Forgiveness

I wish I were less dependent on outside influences in terms of whether I'm happy or not. I feel like I should be able to control my thoughts and feelings a little better and not be swayed so easily by every breeze that blows along.

Sometimes, as now, when I'm looking out at another gray, rainy day, in the midst of an on-going customer service battle with a local business, and contemplating returning to a chaotic environment at work in two days, it seems almost impossible to rise above these things and be content within myself.

I admire people who retain their equanimity no matter what happens, and try to emulate them. I believe that I've attained that goal--in outward appearance. I seldom show anger or disappointment to other people. In fact, people who don't know me may well think that I have no emotions when, in fact, I take my feelings away with me and keep them inside, to be dealt with privately. My outward zen-like calm often masks an inner turmoil.

Yesterday as I was driving to work I was feeling very sad, and became even sadder when I realized that I spend nine hours a day at a place where there is no one to whom I can go for emotional support. And it's my own fault. I don't let anyone in, I don't give of myself emotionally, so there is no one to give back to me. On the other hand, I guess if I don't expose my feelings to other people, they can never throw them back at me. How did I get to be so closed off?

Fear prompts it, I guess--fear that if I let someone get too close to me, know too much about me, they'll expect something of me that I may be unable or unwilling to give. I've gone through my life for so long with so little emotional contact, just skimming the surface, that it's incredibly frightening, but also liberating, to contemplate opening my heart to another person. On occasion I "bare my soul" to another; then I usually feel like it was a mistake, that now they'll know too much about me, or like me less or think less of me. And I worry that I may not express myself well, and be misunderstood. Sometimes my worries are well founded, but most of the time I have to remind myself that everyone has too many of their own worries to give much thought to me.

As I was looking through some books for an applicable quote for this page, two different books opened in my hands to chapters on forgiveness. I'm constantly reminding myself that no one can know what is in another's heart. We're all human, we all make mistakes, we all hurt one another occasionally, unintentionally. We just go through our lives, doing the best we can, day after day.

In Stephen Levine's book, Guided Meditations, Explorations and Healings, he writes a guided forgiveness meditation, which calls on us to forgive those who have hurt us, to ask forgiveness from those we have hurt, and, ultimately, to forgive ourselves.

Now gently turn to yourself in your own heart and say, "I forgive you," to you.

It is so painful to put ourselves out of our hearts.

Say, "I forgive you," to yourself.

Calling out to yourself in your heart, using your own first name, say "I forgive you."

If the mind interposes hard thoughts, that it is self-indulgent to forgive oneself, if it judges, if it persecutes you, just feel that density and let it soften at the edge. Just watch that unkind mind and let it be touched by forgiveness.

Allow yourself back into your heart. Allow you to be forgiven by you.

And so that is my current task--to attempt to allow myself to open my heart to other people regardless of what I may interpret their reaction to be, to realize that the fears and concerns that other people hold in their hearts are the same ones I hold in mine, and to forgive them, and myself. Life is too short to do otherwise.