Recently I have been exploring the topic of “Forgiveness”. Forgiveness is the antidote to many forms of enduring anger and depression, which may manifest as grudges. Grudges and grievances are detrimental for many reasons:
1) They take up valuable mental energy.
2) They encourage you to focus your life around circumstances that serve to avenge the wrongdoer rather than circumstances that maximally serve you.
3) They’re just not fun.

Nursing grievances drains our energy, and such draining perhaps continues to serve the person who did us ill in the first place. A note about enduring anger and depression: these often may actually be more accurately described as wallowing in pity (though it never feels like that at the time to the angry or depressed, so we must be compassionate).

Two books have sincerely informed my exploration of forgiveness: “The Art of Forgiving” by Lewis B. Smedes and “Forgive for Good” by Fred Luskin.

Luskin suggests that nursing grievances is akin to writing out tickets. Kind of like a traffic cop, whenever we nurse a grudge (feeling angry, hurt, sad, upset, disappointed), we are basically writing the person who wronged us a “ticket” for wronging us. Unfortunately, writing tickets that we can’t cash is frustrating… the practical thing to do is to let them go. Frustration stems from trying to enforce unenforceable rules.

What I’m really trying to say is that anger and sadness are both useful emotions when experienced in the right context. Anger alerts us that one of our boundaries has been crossed, and sadness alerts us that we need to change our direction in life – to let go of whatever we had been holding on to. However, in practice these should really be temporary emotions: they should alert us to what we need to change, and then we should change that thing, and then the emotions should go away. Unfortunately, that’s not what happens in practice, the most of the time – it’s not what’s been true in my experience.

So if we’re angry, and it’s not directly related to a situation relevant to the present moment, then perhaps forgiveness is the right strategy. Forgiveness helps us accomplish goals instead of nursing anger. When exactly is forgiveness appropriate?

According to Smedes, it’s
1) We need to bear the wounds ourselves
2) We need to know we have been wronged
3) We need to have an inner push to forgive

According to Luskin, it’s
1) Know what your feelings are
2) Be clear about the action that wronged you
3) Share your experience with one or two trusted people

Reconciling the two,
1) Know what you want to forgive and how it made you feel
2) Want to forgive, and be ready to move on. Get the “story” out of your system (by sharing it). Otherwise, when you’re ready to forgive, your story will resist because it feels it hasn’t had sufficient time in the spotlight. Really, it’s very difficult to let go of any kind of story. Spiritual new-age people talk about “letting go the stories”… and while that is all well and admirable, I’m not yet certain if we can ever escape the ego (i’m equating the “ego” with a “story” and “identity”). The ego is there, and as Greg Slepak so deftly articulated in the comments of my last post, the ego definitely exists as a set of neurological pathways. It may not be “reality” in the sense that it gives us distorted perceptions of reality, but it is “real” in the sense that, like it or not, it is there. So the question is not “how do we remove the ego” but instead “how can we make the ego serve us better”. Indeed, as Eckhart Tolle himself says, “The mind is a powerful tool when used correctly. However, when used wrongly, it is not you who use your mind. Your mind uses you!”. What a goofball But he’s right.

Luskin’s approach is that we want to transition out of a victim identity and instead create a story in which we are the hero. Smedes sharply observes “If we wait too long to forgive…We become the pain we feel. We cannot cleanse ourselves of it without loss to our own identity.” And in my opinion, if something violates the boundaries of your identity, it won’t come into fruition. This may be a concept closely related to “The Law of Attraction”, which at some point I would love to dissect from an intellectual bent, since there’s so much (frustrating!) hand-waving nonsense in the new-age community.

It’s important for me to clarify some things about forgiveness. When I told somebody I was working on forgiveness, he replied “Here’s my approach on forgiveness: three words. Absolutely not. Never.” This attitude is understandable: after all, if you have been wronged, you don’t ever want to have that sort of wrong repeated against you. Moreover, all negative and stressful experiences are routed immediately from perception (eyes, ears, whatever) to the thalamus then through the amygdala, and the amygdala (supposedly) never forgets anything. But forgiveness is about you, and not the person whom you’re forgiving. It doesn’t convert something intrinsically intolerable into something intolerable, and it doesn’t signal that you are willing to put up with it in the future. It allows you to become at peace with the past so you can become at peace in the present. You don’t even have to tell the other person that you forgive them… it can just be internal.

And what are the main steps of forgiveness?

Lewis Smedes says that they are:
1) Rediscover the humanity of the person who hurt us
2) Surrender our right to get even
3) Revise our feelings toward the person we forgive

Fred Luskin presents many techniques for forgiveness… among them are “Breath of Thanks”, “Heart Focus”, “PERT”, “Changing the channel”, and “HEAL”. Of all these, “HEAL” resonated the most with me. Also, the HEAL process is very much a practical application of the theory presented by Lewis Smedes in the previous paragraph. So…

HEAL stands for Hope, Educate, Affirm, and Long-term. I’ll explain.

“Hope” is what you wanted… and what you were not given by the person whom you need or want to forgive. For example, a proper hope statement might be “I wanted a strong and lasting marriage.” or “I wanted a loyal and honest and loving partner.” or “I wanted a strong and compassionate father.” Hope statements should not be steeped in the negative – such as “I hoped that Raymond wouldn’t cheat on me”, or “I hoped that Jerome wouldn’t sell me out for improved popularity.” No, they should be positive.

“Educate” is about reality. There are limits to your control over other people, yourself, or life events. With “Educate” we acknowledge the reality of not having gotten what we wanted, and we fully accept that. We acknowledge forces that resist our control; we try to become stepped in realism. We acknowledge the impersonal nature of the universe. Moreover, we acknowledge that the person who wronged us was a human being, and they were doing what they thought to be the best course of action. Socrates believed that “all vice is the result of ignorance, and that no person is willingly bad”; everyone always does what they perceive to be good. (c.f. Plato’s Meno.) When we educate ourselves in reality, we drain the ego of its power. The ego thrives off of misery and suffering; such unpleasantness is fuel, for it is evidence of one’s “uniqueness”, of how you are “special”. When operating from this perspective we are often emotional, and emotionality is one of the best ways to distort reality (when we are in a state of heightened arousal, we no longer maintain our sober risk profile [Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational]; when we are overly happy, we become inaccurately optimistic [Martin Seligman, Learned Optimism (summary of learned optimism)]).

The more we distance ourselves from the distortions of the ego, and the more we increase our level of consicousness, the better grasp of reality we have. This is not just “Knowing” in the new-age/Eckhart Tollean sense, but indeed a better grasp of material reality. In David Hawkins’ paradigm, rationality is one of the steps on the stairway to enlightenment – and it’s a step that’s way, way up there.

Another really important thing is that when we become more realistic, we learn to evaluate all of the good things about the person that we are forgiving. Of course, this may be really difficult when we’re forgiving a serious wrong, such as the murder of our child, but when forgiving a disloyal friend, we might remember all of the good times we shared with that person. Or when we’re forgiving a parent for not being there for us, we can now remember that they gave us the gift of life, and provided us with meals, shelter, and clothing.

Back to the HEAL acronym/HEAL method: “A” stands for affirm. This means affirm our positive intention. For example, “to use my experiences to become a stronger person”. Another good example is “to find a friendship with a loyal, honest, caring friend”. Luskin provides an excellent six-step exercise for discovering our positive intentions:

1. Find a quiet place where you can be undisturbed for about ten minutes
2. Practice PERT once or twice to get yourself into a relaxed frame of mind
3. Ask yourself, “What was my reason for being in the grievance situation in the first place? What was my goal, expressed in positive terms?”
4. Think about your response until you have a one- or two-sentence positive intention
5. Promise yourself you will not tell the grievance story any longer.
6. Practice telling the positive intention story to a handful of trusted people.

To make use of this technique, you have to understand PERT, Positive Emotion Refocusing Technique
1. Bring your attention fully to your stomach as you slowly draw in and out two deep breaths. As you inhale, allow the air to gently push your belly out. As you exhale, consciously relax your belly so that it feels soft.
2. On the third full and deep inhalation, bring to your mind’s eye an image of someone you love or of a beautiful scene in nature that fills you with awe and wonder. Often people have a stronger response when they imagine their positive feelings are centered in the area around their heart.
3. While practicing, continue with soft belly breathing.
4. Ask the relaxed and peaceful part of you what you can do to resolve your difficulty.

Note: stress and anger come through the amygdala. By breathing, we trigger a relaxation response. I’m not sure why this happens, precisely. I ordered a couple books off Amazon recently, “Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom” and “Mind in the Balance: Meditation in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity”. As soon as I’m done reading them, I’ll review them, and the new knowledge will definitely imbue my future posts. Anyway, the very hand wavey explanation is that meditating makes us calm, and more rational; it brings us closer to our higher Self that knows our desires and can lead us in the right direction through its intrinsic intelligence and wisdom.

Finally, L stands for long-term commitment to forgiveness. We’re human. We’re animals. And while we can transcend the animal components to our existence, the truth of the matter is that it’s very easy to recede into previous patterns. After all, we’re creatures of habit, and our habits are represented by neural pathways. Of course, this would delight the behaviorists, but what can we do? They paved the way, had a lot to say, and I think there’s much to be said for an enlightened revival of behaviorism. We’re addicted to neural pathways; whatever we do, we do repeatedly. If we’re happy, we’re typically addicted to being happy. If we’re sad, we’re addicted to being sad. This is probably very similarly related to “the ego” to which I often refer. So how long does it take to change a habit? According to Psycho-Cybernetics, Dr. Maxwell Maltz says it takes 21 days. The ultimate takeaway is that if we want to effect a change, we have to persist with *intent*, face obstacles as they come, and periodically renew our intentions and commitment.

I hope that this post has been helpful. If you want to learn more, you can get “The Art of Forgiving” from Amazon for only $10.04, and you can get “Forgive for Good” from Amazon for only $10.19. A note on the books: I found Smedes’s text to be more practical, and down to earth, and humble; Smedes’s book is more human and it reads like wisdom from a friend. There is a religious tonality in the Smedes book, but I benefited immensely from the book, so I would caution against dismissing it simply because it makes occasional references to Christian ethics. Forgive for Good has some excellent exercises, and I recommend it as well (3 stars out of 5).

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