said that when the water's like boiling if you imagine that how can you see an accurate reflection of the situation your mind is churned up you know with anger and ill will it's the hindrance the first hindrance and because of that you can't see the situation clearly like in English we have the expression that our blood is boiling right I think that's quite similar to what the Buddha meant by this boiling water oh it makes my blood boil which of course if it was actually happening would actually kill you but there's another simile you know of the hot coal that the Buddha uses he says anger is like having like trying to throw a hot coal at somebody else you know by picking up that hot coal you really do a lot of damage to the skin on your hand so you yourself are the first victim of your own anger and I think it's really obvious we can really experience that and the other problem with it of course especially when it turns into resentment is that we dwell on something that happened we go over and over and over it in our mind also in the suttas there's I'm not sure whereabouts it is in the suttas it could be in the anger to the threes but the Buddha says that there are three I think it is three kinds of people and he said that the those whose reactions his sankaras or his anger in this case is like a line drawn in rock like chiseled in rock you know with a hammer or a chisel so it's really deep and it's it's going to stay right and then there are those who have anger which is like a line drawn on the sand so it stays for a while maybe a whole day but then the tide comes in and washes it away and then there are those whose anger is like a line drawn on water I'm not sure if he said water or the sky actually but I think probably water because it's a matter that you can sort of separate but it just immediately comes back again right so you can't it doesn't last basically and interestingly even in experiments they found they did this experiment I think in the 90s I'm not sure when this book was written and they divided people into two groups no no what they did was have a group of people and they got them to reflect on somebody who'd hurt or harm them in their life even abuse them and I think measures were taken you know to control how how severe that hurt or abuse would have been and they examined their brains you know under the machine while they were reflecting on this and they found that the results showed that there were people who were high forgivers and low forgivers and the people that find it more difficult to forgive had much higher stress levels and worse health whereas the people who could forgive easily more easily or at least embark on the journey of forgiveness they had less anxiety less depression anxiety less depression and much better health so I like these kind of findings because it just confirms what the Buddha was saying all along and it's something that in a way is very obvious right we can feel when we're getting upset that our heart starts to pound even sometimes it just hurts you know I noticed recently I was feeling hurt by something and I was meditating and sort of feeling my body feeling my chest area and there was like this hollow sort of sensation in my chest almost as though I'd been punched and then when I realized that I just you know gave myself a lot of compassion and I was like okay this is the sadness monster like a big fuzzy wuzzy sort of muppet or big bear the sadness monsters come to see me and you know my job here is just to allow them to stay for a while as long as they want you know let them in so then everything around you that softens the body softens the feelings soften and sometimes there may be tears or sort of melting away of something that could potentially turn into a hardened state of anger because when we resent and we just churn it up constantly on our mind we're actually building suffering we're constructing suffering you know the way you would construct a building putting a brick on and making a really strong foundation and you know all the stories and the thoughts around what happened just build that building higher and higher so in the same way forgiveness is actually the opposite it starts to deconstruct and it really softens the mind one of the most amazing things I've seen around forgiveness was a video I saw a while ago there was somebody in America I think it was a young boy and he'd got involved with the wrong crowd you know as can happen right that terrible conditioning of when we're not surrounded by spiritual friends but we're surrounded by people engaging in wrong things so he got in with them and it led to the murder of another young man who I think was a Muslim and they went to court about it and it was just such a moving clip I wanted to find it for you before the session but I didn't have time you might be able to find it on YouTube but basically this family you know with the boy who's murdered and the family of the murdered boy the father was a devout Muslim one meeting there in court and the father of the murdered boy basically said I forgive you I forgive you you're my son he said to the murderer of his own son and then that person actually went up to him and he gave him a hug they embraced and the families were crying you know feeling so incredibly moved and it's just extraordinary isn't it that you know such things can be forgiven and the wisdom that goes along with that realizing that you know holding on to that anger doesn't serve anyone it's just going to spoil your life my mom told me a story recently actually about somebody who's again a murder I think their daughter was killed and and for 40 years they were trying to fight for justice this word fight for justice and basically they said it had ruined their life and they kept saying you know only when justice is served can I forgive and that didn't happen for 40 years so in the meantime that person has literally you know wasted their life and who knows if the justice in the end will really change the course of that person's mind so it's very difficult and I'm not saying forgiveness is easy I'm not saying I have any clue what that kind of suffering is like you know but I read a really lovely book by Desmond Tutu and his daughter Mpoh Tutu I hope I pronounced her name correctly but in there it talks about a process of forgiveness and talks about four stages so I thought I'd share those with you because it might be of interest and of help in your own journeys and it really shows how this process of forgiveness is an intention that requires as I say courage it requires patience but it also requires a lot of honesty a lot of integrity and being honest to your own pain your own hurt so it starts by telling the story this is number one tell the story so we don't suppress what happened we talk about it we get it out you know even the most terrible things because it helps us make meaning of what happened you know it stops us just pushing it under the carpet and in that telling there's already a healing process happening and the telling of the story starts to change the story over time you may remember different details you may be able to frame things differently frame your own position in that differently and then the second step is called naming the hurt so we name the hurt how it hurt me and really do it you know I think as Buddhist practitioners as Dhamma practitioners we can go one step further than naming the hurt and actually start to gently come in contact with it but I do want to say again this is where the aspect of gentleness is so key gentleness is a part of patience yeah patience involves gentleness so we don't just plumb straight into the most difficult places whether the difficult story is a difficult pain but we just gradually gradually learn to experience how it feels in our body how that hurt feels especially when we the thoughts about the story come up or what happened to us and if it's too intense we can expand our awareness and keep it say on the extremities this was something I got from my first teacher Goenka we used to sit for very long hours so most of the time it was physical pain we were working with but of course it's very connected to your emotional reaction and you learn to differentiate the two so you'd be sitting there and sometimes you know you just have to move out of compassion but other times you would just learn to actually develop patience towards difficult or uncomfortable unpleasant sensations and one way of doing that was to go right inside it and really examine what was happening all the different textures and layers of that intensity but the other one was to go to the extremities and just rest the attention on the palms and on the soles of the feet because those areas of the body are always quite pleasant quite neutral sometimes maybe there's a mild tingling or but it just expands the mind there was another retreat I did after leaving Perth when I was really it was like 2016 and I had no idea of the next step there were a few days where I just felt like I was in a void and didn't know how to go forward or back or it was very strange and and luckily I had an invitation to do a retreat just in someone's house who'd rented an apartment in Lanzarote for those who don't know it's an island off between Africa and Spain and while I was there I had a lot of kind of doubt and fear and a sense of ah what have I done I've decided not to go back to Perth my visa was cancelled you know there was no way of going back to the training there and I had to find a new way forward for my monastic life and so there was this sort of sense of closing in like a sort of sense of closing in like a sort of quite heavy feeling and I remember just noticing how because the mind has this negativity bias to kind of close in around suffering and pain I would just try and expand it out every time I felt it was like getting compressed getting contracted just expand it out expand it out and most of that three weeks I was just working with like it's very nice sort of peripheral experience of the body so just expanding it and then even expanding it beyond there I guess it's a kind of emptiness practice realising that you know this body is like and this mind is it actually goes beyond this peripheral body right and we can experience something wider we can open our mind to a sense of space a sense of emptiness where which can hold all these difficult emotions and by the end of that three weeks my whole energy was completely different it was really extraordinary I could feel totally different and my family responded to me very differently and from there I felt like I almost had this clear path ahead so lots and lots of energy freed up to go into the starting of this project so this forgiveness it really softens the mind and we need that softness to come in contact with the pain and then the third step in the forgiveness process is called granting forgiveness so obviously that's the bit that we all want to get to but as I say it's a journey it's a process you may never get to that point but at least you can have the intention may I learn to forgive may I learn to forgive may I be open to the forgiveness to the forgiveness process yeah may I be patient and allow it to take its own time so the granting of forgiveness is it says in this book it's like you step out of the victim mode you know they hurt me they did this to me in the buddhist texts as well but I said oh there's this way of thinking they abused me they you know violated me and such a way of thinking only increases the pain increases the hurt so we step out of that victim mode and into the heroic mode who the hero who is able to put things down not the hero who's able to attain and get a goal or you know say yay I'm sitting through pain I'm getting to get into the jhanas today that's why I came to this retreat you know that's not heroic that's egocentric goal-oriented craving actually in many ways but the heroic effort is to actually let go to put things down and to have the courage to do that because sometimes we do create a sense of self even around the things that have hurt us the most yeah I am the person that struggled that had a terrible childhood I am the person who was abused in a way that's true but in a in another way you're not a fixed person abuse happened but you can start to step forward into a different interpretation a different more heroic mode you know right now right this minute we're not being abused you know if anything it's our own minds that torment and torture us right so this is really the issue so we start to take some kind of agency autonomy again for our life but again I mean it's hard to use those words because in buddhism we're not claiming that we can control our life but we do understand that our response to what happens and to whatever's arising influences the direction of our life it influences whether or not we're moving towards the wholesome states increasing or we're moving towards unwholesome states just manifesting and increasing in our minds so that's always the guideline really with the right effort it's not about how much effort you make but which direction is it taking you in and then the last step in this four-fold forgiveness process is to either renew or release the relationship so this is of course about somebody else we can't well I guess we can renew and release the relationship to ourselves as well actually we can renew it we can decide to treat ourselves differently right but we can't really release it unless you want to completely change your relationship overnight we have to live with ourselves but in terms of other people I think it's important to understand that forgiving somebody doesn't mean you have to invite them into your life Ajahn Brahm has this nice phrase loving the tiger at a distance and I think that distance is so so so important especially when people have really hurt and harmed us there's somebody in my life like that and it's 10 years 11 years now since we met largely circumstantial too but I'm not quite ready you know I'm not quite ready and I don't know if I need to be because my process has already happened or it's continuing I think a large part of it is has been achieved and that happened mainly through the practice of loving kindness and not interestingly it wasn't even loving kindness directed to that person it was just general loving kindness that eventually started to include her too spontaneously so the Buddha says that the five ways of overcoming resentment are basically loving kindness which is the antidote if that doesn't work we use compassion yeah so we can understand that okay this person struggled in their life you know they're also suffering instead of judging them we can try to put ourselves in their shoes and also compassion to ourselves may I come out of this pain or may I first of all meet this pain with kindness yeah and then so loving kindness compassion and then equanimity so as usual in the Buddhist text you start with the first one if that doesn't work try the second yeah so sometimes equanimity is all you can do you're not going to develop fuzzy wuzzy feelings towards this fuzzy wuzzy big giant monster of pain but you can be you know you can develop a sense of acceptance a sense of equanimity whereby you can feel that you know you can take the distance that you need and take the space that you need and then the fourth one is interesting it's to actually it says in the suttas the way it's translated is to ignore the person but I kind of think of it more like not giving them undue attention and I can really relate with that in terms of things like reading the news you know how many of these stories do you want at the forefront of your mind because we talk about spiritual friendship and the importance of wise friends but if you've got you know the tv on with some type of politician's face blaring out and saying horrible things you know destructive things then you're associating with that person for that time you're in the company of that person and they do affect your mind we can see that happening right depending on the way people in leadership positions may speak or you know they're not in leadership positions may speak or the way they may you know engender fear or hatred of others so we have to be careful with that and selective so turning our attention away from something that's difficult or traumatic and towards something more wholesome and supportive for us yeah so again it gives you permission not to see the person who's hurt you so so terribly you know sometimes people tend to myself or to ajahn brahm and they say you know i'm in an abusive relationship but i should forgive them i should make peace and be kind to them because they don't know what they're doing shouldn't i you know shouldn't i be loyal and and i just think gosh you know the first question really is am i at risk of harm and uh you know you need to protect yourself first of all this is the most important thing in life and of course it's not always safe to leave a dangerous situation but to try to create the condition so that it is safe to do so if that means protecting yourself or maybe protecting your children so we don't have to put up with terrible behavior you know and we shouldn't feel that we have to be sort of stronger than we are right maybe some of us are really really sensitive people and we just yeah we just get thrown and too affected by even even people who become mildly angry you know we have the right to choose we have the right to choose who we associate with so and then the last one in the buddha's five is that if none of those apply if none of those really help to apply the law of kamma so to understand that beings behave the way they do due to causes and conditions and they will reap the results of their deeds you know we don't have to think about bringing those results about we don't have to be the ones who deliver their comic results you know through um seeking revenge usually if somebody has intentionally hurt or harmed another they already suffer whether they know it or not you know and they are going to going to suffer more in the future so reflecting this way can also help to bring a bit of objectivity and perhaps even engender some compassion to arise so i wanted to obviously talk about forgiveness in the meditation process as well and it might be easiest just to do that through some practice but um the basic idea as i say is uh is one of letting go and making peace so forgiving our body first of all for being in the condition that it is you know it might not be perfect you might have some kind of diseases in there or you might have a body that would love to sit for three hours but it'll only do 20 minutes but can we forgive our body for that you know can i forgive my right hip which is always in a bit of an uncomfortable position on this zoom cushion and it starts to ache i notice that if i start to fight with that you know i uh i just create a sort of solidified sense of of throbbing or pain in the hip but if i can just forgive it and say oh you're okay you're doing really well then it's like my hip goes oh thank you so much and it just softens you know and the and the pain just starts to dissolve it's not it's not really bad pain so don't worry about my hip and then just making peace with the moment this is your moment yeah this is your special moment it's come to see you it wants to know whether it's welcome or not so even if it's not perfect even if it's a bit kind of sickly or a bit grumpy whatever that moment looks like this is come to see you and the present moment is so often rejected by us you know it's got a kind of complex by now it thinks oh i don't know if they're going to accept me or not so can we just forgive this present moment and say oh it's okay my friend you're welcome you know it's like a mother she might have two children and one of them is kind of really well behaved and conscientious and the other one's quite mischievous and naughty or perhaps the other one's just more melancholic in nature whichever child is in front of that mother she's going to give them the same loving kindness the same care right and those children's moods are changing constantly so in the same way like if you imagine these little moments coming in when you close your eyes and you meet that present moment it's like a child coming into your mind saying you know how are you going to treat me so can we forgive that moment for being the way it is and be patient and kind to it so let's get into some meditation

Reviews

Incredible and honest. Thank you

'Watching the Tiger from a distance' 🐅 I needed that! Thank you!

Thank you for showing us, the power of forgiveness, and all this wonderful stories which go under my skin.

Thank you for a gentle, caring and well informed talk. Very compassionate and kind and rewarding. Namasté 🙏

I love the light you bring to such a delicate topic! Metta 💜

🙏🏽💕thank you for this lovely, inspiring, and educational talk. I will listen again and again as I practice Deep forgiveness as well as Patience.
Your voice is soft and inviting. Ty .
This Is what I need right now.