I will never forgive you
How many of us have felt or actually said "I will never forgive you?" How many of us have realized that, years after the event, we were still carrying anger, resentment, or hurt from something that someone did to us?
I remember being at a retreat with S. N. Goenka who talked about “letting go.” He related a quote from the Buddha: "holding anger toward someone is like picking up a hot coal and throwing it at them. You are the one who gets burned."
He also used a metaphor:
Imagine etching "I will never forgive you" into granite with a jackhammer.
It will be there long after you are dead.
Now imagine etching the sentence into the ground with a strong, sharp stick.
It will last months, maybe even years.
Now imagine writing those words on the sand at low tide.
They are gone by the next tide.
Eventually, we can write them on the water and they are gone in moments.
While at Cape Cod this summer, I made a visual meditation which you can watch here. You can see the tide coming in as it washes away the NO that I etched into the sand with my feet.
The actual process
The actual process, to use a fairly common saying, is simple but not easy. Essentially you are not trying to get rid of the unwanted emotion but rather continuing basic mindfulness awareness—being curious, nonjudgmental, and compassionate—towards the part of you that is feeling anger, resentment, shame, etc.
Thich Nhat Hanh encouraged us to befriend parts of ourselves that we didn’t like. He suggested that we treat this part like a younger sibling who is upset and open our arms and comfort them. Another time, he suggested saying to this unwanted part, “Hello old friend, come sit with me.” In an earlier blog I spoke about Internal Family Systems, an approach where we recognize that this strong emotion is a part of us that can't let go, yet. In order to be free from this afflictive emotion, we have to welcome this part, to listen to this part, to understand what is keeping that part from letting go.
We are far more complex beings than we can imagine. With strong emotions that persist, the problem solving, analytic parts of our mind cannot think their way into resolving this ‘problem.’ Rather we invite in the heart intelligence and the body intelligence by feeling this energy with an interested, non-judgmental, and kind awareness. I will illustrate with some stories.
My mountains of resentment
I was lying in bed feeling resentful toward someone about something and practicing observing the resentment in my body, feeling the resentment, being kind to those parts of me that were holding the resentment. I had been doing this for years, and had worked on this issue in therapy to understand where my resentment came from. And it was still there! Suddenly, my resentments appeared to me as huge mountain ranges. Each mountain range represented my resentments toward various people and situations: my resentments toward my father, my wife, my children, other people, the college where I worked,...
It was a stunning and horrifying image. However, in the next moment a voice came from within me stating, “you don’t have to take down these mountains, you simply have to stop continuing to build them.” In that moment, so much resentment fell away. In reflecting that night and afterwards, I saw more clearly the behaviors that helped to create the resentment, and that was when my behavior changed. And the mountains got smaller.
Similar story, different words
I have shared this story and teachings about letting go at the Center where I teach, and several people have told their own stories of success with this counterintuitive and initially strange feeling process (asking a part of yourself what you need to hear). Below is a composite of a couple of stories.
One participant said that she had rolled her eyes when I talked about being kind to the part that we didn't like and asking it what she needed to know. However, on her ride home she was still stewing about something that had happened. So she asked her angry part, "what do you want me to know." To her surprise the angry part spoke right up and said, "You need to listen to me. Sometimes you're too nice and you let people walk over you. If you'd listen to me, this wouldn't happen." It was a transformative moment.
Her son’s killer
In an earlier blog I told the story of Mary who tried to forgive her son's killer. However, years later there was still a lot of anger. So she decided to meet the man in prison. Here is her description of the moment of letting go. She felt the meeting was helpful and he asked her if he could give her a hug and she agreed. Here is the moment of letting go in her words. During that hug, "I felt this ‘thing’ leave me. And I instantly knew that all that hatred, the bitterness, the animosity, all that junk I had inside me for 12 years, I knew it was over with. It was done. Instantly, it was gone.”
Final thoughts
In some cases, a truly mindful awareness of the afflictive emotion will result in the letting ago. In other cases, like my resentment or Mary’s anger toward her son’s killer, it takes much longer. Thus, patience and letting go of expectations are important qualities to bring to this issue.
An important aspect of letting go is that we can’t dictate when it happens, so those years of mindfulness practice and therapy were helpful, and those years that Mary worked on forgiving her son's killer were helpful. It's like fruit on a tree. The fruit falls when it is ripe, and not until then.
Another image that underscores the idea of letting go, when we understand in our whole being what is holding us back, is the image of accidentally picking up a hot pan on the stove. You don’t have to think “I should let go.” When we have that same kind of knowing and feeling the pain that we would have with the hot pan, the letting go is that immediate.