(Disclaimer: if you don’t want your life and the world to change for the better, don’t read this! 
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These past few years I have been initiated into the practice of forgiveness. It has not been easy and the road has never been straight. I have not always known that forgiveness was what was being asked of me. At times it has been a grind so painful, so confusing, and yes even despairing. But without a doubt this path I have persisted on has brought me to where I could never have gotten otherwise, to a place of healing, freedom and power.
Growing up in a cult-like church environment, cut off from others of my culture and indoctrinated to believe that I was inherently sinful, I was manipulated into believing that the only way to experience freedom was to first acknowledge my badness, my deficiency, and in my pitiable state reach out to God to make me whole. I was taught that, just by being me, I offended God and required God’s forgiveness.
When I broke some rule that my parents had established (or simply did something they didn’t like), they would sit me down in private, explain the nature of my offense, announce the number of lashes that would be administered to my naked rear end, then ruthlessly dole them out. If, after the assigned number of lashes, my spirit was not broken and I wasn’t a contrite mess of tears begging them for forgiveness (and God too, because they always seemed to imply that in offending them I had offended God)…well then, more lashes would be imposed until I did.
It wasn’t until I became a father myself that it even occured to me how in this way of parenting me it was THEY who had offended against me, they that should be grovelling for my (and, I suppose, God’s) forgiveness.
I’m not sharing this, however, to out them or to be acknowledged for how they abused me. This post is not about the wounds I sustained from their beliefs, their dysfunctions, their emotional abuse and neglect, their gaslighting. It’s not about the massive energetic violations of my spirit that I had no choice but to tolerate and try to survive. It’s not about how they poisoned my view of family by making sure that family was the least safest place for me to belong in.
My experiences are not unique to me. Far from it! So, so many others have been victimized both individually and systemically that I have been lucky enough not to have known.
Without invalidating anyone’s suffering, however, this post is also not about decrying the systemic abuses of power based on class, gender, status, race, orientation, etc. Regardless of what group you identify with or belong to, every single one of us has experienced wrongs done against us, which have left us hurt, angry, bitter, terrified, entitled, numb, resentful…or worse, in denial.
No, this post is about FORGIVENESS!
Because it would seem that many, if not all of us, have been disastrously misled about what it means to forgive. We have been programmed to believe that when I have been wronged, I am now in a power struggle with you. If you continue to do what hurts or offends me, then you are taking power from me. If you stop, and you take accountability, and ask for or desire my forgiveness, I now have the power to forgive you or not.
I spent decades keeping both physical and emotional distance between me and my family because of this. But the reality was that I was still energetically entangled in a power struggle with them, one that kept me oppressed. It cost me my energy, opportunities, money, marriages, and belonging in the world because this programming about forgiveness was so deeply entrenched in me. No matter how much I worked to heal and let go of the pain, the hurt, and the wounds I sustained, I couldn’t see this deeper power struggle for how deep it lived within me.
You see, rather than it being what they did or didn’t do that kept me in suffering, it was the paradigm of power-struggling that was the deepest culprit of all. It was the power struggle paradigm that consistently recycled through every area of my unconscious the core belief that I either was, or could be, a victim. It was the power struggle paradigm that framed my experience of everything: God, myself, my career, my achievements, my income, my friendships, my partnership, my parenting. I couldn’t let people close, I couldn’t fully relax, I couldn’t really trust. I was guarded and judgemental. I was desperate to perform to expectations at all costs. I told myself I masked all of that well, that I wasn’t that bad off or struggling as much as I was, and over several decades of working on myself I did make some progress to getting free of it.
And let me be clear: The power struggle paradigm did not originate with my parents’ treatment or my church’s doctrines. They themselves were merely symptoms of an evil manipulation far, far greater. No, it is the paradigm that has long been embedded within our culture’s collective mindset, seeding every interaction with fear and distrust of that which is not like me, those who do not agree with my story, my experience. From ancient masculine-feminine tension and patriarchal oppression and manipulation, to colonialism, racism, nationalism, capitalism, religious and political dogmatism and the like…this power struggle paradigm has long plagued humanity and dragged all of us, victims and perpetrators alike, into a sea of oppression that we have come to believe is normal, inevitable and immutable.
Because even when I felt the most open and connected, the most empowered and authentic, the most trusting and hopeful, there was always the specter of a power struggle that I was unconsciously bracing myself for. No matter how much I praised, celebrated, respected or enjoyed others, there was a niggling part of me that was on high alert for the ways they would hurt me. Everything came back to being a power struggle, everything came back to the fear that someone could be a threat to what I wanted and needed.
But what finally freed me was when I came to see that it was me that was holding on to that power struggle energy deep within me.
When I no longer saw myself in a power struggle with those who had hurt me or rejected me, then I finally found and sank into true power and belonging.
When I realized I was making myself a prisoner to the paradigm/rules of power-struggle based forgiveness and reconciliation, I could free myself without needing a thing from my perpetrators.
You see, we have been brainwashed to believe that forgiveness is like a gift that we give to someone else. In reality, forgiveness is me letting go of and actively rejecting the paradigm of power that fundamentally enslaved me. Rather than me seeking to believe or trust something new about them, I had to believe something new about myself. Rather than being dependent on whether they shifted what they were doing or what they were thinking, I could shift my paradigm about power and in so doing experience the freedom of forgiving, know that they could no longer threaten me because they could no longer separate me from Me, nor from the True Source of power which lived within me now, and always had.
It was no longer about me and you, it could now be about me, about you, and about us….three separate and related living organisms, each holding value and purpose and meaning when I chose to see it without the power struggle. You, Me, Us….each their own beautiful and powerful Beings, that I could honor as they were, and not need them to be anything but that.
It could now be YouMeUs, not fused into one, but not disconnected either. Interrelated. Interconnected. Cocreative. A beautiful torus of energy infused with the power of Creation.
Because I no longer choose the power struggle that was taking me out, I am free. Regardless of what you acknowledge, regardless of what you do.
It is no longer about whether I forgive you or not, but rather whether I choose to fill myself with forgiveness energy or whether I choose to engage the power struggle.
And that choice is one that I, and only I, can make or keep myself from making. I am no longer a victim to a system that has taught us to believe that forgiveness is a commodity to be exchanged like currency.
Being in forgiveness is our birth right to choose for ourselves.
