Compassion & Forgiveness

With compassion, the place where the rubber meets the road is when someone who is suffering has done something wrong to bring it on themselves. The place where self-compassion is most difficult is when we are hurting because of something we’ve done wrong. To go deeply into compassion we must go deeply into forgiveness. And forgiveness without confession is tepid. So on the last evening of this retreat, before returning to our lives in the world, this talk explores compassion and forgiveness.

Transcript

So,

What I want to talk about is compassion.

This is from the feminist poet Adrienne Rich.

Gentleness is active.

Gentleness swabs the crusted stump,

Invents the more merciful instrument to touch the wound beyond the wound,

Does not faint with disgust,

Will not be driven off,

Keeps bearing witness calmly against the predator,

The parasite.

I am tired of faint-heartedness.

Compassion is really not for the faint of heart.

And it's not for those who want to be tough and brave either.

It's really for gentle hearts that are willing to be both gentle and fierce and tough and kind all at the same time.

So she was writing about gentleness here,

But it could have easily been about compassion.

The Pali word for compassion is karuna.

It's one of the four brahma-viharas,

The wholesome states,

Wholesome qualities of mind.

And it's usually described as the quivering of the heart in response to seeing suffering in another.

Uttarjaniya has a way of talking about the brahma-viharas that I always love.

He says—because there are four of them—there is metta,

Compassion,

Joy,

And equanimity.

And so he says metta is actually a feeling of friendliness towards other beings.

And when they are of equal status to you in terms of their level of happiness or unhappiness,

That's metta.

And when their status is lower in the sense that they're suffering more than you are,

Then the same energy becomes compassion.

And they're happier,

Have more ease and well-being than the same feeling as joy.

And when you can't do anything about it,

That's equanimity.

So they're all related together,

And there's actually a whole field of these qualities,

Not just those four.

But compassion is a kind of outflowing of the heart,

Outflowing of the heart.

In the text they talk about near enemies and far enemies of these states.

So the near enemy of compassion—a near enemy is a quality that is very similar on the surface,

But underneath it's fundamentally different.

So the near enemy of compassion is pity.

Both of them have a sense of caring,

But can you feel the difference between the two of those?

So would you describe that,

The difference between compassion and pity?

I feel so bad for you in the subtexts,

I'm sure glad it's not me.

So there's a separation,

While compassion is just this outflowing.

So a far enemy is one that is the complete opposite.

So what is the complete opposite of compassion?

Indifference.

Indifference?

Ill-will.

Ill-will?

Can you go even further than that?

Hatred.

Hatred?

Can you go even further?

Disgust.

Aspising.

Good.

Can you go even further?

Violence.

Violence?

Even further?

Ethnic cleansing.

Genocide.

Could be,

Could be,

Could be.

Sadism.

Taking pleasure in someone else's suffering.

And a lot of the quality you're talking about can be related to that.

You know,

Revenge and spite can all have qualities,

But I think the polar opposite is really sadism,

You know,

Because it's just the opposite.

So this evening I want to drill down into compassion itself.

And I think where the rubber meets the road with compassion is when someone has done something wrong,

Maybe hurt themselves or hurt others,

And they themselves are suffering.

You know,

If a tree falls on somebody's house or they,

You know,

Are quite innocently hurt,

To feel compassion for them is quite easy.

But to feel compassion for the suffering of someone who has really done something we consider wrong is really,

Kind of puts the whole thing to the test.

So what we're talking about here is really forgiveness.

And some of the place for a lot of us where it comes to the test is when we feel that we have done something wrong and we are suffering because of that.

And can we find the compassion in how we relate to ourselves?

So this brings us back to forgiveness again.

In communities,

Before we forgive one another,

The most important thing I think is just to listen,

To really just listen.

When we are suffering because we've done something wrong or somebody is suffering because they've done something wrong,

In a community the first thing is just to be heard,

To have the person talk about what they've done.

So I want to start tonight with confession,

And then we'll move from that into forgiveness.

So let me begin with a story.

About half a dozen years before she died,

My mother moved from New York City where she had been living in a loft with an artist.

How stereotyped is that?

But it's true,

It's very sweet.

Where she'd been living in New York City,

She moved up to Massachusetts,

To the small New England town where I was ministering.

And she rented an apartment about a half a mile from us,

Second story in this old colonial house.

She joined the church that I was serving there,

And she made arrangements so that she would spend every Tuesday with her oldest son,

Nathan,

His only son at that time.

He was about four.

Our second son was born a year later.

So she would pick Nathan up after school and take him down where they would search for bugs in the creek,

Or go and write stories,

Or eat ice cream,

And in other ways let her be a kind,

Wise,

And indulgent grandmother.

When she got cancer,

I was the front line support as we drove around to doctors and alternative healers and tried to figure out how to relate to this.

When she let go of her last breath,

I was sitting at her bedside just watching the pulse at her temple.

My breathing,

The pulse stopped.

Then they started,

And I stopped.

And then they didn't start up again.

She had asked me to lead the memorial service for her,

So I did.

And after the service,

It was actually the next day after the service,

I drove the last of the relatives,

My older brother,

Into the airport in Boston.

It was about a little over an hour drive.

And I came back home,

And I walked into her family room,

And I sat down.

The previous month had been very,

Very busy,

Both logistically and emotionally.

And all of a sudden,

I had nothing to do.

And I was at a loss.

My mother had a color TV that she wanted us to have,

Because all we had was this little black and white.

So I couldn't think of anything better to do,

So I decided I was going to drive over to her apartment and pick up this color TV set.

So I did,

And I went up the back stairs in New England.

Everybody goes up the back stairs.

And when I walked up the back stairs into her kitchen,

I felt like I was hit by every unkind thing that I had ever done to her.

It was a mental,

Emotional,

And physical blast.

I remember grabbing hold of the railing at the top of the stairs to keep my balance.

For example,

I remembered one afternoon a couple years earlier.

It was a Friday afternoon,

And I was going to be in the pulpit that Sunday,

But I was way behind in preparing for it.

Erica was off working,

So I was at home alone with Nathan,

And he was too young to be left alone,

So I couldn't work on it.

And so I looked up,

And walking up the street towards the house was my mother.

And her shoulders drooped,

And her eyes were down,

And her gait was a little melancholic.

But when she walked into the family room,

I said,

Hi,

Mom,

It's good to see you.

You know,

I'm really behind in preparing for Sunday.

Would you mind watching Nathan for a little bit so I can work on it?

And I can remember now seeing her eyes as she looked at me,

And they were a little hesitant.

But what's she going to do?

She was my mother,

So she said yes.

And I scurried up the stairs into the attic where my office was so I could work on the sermon.

So I wasn't mean,

I wasn't abusive,

But I was intentionally unmindful.

So now standing in that kitchen,

You know when sometimes they say when people die how their life flashes before them,

There were like hundreds or thousands of these incidents where I had been unkind or inattentive or neglectful or selfish,

They just flashed through me all at once.

Nearly took the wind out of me.

And I mark that moment as when my true mourning really began.

And it was awful.

Because there was nothing I could do to make amends,

She was gone.

And I just had to find some way to live with all this ugliness that I had rationalized over and over and over.

My mother was a writer.

She kept journals all her life.

And so in her will she left them to my sister.

I have one sister and four brothers.

And so Stephanie took all these journals and divided them up into five groups.

And I got the ones from her years living in New England.

So I was sitting at my office one afternoon several months after her death.

And I was paging through these and I came to this entry.

She wrote,

I'm lonely and discouraged.

I went to talk with Doug.

But he was busy as usual.

He had no time for me.

He asked me to look after Nathan so he could work.

I was angry and upset,

Though he didn't say anything.

I do love Nathan so much.

But I really wanted to talk to an adult.

I left feeling empty.

We have all done bad things.

And by bad all I mean is that we have all violated our own personal values.

Probably all of us have,

Maybe not all of us,

Probably most of us have broken laws,

Regulations anyway.

And all of us have really,

All of us have broken precepts.

And all of us have broken our own deepest values.

So perhaps we turned aside from someone in need,

Got angry at someone who was innocent,

Felt too busy to reach out to someone in need,

Dissembled,

Misrepresented the truth.

From time to time all of us betray our deepest values.

And the result is that our hearts feel bad.

We may brush the feelings aside or rationalize them or blame someone else or try to wipe them out of our memories.

But deep inside they encrust our hearts like barnacles on a boat.

So what do we do about this?

What do we do about this?

We are social creatures.

For millions of years our very survival,

Very survival of our ancestors depended on the tribe,

The clan,

The band,

The community around them for their survival,

For their literal survival.

So millions of years of evolution have bred this deep feeling for social connection.

So in most spiritual traditions there is one of the steps towards cleansing these barnacles off our hearts is to tell someone about our misdeeds,

To just let someone know where we think we have missed the mark so that it doesn't become a secret that separates us from the community.

So it needs to be shared with another person.

So we here are Buddhist,

Our aspiring Buddhists,

Our feel-some-draw in that direction.

So we don't have a… In Buddhism we don't have this tradition of original sin.

We have this idea of original goodness,

Buddha nature.

So confession may feel like it's outside of this framework,

This spiritual framework that we're working within,

Yet all of us have done bad things.

All of us have done things that are unworthy of our Buddha nature.

So the first thing I want to suggest tonight is that there is really no contradiction between our inner light or Buddha nature and the reality that we have all done bad things.

The bad things that we've done doesn't poison our core.

Rather,

It just encrusts our inner beauty,

If you will.

It kind of puts a shadow over our being.

So I would like to have us this evening,

Our final evening here,

To explore confession and its possibility for breaking up some of that subtle armoring that all of us carry deep inside somewhere that shadows us.

Originally,

I had planned just to talk about forgiveness,

But I think without confession you know,

Forgiveness is tepid.

It is really tepid.

And,

You know,

When we do confess,

That sometimes we do,

Oftentimes we confess because we're looking for forgiveness in return.

It's like a monetary exchange.

You know,

I will give you a confession,

You give me forgiveness.

And if you don't give me forgiveness,

I feel cheated.

That wasn't part of the deal.

I'll take the confession back.

But what I would like us to do first tonight is really to explore just the power of confession by itself without it getting confused with forgiveness.

Okay?

So in a moment,

What I'm going to invite you to do is to turn to someone near you and to share something that you don't feel so good about.

Maybe something you did or said or neglected to do or neglected to say.

It may have been something you did intentionally or accidentally or out of ignorance or misinformation or out of an emotional moment.

The only criteria is that it's something that you did that runs counter to your own deepest values.

That's all.

So in this little exercise,

We're going to have a confessor and a confesie,

One who confesses and one who hears a confession,

And then we'll switch roles.

Okay?

So we're not going to entrance this in an institutional hierarchy.

Each of us will be in both roles.

When you're confessing,

I want you to remember that this is an exercise.

I'm really not asking you to share the deepest,

Darkest,

Ugliest,

Most terrible thing you have ever done in your whole life.

Good.

Okay?

Are you just going to say why you've done it?

Or are you just going to say this is what I've done?

And the reason that you've done it is because you've done it.

I'll leave that up to you.

What I don't want you to do is to give the whole background story,

Because we don't want to be here all night.

We're actually going to spend just about three or four minutes with this,

So I want to be sure there's time for each.

Let me say a few other things.

So when you are confessing,

Again,

You don't have to say your deepest,

Darkest.

But when you're listening,

It's a very important role.

When you're listening,

Your role is simply to listen and nothing else.

Your job is not to fix the person.

It is not even to forgive them.

That's not going to be your role in this exercise.

Your role will be to be a kind,

Open heart to just hear and trust that maybe,

Who knows,

Maybe that is enough.

It's an experiment,

Okay?

But if this is not what you thought you were getting into tonight and you would rather not participate in this,

Please,

Please,

Please feel free not to.

You can just close your eyes and meditation.

We kind of like meditation here.

It's a good thing.

We're all for it.

But if you close your eyes,

Then the people around you will know just to leave you be.

Okay?

And again,

We don't want the whole background story.

If you want to say why,

But not a long,

Long story kind of why.

So is this clear?

Okay.

So please begin.

I will ring a bell about halfway through so you'll have a sense of your time.

I will confess first.

If you find yourself without a partner,

Just join a pair and make it a threesome.

They will welcome you in.

It'll be just fine.

So just,

We may need a threesome to make the numbers work out.

If you need a little more time,

Continue.

But if you're done,

We'll turn around here so that.

.

.

So what happened?

Comments?

Observations?

I'm not asking for confessions necessarily,

But what was the process like for you?

It's very powerful.

How so?

It stirs the soup all the way down to the bottom.

I sort of wonder the value of it.

Of stirring the soup?

Yeah.

Okay.

One of my teachers many years ago was a monk named Utsula Naga.

I told him something similar to what I shared with Pat.

He said,

Stop thinking about it.

There's a place for that.

And,

Re-gate well-being to yourself.

Let it go.

In my experience,

That there are people who,

For whom,

It's what I would call hysteria,

Release something and pull it back in,

And release something and pull it back in.

And they may need a different type of process.

But I think for a lot of us in the West who are actually better at stuffing stuff down and have it work around underneath there.

We'll talk more about that.

I just want to get some more comments though.

But that's a good observation.

I felt as if it opened up connections with those who listened with and spoke with it as a softening,

A shared softening.

Because of reality,

All of us know that we have done bad things.

And when somebody has the courage to say that,

We don't feel quite as alone at all.

David?

So the trivial confession is like a root that has a lot of tentacles.

So you feel it's just not that event or that situation.

But it's all that.

It's connected.

And so it kind of raises it all up.

My impression has been,

For me in my position listening to all of you in the interviews,

That there are many people who get to a certain place in the practice.

The mind starts getting very quantum-ous.

And then in that stillness,

There's all this stuff that just starts rising up to the surface that really wants to be seen.

Because it takes some tension to hold it under there.

And even if it's been an unconscious habit.

And you can really put yourself into a personality that is just used to doing that and go through a whole lifetime like that.

But you start letting down into these deeper,

Quieter places.

And pretty soon there's no place to hide.

There's no place to hide.

Other comments?

I thought it was nice not to have the other one speak so that you really felt heard.

We think we're being very supportive when we're speaking,

Et cetera,

Et cetera.

But often times we just feel kind of cut off by that.

I got kind of the opposite.

I got,

She really listened to me.

And I got some really wonderful advice in a way that I don't think I could have gotten and heard from somebody else.

Ah,

Okay.

Okay.

That's lovely.

That's lovely.

How this works,

It could work in many,

Many different ways.

I have a comment.

I think you've captured this in your book.

The private feelings versus public and transient.

This process brings it out.

I think the reason I feel it's effective is because it depersonalizes what you have been holding onto.

Once you let it out,

It's no longer a secret and hence not tied to your identity.

So it kind of gets relieved from your.

.

.

Your sense of self.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So if the impersonal is a key part of this path,

Quietly or unquietly holding stuff down because what?

Because we're afraid of what somebody will think of us.

Really strongly reinforces that sense of self.

So after my mother died,

I carried around this cloud of guilt and remorse.

Outwardly I suspect I looked pretty normal,

But inwardly there was this.

.

.

It felt like a darkness that was just pulling my spirits down.

I tried to ignore it.

I hoped that it would go away,

But it didn't.

And after several months,

It was clear to me that denial just wasn't working very well and I needed a different strategy.

Jetsun Milripa was a Tibetan monk who spent years meditating in caves.

And he said demons used to come to visit him.

And he tried all these different ways of how to deal with the demons.

And the one he found that was actually the best was just to invite them in for tea.

So I didn't have a cave,

But I did have my office up in the attic.

So I decided I was gonna.

.

.

I cleared my calendar and I went up into my.

.

.

Up into the attic there for a day to invite the demons in.

I just wanted to get to know them.

I just wanted to stop fighting them and just let the stuff that I was feeling come up to the surface and just get to know it.

And to make sure I stayed honest,

I took a little bit of LSD.

You got some real deep.

.

.

It's about confession,

Steyer.

It's past the statute of limitations.

It's kind of difficult to describe exactly what happened to me,

But superficially what it was,

Was that at one point I fell asleep.

And I think.

.

.

I don't know how long it was,

But it was maybe 20 minutes or so.

And when I woke up,

It felt as if I was inside the consciousness that had been my mother's,

That I was looking out through her eyes at me being selfish,

Being neglectful,

Being thoughtless,

Being self-absorbed,

And all the rest.

And I could feel inside myself how deeply that had hurt her.

Yet it wasn't as deep as I had imagined.

I could feel that it actually had not damaged her,

That her heart was a lot bigger than I gave her credit for.

Yes,

She had pain,

And she had more anger and irritation and sadness and upset than she had told me about.

But that she didn't carry any resentment or grudges or even disappointment.

That she really understood my stresses,

My confusion,

My flaws,

And all the rest of it.

And her love was bigger than that.

She was really okay.

And she always had been.

And with that realization,

This cloud,

This darkness that I'd been carrying around began to thin out.

The barnacles that had been on my heart just began to come loose.

And I still mourned her death.

Many years later,

I had these misty-eyed moments.

Nathan grew up to be quite a writer himself,

And he won this literary award when he was in junior high.

I remember sitting in the back of the auditorium with Erica,

Watching him go up there to the stage to get his award.

And this thought just went lightly through my mind.

Because my mother was a writer,

She would have loved to be here.

And I just about lost it.

So I still had those moments of grieving her.

But it felt like wholesome sorrow rather than this kind of foreboding guilt.

That I think is what forgiveness feels like.

That is what it feels like.

It begins by being fully seen.

Our faults are viewed with clear eyes.

There's no hiding.

But at the same time,

We're held in a larger kindness that sees that we're just human.

We all make mistakes.

And that it's really okay.

To feel forgiven is to know that you are known as you actually are.

That you're seen clearly.

And there's no grudges.

There's no holding back.

There's no standing away.

I think that's what forgiveness feels like.

And to be clear about it,

That day in the attic,

It didn't feel like my mother forgave me.

I just realized that she had never condemned me.

And with that,

I could begin to forgive myself.

We are all truly our own worst critics.

I don't know how to describe it.

I still felt the grief,

But I just no longer had any desire to hold any of it back.

It wasn't a stone on my heart any longer.

So that's what forgiveness feels like.

And I hope that it's clear.

I always want to talk about forgiveness.

I always want to give this caveat,

Just to make sure people are clear about this,

That to forgive someone doesn't mean that what they did was okay.

To forgive someone doesn't mean that what they did was okay.

It doesn't mean that we have to see them as a saint.

And it doesn't mean that the relationship necessarily returns to what it had been.

Perhaps it will,

As it did with my relationship with my mother,

It felt like it was restored.

But sometimes the relationship was forever changed.

I had a girlfriend in my sophomore and junior year in college.

At one point,

I painted a picture of a landscape on a piece of raw linen and framed it and gave it to her.

It came from this very sweet and tender place inside me.

And she got it and she was touched by it.

And then a couple months later,

We had a fight about something and in a fit of anger,

She cut this painting up into little pieces.

The painting had nothing to do with what we were fighting about.

It was completely irrelevant.

It was clear that she was just looking for a way to hurt me as much as she could.

I was just stunned by the violence in it.

Afterwards,

She was genuinely and deeply sorrowful about what she had done.

And we made up.

And now I could see this sadistic potential in her that I hadn't seen before.

And it wasn't at all surprising given her background.

And I think there's a place inside me that really knew it,

But I kind of brushed it aside in a romantic haze.

Well,

I couldn't brush it aside anymore.

So we gradually drifted apart.

The relationship ended amicably and I still have a soft spot for her in my heart.

And I easily forgave her.

I mean,

We're all human.

But I just didn't want a primary relationship with somebody who in a difficult moment could be that emotionally violent.

So the relationship changed.

Just because we forgive someone doesn't mean that what they did was okay or that the relationship remains unchanged.

Forgiveness means that we're just letting the past be in the past and letting our life be in the present and flow forward in a wiser way.

Julie Talman said once that forgiveness is giving up the hope of ever having a better past.

I think that's the essence of it.

So we could condense all this down into a simple practice that we can do quietly on the cushion or actively as we move through the day.

And it starts with forgiving ourselves.

It starts with forgiving ourselves.

And just like the meta practice,

It uses simple phrases to evoke that feeling of forgiveness.

And you can create your own phrases.

But when you do those,

It's really helpful to consider three things.

That the most common reason that all of us make mistakes,

The most common reason is that we don't really fully understand the situation,

At least at the moment.

Maybe we're emotionally blind,

Maybe we're ignorant,

But we just don't understand the situation so we do something that we regret.

It also helps to note that remorse and guilt are strongest when we've actually hurt someone or hurt ourselves than when there was actually no harm that resulted from it.

And the third thing to know about forgiveness is that our inner critic is most enthusiastic when what we did violates our own personal values.

So those are the things that not understanding a situation is the most common reason we make mistakes,

That remorse and guilt are strongest when someone was actually hurt than when there was no harm,

And that our inner critic is most vociferous when we violate our own values.

So when I take those considerations and put them together,

I come up with four forgiveness phrases.

I forgive myself for not understanding.

I forgive myself for making a mistake.

I forgive myself for hurting someone or hurting myself.

I forgive myself for violating my own deepest values.

I forgive myself for not understanding.

I forgive myself for making a mistake.

I forgive myself for hurting someone or myself.

I forgive myself for not following my own deepest principles.

So the way this practice works is you begin by sitting down quietly and you can close your eyes.

You don't have to right now,

But we'll practice this.

Let me just describe it to you.

You can close your eyes if you want.

I don't care.

You sit down quietly,

Close your eyes,

And then you say your own version of perhaps one of these phrases or something else.

I always like to begin with I forgive myself for not understanding because I just think that covers so much territory,

So much territory.

But you choose whatever phrase works for you,

One or two,

And then you repeat it slowly over and over until you get some of that feeling of forgiveness.

And then you surround yourself with it,

Just like you did with the metta.

And as always,

You know the mind will wander off on all kinds of errands.

And when it does,

Recognize,

Release,

Relax,

Come back,

And then pick up with a phrase.

And if the mind wanders off to blame or dissatisfaction,

Just six R,

Just six R.

Sometimes the mind will naturally go to a person who may have hurt you or abandoned you in some way.

And so you can just gently turn the practice at that point.

I forgive you for not understanding.

I forgive you for making a mistake.

I forgive you for hurting me.

I forgive you for not following my own deepest values.

And if you visualize easily,

You just picture the person looking right into their eyes,

Or just have that sense of being in deep contact with them.

I forgive you.

I forgive you.

OK?

You want to practice this for a little bit?

It's very helpful in this not to get too deep,

Not to get involved in the story line behind this.

Just stick with the simple forgiveness.

And we'll just spend a few minutes with this.

I want you to get a sense of this.

And then you can incorporate it into your practice when it feels useful.

So allow yourself to settle in and to think of some time when you have not followed your own deepest values.

And then try out one of these phrases.

I forgive myself for not understanding.

I forgive myself for making a mistake.

I forgive myself for hurting myself or others.

I forgive myself for not following my own deepest values.

And you can use your own language on this.

I forgive myself for not following my own deepest values.

I forgive myself for not following my own deepest values.

I forgive myself for not following my own deepest values.

I forgive myself for not following my own deepest values.

I forgive myself for not following my own deepest values.

I forgive myself for not following my own deepest values.

I forgive myself for not following my own deepest values.

I forgive myself for not following my own deepest values.

I forgive myself for not following my own deepest values.

I forgive myself for not following my own deepest values.

Other comments?

It struck me that under it I found other levels of shame or deception that,

Oh,

I had thought about giving myself for that too.

I thought it helped clear some tension.

I thought the best sentence was to forgive myself for not knowing.

Right.

Yeah,

I think that's real common.

What you understand now,

You never would have done that and say it's hard to forgive yourself and you forget that you really didn't understand it.

And I think that includes emotional blindness too.

I mean,

It's a little bit harder to forgive ourselves for that,

But it's certainly,

You know,

Trouble forgiving someone else for that.

But,

You know,

Ourselves,

Sometimes it's really hard.

So my issue was with my son.

He's still four years old and I can't really talk to him about what happened because he was very young when it happened.

But I heard him.

And doing that,

I actually feel,

I feel tremendously closer to my son without even having to talk to him about it.

And our relationship right now,

It's awesome,

But there's even a more intimate closeness I feel with him that I haven't felt about.

Yeah,

I think just in terms of how we're wired,

There's nothing that gets to us more deeply than our own kids.

And all of us hurt our own kids.

There was this,

There was a study that was done of mothers and daughters.

And the mother may have been 90 years old and the daughter was 70.

So there's long,

Long lives.

And the question was,

What did the mother do that was most harmful to the daughter?

And the mother would say,

Well,

I did this,

This,

This,

And this.

The daughter would say,

Oh,

Yeah,

But that wasn't a big deal.

You know,

That wasn't a big deal at all.

What really hurt was this.

And the mother would say,

I don't know what you're talking about.

So the horror story is that the ways we hurt our kids the most are the things that we're not aware of.

And as their awareness grows,

We see that and we can have all that.

So one of the things we can do for our kids the most is soften and open our own awareness so we have less blindness.

And when there is that remorse and guilt,

We think it's something that is just us.

But we end up holding back some of the love and connection out of that.

So you're helping your kid by forgiving yourself.

Honestly,

Yes.

Yeah.

Other comments?

There's another way of doing this practice,

Sort of taking it out into everyday life,

Which is as you go around through the day,

Whatever happens,

You forgive yourself for it.

I forgive myself for slamming the door.

I forgive myself for spilling the milk.

I actually throw that phrase in,

Even if it doesn't feel like it's needed.

And I find when I do that,

What it surfaces is I didn't realize there was this quiet little inner critic that's saying,

Yeah,

Yeah,

Yeah.

And you start forgiving yourself and there's all these layers that just expand and open.

Does that work for Roe Grange?

Pardon?

Does that work for Roe Grange?

Question was,

Does it work for Roe Grange?

Oh,

Here is LA.

Everyone needs this practice at some point.

And what I found in teaching and in learning from Bhante is that when someone's practice gets stuck and you can't forget what's going on,

It seems like they're doing right,

All the techniques are there,

Just the holds there.

Oftentimes,

If you shift them to the forgiveness practice,

It really helps.

When I was,

I spent a long time in the seventh jhana,

Couldn't,

Bhante couldn't figure out what it was,

I couldn't figure out what it was.

And he said,

Why don't you do the forgiveness?

And I started doing that and just opened up.

Some people need the forgiveness right in the beginning,

But I think there's always,

There comes a point where all of us can really benefit from this.

Just a couple other quick points.

I always leave out of this asking for forgiveness from someone else.

We all want to ask others,

Will you forgive me?

But to me,

Asking for forgiveness feels a little manipulative.

No,

David says,

You know,

Doug,

Will you forgive me?

What am I going to say?

Nah.

It makes me into the bad guy.

And so,

You know,

If I'm asking somebody to forgive me,

I'm asking them to,

Putting them in a really awkward situation for the purpose of making me feel better.

So I might say to the person,

You know,

I feel really bad about what I did.

And this is what's going on.

And this is what I've done to make sure as best I can.

I hope I don't do this again.

And I leave it at that.

At the most,

If I have a lot of faith and confidence,

And I really know how they work,

I might say,

I hope someday you'll forgive me.

But I actually don't want the forgiveness unless it comes spontaneously.

In the meditation practice internally,

Sometimes it can be helpful to ask for forgiveness just in your own inner practice.

But I wouldn't do that externally.

So you're not manipulating somebody.

Although one of the suggestions you make is to hear the other person forgive you in the practice.

And I found that helpful.

Yeah.

I hope sometime you can confess and find out who that is.

Yes.

And that helps.

Yes.

We don't need to speak to somebody else.

And I think that's particularly helpful with the practice.

A little bit depends on the situation.

If you're working on a sangha or something like that,

It can help to start there.

But sometimes it's helpful just to say a little bit to somebody.

So,

You know,

The way this works in this,

Actually in the Buddhist tradition,

Which actually within Buddhism there is,

You won't find anything in the suttas about forgiveness,

By the way.

It's simply not there.

What it is,

Is it's a lot about compassion.

And that will really cover the territory,

Except I think in the West,

Where there is so much self-hatred that has been just worked into how we're raised,

That sometimes it takes going this extra step.

And so I think that's why we come to it,

Because it really is all about compassion.

But within the tradition,

There was the recognition of this.

And one of the ways that is there are precepts.

And you go to somebody,

It may be a teacher or a senior student or somebody you trust,

And you just say,

You know,

I broke this precept.

And you don't even have to say any more details than that.

And then they give you the precept again and you say it back to clear it.

That's the way it works in.

You have to tell them which ones?

Yeah.

There is that much specificity.

Oh,

Once upon a time,

I broke a precept.

Because you need to take the precept again.

Oh,

Yeah.

So you take the precept with them.

Is that the idea?

Yeah.

OK.

Yes.

Yes.

Another thing is that Fred Luskin at Stanford University has done a lot of work around forgiveness.

And he started in the cardiologist department.

That's where he did most of his research.

And he found that people with the heart attacks,

They're holding on to grudges and not forgiving.

And so he was talking about it in one of his books.

Yeah.

The way that we hold energies back is really can take a toll on all kinds of levels.

One question.

Do suttas talk about compassion to yourself?

Can you talk?

Do the suttas talk about compassion to oneself?

Well,

It's tricky when you really get into it.

Because the self,

From a clear Buddhist perspective,

Is it's an artificial construct anyway.

So if you're approaching it from the standpoint of softening the tightness around it,

That can be really helpful.

And I don't know if the suttas enough.

I haven't heard of stuff in there.

But I don't want to give a blanket statement,

At least until they turn the camera off.

I'm really glad you brought this up.

Because it's clear that we can get locked down by the shame of the things that we've done.

And that really paralyzes us in some ways emotionally.

And for me,

It felt as if,

Oh,

That's a whole sector that I hadn't dealt with in my process with the six hours.

And so that's really helpful.

Because that feels intuitively as if there is a lot of lockdown over various things.

But because of the shame,

One doesn't look to see that much necessarily,

Unless it's really in one's place.

Yeah,

Shame is a kind of an implosion that is really helpful to find whatever way you can to work that through.

Anything else?

Yeah.

In the beginning of the dharma talk,

You talked about compassion being gentle,

Fierce,

Tough,

And kind.

Can you elaborate on that a little bit?

Oh,

Yeah.

So your child comes up to you and says,

Oh,

I'm really feeling bad about this.

You know,

Can you help me with this?

And you say,

Oh,

I love you so much,

But I'm reading the newspaper.

There's no action component to it.

So that's one part of it.

Another part of it is,

You know,

Particularly with a lot of the violence that's going on out there in the world,

That real compassion sometimes requires a willingness to really step in.

And it takes a kind of a fierceness at times.

And you don't have to be stupid about it,

But you know,

If you're in a,

We can imagine all kinds of situations,

You're in a group where somebody is being a little bit scapegoated and there's this whole kind of group thing that happens.

You know,

To stick yourself in there,

To call the group on it can feel really frightening because you have all the flow of energy is going in that direction.

And so it can take a whole lot to just be able to say,

You know,

We can think of compassion.

I mean,

I love that Adrian Rich passage because we can think of compassion is really soft.

You know,

I will put a bandaid on your wound,

I will massage your shoulders,

Etc.

,

Etc.

But you're driving along and there's somebody on a motorcycle just hit a post.

You know,

The place can curl up and do you have the courage to actually approach them?

Yeah.

Other thoughts around that?

Victoria?

In the past two years,

It feels like my compassion has gotten so big that it's kind of hurting me.

Like,

I don't listen to the cramp yard like I used to and I don't look at the front pages of the newspaper because it feels like it's not skillful.

And I'm kind of.

.

.

And that doesn't work.

Yeah,

On my website I have four talks I gave on compassion.

I want to talk about idiot compassion,

You know,

Of just stupidly doing this stuff.

So it is a matter of skillful means.

And getting all horrified about what's going on in the world doesn't necessarily help anyone.

And so yeah,

There is a place where we need to engage,

But it really does have to be skilled.

And quite frankly,

The depth of destruction and stuff that's going on out there can be so overwhelming that a lot of that stuff we just can't handle on our own.

You can't stay soft and open to face it.

You can with communities.

If you have a group of people who is looking at it with you and supporting you,

And you get hit by that and you get the support,

Etc.

And sometimes we really need that in order to be able to move in a healing way towards what's going on on the planet.

But I certainly have had that experience,

Particularly coming back on retreats,

You know,

Feeling really wonderful and light and open.

And then at some point I just feel myself really depressed.

And what I realized was I was trying to get caught up in the news as I was hearing all that stuff.

And I just don't realize how strong that hits you.

And I think it is if we are going to take this work deeply,

We really need to keep cultivating a realistic understanding of what our limits are at the moment so that we're not pushing ourselves over the brink.

And I think it's helpful to stretch your limits a little bit,

You know,

Just to test them a little bit.

But you don't want to put yourself in the midst of stuff that your system isn't able to handle.

I think that would be self-compassion.

Yes,

Yes.

We really have the boundaries in our heart,

Following that moment emotionally,

That we can extend.

Yeah.

We have a good friend who's working and got her PhD in compassion fatigue because how much it traumatizes the body so to speak.

Yeah.

And,

You know,

In terms of making a difference in the world,

I keep on thinking of the whole keto principle.

It says,

You know,

There's this field right here and what comes inside that,

You know,

You have to deal with.

You know,

What's out there further may not be an end of your business.

And it's not using that as a way of just putting blinders on.

But if you really take care of the stuff that's right around you,

It sends ripples out.

And if you take on more than you can handle,

Then what happens is the trauma of that ripples out.

So this,

As we all can feel,

Is a really complex topic as we get into how this stuff really hits us.

And underneath it all,

What we're doing with this practice is actually building up our capacity as much as we can because these things are complex and that there is no simple answer that applies to everyone with this.

And I always love what,

I think I mentioned this earlier,

What Thich Nhat Hanh said,

This very simple statement.

He said,

When you're mindful,

You know what to do and what not to do.

And the inverse is that if you're not mindful,

If your awareness is not open,

Then we act out of ignorance.

You're having quiet practice.

Yes.

So,

Anything else?

What I would like to do is just have us sit just for three or four minutes.

And I will invite you to come in and use this practice.

And then I will ring a bell and then I will invite you to do what you need to do.

You know,

If you've got to have good energy and want to continue in your practice,

Please do so.

If you want to go outside and do a little walking meditation or something and come back and sit and just continue on.

I forgive myself for not understanding.

I forgive myself for making a mistake.

I forgive myself for hurting myself or others.

And I forgive myself for not following my own deepest values.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Substituting compassion for gentleness.

Compassion is active.

Compassion swabs the crusted stump.

Convents the more merciful instruments to touch the wound beyond the wound.

Does not faint with disgust.

Will not be driven off.

Keeps bearing witness calmly against the predator,

The parasite.

I am tired of faintheartedness.

May all beings know compassion.

May all beings know kindness.

May all beings know joy.

May all beings know equanimity.

May all beings know compassion.

May it be so.

Amen.

Reviews

A powerful talk that addresses the subjects with honestly and the difficulty in right action.

Really helpful way to approach forgiveness. Thank you.

I am so grateful to have stumbled upon this talk. It was unreal. Thank you 🙏🏾

Thank you for the so useful forgiveness mantras 💜🙏🏽

It was by your seeing yourself through your mother’s eyes that I was able to see myself through your mother’s loving eyes, then my own motherly eyes and finally, my mother’s loving eyes. This instantly removed the decades old block prohibiting me from forgiving my parents. More importantly, it removed even a bigger block to forgiving myself. This is a must listen for anyone struggling with forgiveness. 🙏