I work with many clients who can’t seem to forgive themselves or someone else. They are not students of ACIM. I am. So I aspire to reach them in a version of the universal language they can relate to.
Please forgive the crudeness of the following, and read on, because there is a point in here somewhere that might be helpful to some of you:
I teach my clients to…F**k Forgiveness!
I can say this, because I am an L.F.F. (Licensed Forgiveness F***er)
I can hear some of you questioning, “But, Master, how does thou f**k forgiveness?” Also, “How can I f**k forgiveness when I can’t even seem to get to first base with it”?
Firstly, I would like all of you to stop trying to date forgiveness at all. It’s out-dated.
In fact, I would suggest you give up on it completely, log in to Gracebook, and unfriend forgiveness forever.
Allow me to explain.
When I was in college I started studying the Course in Miracles, which, as you know, uses the word forgiveness a precise total of a zillion times.
I came back for the summer, sat down with my mother, and told her with as much sincerity as I could muster, “Mom, I forgive you for everything.”
My mother got angry, accusing me of faking a forgiveness-gasm, and uttered some of her most famous words in our Brooklyn household: “How dare you!?!”
I went limping back to a Course in Miracles with my spiritual tail between my legs, wondering what went wrong.
Have you ever heard of emotional bypass? My mother, who was both an atheist and an empath, could smell my spiritual bullshit a mile away.
As a coach, I’ve worked with no fewer than a zillion clients that had trouble trying to forgive someone, as if forgiveness was something they should do, and would do if they tried hard enough.
But forgiveness is not a verb.
It’s a process, a journey, a result of a long term commitment to healing, to peeling away hurt feelings, layer by layer. The key is allowing the pain inside you to be met with compassion. Then you can have compassion for the people who have pushed your buttons.
Here is an extremely helpful thing to understand about us humans:
Everyone on earth now is here on a healing journey, and many people are not aware of it. In fact, most are overwhelmed by what is being presented to them for healing, especially at this time in our intense collective celestial speed-up.
And, to make matters more interesting, most folks have zero tools or support for their healing journey.
And to top it all off, we all have learned to cover up the overwhelm with masks of content.
“How are you?” “Fine, and you?” “Just fine.”
Most of us now know that F.I.N.E. is an acronym for F***ed, Insecure, Neurotic, and Eager to Exit this conversation!
So what is true forgiveness?
Since forgiveness is a term so widely misused and misunderstood in our culture, when working with people other than Course students, I prefer to unfriend word entirely, and replace it with the words, compassionate understanding.
When you have done your healing work around feeling angry, hurt, abandoned, betrayed, rejected, persecuted, abused, or traumatized by someones behavior, you gradually develop a compassionate understanding for the simple fact that the other person had no bandwidth for you at the time.
And that is because they were busy being overwhelmed by their own healing journey.
It is not because there is something wrong with them, and it is certainly not because there’s anything wrong with you. Their plate was full and bending in the middle. And maybe neither of you knew it at the time.
By accepting that, it does not mean you have to interact with them, ask them to lunch, or tell them that you forgive them.
But maybe you can stop dressing them up in fancy psychological diagnoses, words such as ego-driven, narcissist, an obsessive-complulsive, or a major asshole.
Perhaps you can see them as both a Divine Child of God and a fellow stumbling human being, doing their best with what is on their plate.
Having no hard feelings is a sign you have done your healing work, transforming your hard feelings into lighter ones.
Here’s a handy word tool that you can take with you throughout your day, possibly saving you some time with a life coach like me, or on a therapist’s couch:
“Everyone I meet today is currently overwhelmed by their healing journey, no matter how fine they appear.”
To go back to my mother, many years later when I actually had forgiven her, she was visiting, and she saw a flyer I had on my fridge for a workshop I was leading, an offering playfully titled, Healing the Sick, Raising the Dead, and Forgiving your Mother!
We both had a good laugh.
PS. Now that we f***ed forgiveness together, wanna cuddle?
(plenty more where that came from at scottsongs.com)
8Janis Baron, Donna Benjamin and 6 others
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