Cultivating Forgiveness

Another gentle passage on cultivating forgiveness from Comfortable With Uncertainty by Pema Chodron.

” Forgiveness is an essential ingredient of bodhichitta practice. It allows us to let go of the past and make a fresh start. Forgiveness cannot be forced. When we are brave enough to open our hearts to ourselves, however, forgiveness will emerge.

There is a simple practice we can do for cultivating forgiveness. First we acknowledge what we feel: shame, revenge, embarrassment, remorse. Then we forgive ourselves for being human. Then, in the spirit of not wallowing in our pain, we let go and make a fresh start. We don’t have to carry the burden with us anymore. We can acknowledge, forgive and start anew. If we practice this way, little by little, we will learn to abide with the feeling of regret for having hurt ourselves and others. We will also learn self-forgiveness. Eventually, at our own speed, we’ll even find our capacity to forgive those who have done harm to us. We will discover forgiveness as a natural expression of the open heart, an expression of our basic goodness. This potential is inherent in every moment. Each moment is an opportunity to make a fresh start.”

And so, every moment is an opportunity for a new beginning when we can cultivate forgiveness for ourselves and others.

Cultivating Forgiveness

Cultivating Compassion

A beautiful passage on cultivating compassion from the book Comfortable With Uncertainty by Pema Chodron.

“Just as nurturing our ability to love is way of awakening bodhichitta, so also is nurturing our ability to feel compassion. Compassion, however, is more emotionally challenging than loving kindness because it involves the willingness to feel pain. It definitely requires the training of a warrior.

For arousing compassion, the 19th century yogi Patrul Rinpoche suggests imaging beings in torment: an animal about to be slaughtered, a person awaiting execution. To make it more immediate, he recommends imagining ourselves in their place. Particularly painful is his image of a mother with no arms watching a raging river sweeps her child away. To contact the suffering of another being fully and directly is as painful as being in that woman’s shoes. For most of us, even to consider such a thing is frightening. When we practice generating compassion, we can expect to experience our fear of pain.

Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allowing ourselves to move gently toward what scares us. The trick to doing this is to stay with emotional distress without tightening into aversion; to let fear soften us rather than harden into resistance.

It can be difficult to even think about beings in torment, let alone act on their behalf. Recognizing this, we begin with a practice that is fairly easy. We cultivate bravery through making aspirations. We make the wish that all beings, including ourselves and those we dislike, be free of suffering and the root of suffering.”

And so, we begin our path to cultivating compassion gently.

Cultivating Compassion

I am not a practicing Buddhist, but I have great admiration for those who are. I do read often about the Buddha message, and one of my favorite books is Comfortable With Uncertainty by Pema Chodron. It seems to be a book I reach for more and more in these uncertain times.

One of the great messages of the Buddha is compassion. I often wonder how it is that so many situations on this planet call for our compassion, and why it is we fail to answer. It seems to be a matter of how willing, or not, we are to feeling and experiencing our own pain. We are all walking wounded in some way, and pain is inevitable in this life. Many of us are willing to dive in and go through it so we can get to the other side of joy, but many choose the path of running, some faster and harder than others. I think the Buddha, who clearly confronted his own pain, wanted us to know we could take refuge in him. Chodron explains that taking refuge in the Buddha means we are willing to live our lives embracing the experience of being awake.  We must be able to connect with the truth of who we are, and in order to do this, we must be willing to take all our armor off. Chodron explains this so beautifully, ” I will spend my life taking this armor off. Nobody else can take it off because nobody else knows where all the little locks are, nobody else knows where it’s sewed up tight, where it’s going to take a lot of work to get that particular iron thread untied. You have to do it alone. The basic instruction is simple: Start taking off that armor. That’s all anyone can tell you. No one can tell you how to do it because you are the only one who knows how you locked yourself in there to start.”

We cannot become and grow into beings of compassion with our armor on. We are not living from our true self when we are weighted down with all that armor. We cannot truly feel our own pain, or true joy for that matter, so there is no way we can feel the pain of others. When we begin to practice compassion, we will open the gates to the fear of feeling pain. It takes courage. The only trick I know when I am here is try to stay in a soft and gentle place inside because my resistance to feeling my pain makes me hard and tense. If I can feel my pain, I can feel the pain of another and together it will soften your heart. Again Chodron says, ” Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It is a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.”

This is such a beautiful Buddha message. Perhaps one day humanity will focus on what we all share over all our differences. This would be a sweet meditation  surrounded by our garden buddhas, to connect with all that we have in common with one another. For it is our similarities, not our differences, that cultivate the well of compassion when needed for one another. The Buddha message speaks the truth about the Universal Laws of Spirit.

Buddha Message