This is a forgiveness meditation I recently wrote. Its about forgiving others and ourselves.
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You deserve more, more joy and satisfaction and moments of peace.
And in order to have all of that, you need to become less, to release the burdens you carry. Not the rent or your mother’s illness or the circumstances of your life, but the past that you carry with you.
You know the invisible, tattered piece of luggage you carry everywhere. Packed with the ideas about your shortcomings and those of others; the large supply of critical thoughts, the record of every time you lost your way or made a mistake. It holds your grudges, the list of debts – what the people in your life owed to you that they never paid, perhaps what is owed to you by life itself.
This suitcase is with you always– literally weighing on you, fatiguing you and slowing you down. Think about it – you can’t run or skip or jump or dance while caring it. It’s making you old and resentful and shut down. Its so full of accumulated stuff there isn’t even room for you to pick up a new offering of this moment.
But congratulations: you have reached a special waystation on your journey. This is the precise time and place where you can put it down.
You have tried your very best in life, and your performance has been brilliant. You made the best choices you could. You always did what you felt you needed to do.
Sometimes your intention didn’t translate in the world as you thought it would. Your choices had effects you never intended.
Sometimes, you didn’t know what to do. You tried things and they didn’t work. Messes were made. You ended up with situations you never intended.
Other times, fear took over and got in the way of your heart’s intention. You attacked and defended and did all kinds of things to quiet what was raging inside of you.
Again and again, you missed the mark. So did all of us. All of us, doing our very best, constrained by the limitations of our own ignorance, fear or humanity.
We reacted to each other’s misfires as if they were the truth. We misunderstood one another. Life got complicated, and the world became treacherous.
Here, at the waystation, there is a pond with dark, still waters. Take your suitcase with all it carries, and drop it in. Drop it in because you know the truth: You were doing the best you knew how, and so was everyone around you. See your own perfect trying and that of everyone around you. Forgive. Watch it sink under the surface and drift to the bottom. A soft thud. It rests there now – safe and where it belongs.
Feel yourself and the world without it, clean slate. No lingering regrets. No resentments. No beliefs about what’s wrong with you or the world.
Feel your body, taste the air, look at the light of day. Your face is different know, cleansed and opened. And so is your neighbor’s.
Look around at grace. Look around at the force of birthing, of beginning again.
My love: life was meant to be lived only with the cleansing and rebirth that comes from total forgiveness of yourself and others. Without it, you will suffer and you will contribute to the insanity and cruelty of the world.
If you will practice profound letting go, you will live the joys of a thousand lives in this one life. You will liberate all those around you by your presence and you will receive a waterfall of forgiveness and compassion so abundant and huge you cannot today imagine it.
