0:00:00.5 Juan Alvarez: Would you like to be a better parent or a partner? Are you ready to break free from unwanted habits and get over the burden of the past? Maybe you would like to develop a healthier relationship with money or with food or be able to lead with compassion. In all those matters, Mindfulness can be a catalyst of change and a resource that you can always tap into. My name is Juan Alvarez and I’m an executive coach and a mindfulness teacher, a teacher and a guide or a companion for people looking for attainable ways of being more present, peaceful and conscious in their lives. I’ve dedicated my life to exploring how mindfulness and meditation improve our relationship with the world and with the people around us. So tune in if you want to build a solid meditation routine and learn different techniques that will also enhance the only practice that truly matters when it comes to being purposeful, life itself.
0:01:06.9 JA: Welcome friends to Life is the Practice. With today’s episode, we close the first season of this podcasting adventure and we do so by exploring the practice of forgiveness. Why is it so difficult for us to forgive? What is the nature of harm? How do we forgive sincerely and at the same time maintain our integrity and boundaries? How does the practice of mindfulness help us forgive? These are some of the questions that we will answer in our discussion today, including compelling contributions from two of my clients, Casey Brown and Jose Palma. Casey’s the founder of Boost Pricing, a company that helps sales teams price from confidence, negotiate with courage, and make better pricing decisions for higher profits. Jose is one of my lifelong friends. We’ve known each other since we were six. He’s a serial entrepreneur and the artist behind this podcast graphic design, so thank you Jose. Let’s go.
0:02:16.8 JA: This verse in the Koran tells the story of the prophet Yusuf whose brothers in a feet of jealousy throw him into a well, and yet he finds a way to forgive them in time. Curiously, we find similar versions of this story in the Torah as well as in the Bible. Joseph. Joseph is harmed and later forgives his brothers. It is common to find references to the importance of forgiveness in all religious frameworks and spiritual traditions. Why am I referring to these texts? Well, because in general they provide us with the keys to living a fulfilling life. In today’s podcast, we explore the fundamental role that forgiveness plays in our vital process and how mindfulness help us develop this important ingredient for a peaceful and happy existence.
0:03:18.9 JA: Let’s begin. One of the keys to our research on forgiveness must be to explore the nature of harm. What is the source of the pain inflicted? After all, it is the harm that has been caused that gives rise to the opportunity for forgiveness. But where does it come from? My meditation teacher Juan Manzanera, wrote in one of his articles, they hurt us. It’s true, but we all hurt each other. We are dominated by the mind, desire, fear, ignorance, anger. We act controlled by our emotions and sometimes we hurt each other. It’s not a justification, but when someone harms us, it is motivated by fear, desire, anger or any other negative emotion; it’s not the person but the mental state that possesses them. We live at a level of consciousness in which the mind dominates us. We only have to observe ourselves for a few days to corroborate how emotions control us and lead us to act without choice.
0:04:23.3 JA: This level of consciousness that Juan points out is what we call the state of identification with the mind or egoic state. It is a life condition in which most of us are trapped when we live from the ego. Mental states of scarcity and insecurity fill our life experiences with emotional discomfort that we then project onto others causing harm. In addition, we dwell in the midrash of separation, me, you, them, which prevents us from seeing that whatever damage we cause to others we do to ourselves and to the rest of living beings. Just look around. We see in the egoic state the cause of wars, marginalization, and other atrocities that cause suffering in our world. It is no different from what you and I experience daily. The mechanism is the same. It’s just the degree of pain that is more pervasive and damaging. This unconscious state of being is the root of all pain and suffering. If the concept of ego is new to you, I invite you to listen to episode five in which we explain it in depth.
0:05:32.9 JA: Now that we know where the harm comes from, the question becomes why is it so difficult for us to forgive? To help us answer this question, we return to the article by Juan Manzanera, in which he writes, harming each other is part of life. That is why we need to forgive. We need to stop giving it so much importance and to stop being surprised and disappointed by the actions of others. It is essential for our inner balance to abandon this negative attachment to what has attacked us. When we are hurt, we remain hooked and attached to whoever caused the harm. We do not want to let go. We feel we have every right to respond and be outraged. This is how we begin to feed a wound that will not fully heal until we realize and start the process of forgiveness. Juan is revealing some of the most common obstacles we confront. When we are hurt, we identify with the role of the injured or the victim and we get stuck in it, blaming the other and projecting our pain onto them. Look at what they did to me, as a result without even realizing it. We too are prisoners of the egoic state. This attitude limits and keeps us trapped in pain and conflict with others, sometimes for many years unto our own detriment.
0:06:57.9 Casey Brown: I grew up in a household in poverty with an alcoholic parent. I was very afraid a lot as a kid. So I have a set of stories and beliefs that I’m holding onto that is the obstacle to forgiveness. So in other words, forgiveness in and of itself wasn’t the problem. It was really about my ability to see myself as distinct from the thoughts I had.
0:07:23.4 JA: On the other hand, on an emotional level, we rarely know how to handle pain. It often feels uncomfortable or annoying and makes us react unpredictably. To forgive others, we must first learn to take charge and heal our own pain.
0:07:44.6 CB: The practice helped me see my own role in my pain. I would get triggered in situations and feel very angry, upset, frustrated, and I would point directly to the past and say it’s my dad’s fault, and then recognizing the pain that I was experiencing was already in me and I had held onto it for decades. And so there’s a tool from the practice, a emotional processing tool of feeling the pain and accepting it and being almost intimate with it in a way I had never accepted before. And as if by magic the anger and the resentment with my father has really melted away and I find a real ease in being with him.
0:08:34.0 JA: When we speak of obstacles to forgiveness, for many of us, resistance grows out of a fear of being vulnerable or potentially appearing weak, but Casey’s testimony allows us to actually glimpse the very real strength required for the process of forgiveness. As Gandhi said, the weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong, and now we take a minute to explore the alternative. What happens if we do not forgive? It may take weeks or years, but in the end, we will only find peace if we know how to forgive. And what does that look like? Letting go of animosity toward the person who hurt us. Otherwise, we remain trapped in an all consuming loop of negativity in the form of resentment or even hatred. A teacher of mine used to say, have we ever thought about reaching death without having forgiven? It can’t be an easy journey.
0:09:38.8 JA: Sometimes so much negativity and the projection of guilt unto others lead us to revenge, perpetuating the cycles of hate and pain. Put another way. Let’s consider the words of Nelson Mandela, the long imprisoned South African anti-apartheid activist and leader who shared the powerful belief first expressed by Augustine of Hippo. Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies. In order to forgive it is essential that we start with ourselves. We must start by becoming intimately familiar with the mechanisms of ego, guilt and pain. And once we come to understand these concepts personally, we can then begin to apply them to our relationship with others. What does it mean then to forgive ourselves? The key to forgiveness lies in becoming aware of the origin of our harmful behavior. It is about illuminating the change of the ego, which lead us to harm others in the form of unconscious negative mental and emotional patterns.
0:10:49.3 Jose Palma: I remember I had these thousand thoughts coming to my mind, how self demanding you are, how judging towards yourself and towards others, how you compare yourself. Sometimes wanting to position yourself on top of others. Sometimes you compare and you go down and that makes you feel bad. How many times I haven’t put any boundaries and when I don’t put those boundaries, what happens is I get anger and I project it into the world.
0:11:19.0 JA: Little by little we come to realize that evil does not dwell within us. Rather, it is the negative mental and emotional states that we harbor, which unconsciously take over, states such as fear, anger, envy, or insecurity. By revealing our essential innocence, the guilt we carry for the pain cost dissolves and forgiveness emerges. We recognize our limitations and lack of choice.
0:11:45.7 JP: So the biggest challenge one that was just basically, yeah, allowing me to recognize that all what I’ve done before has very little to do with my essence, but has a lot to do with the ego construction and from there realizing that all the pain that I’ve created to myself and to others is something that has very little to do with the real self.
0:12:18.5 JA: Forgiving ourselves then is learning to get out of the ego trap and reconnect with our essential nature. It is not about entering into a mental process to justify our behaviors, an approach that only continues to feed our egos. Our task is instead to go about transcending the ego itself, entering into conscious alignment with our vital essence. Some recognize this as an experience of God or creative source of life, which is forgiveness in itself. We are talking here of a heightened state of understanding in which there is no guilt, only peace and love. The egoic state is a state of separation from the loving source of life. When we operate from this place, we forget who we are and block the natural flow of our essential goodness. We are swamped by the suffering that comes with dwelling in the egoic experience of separation. The more we practice, the more we realize that when we are in an egoic state, it is no possible to avoid harm. No matter how strong our will or good intentions, we will always betray ourselves. Once we are better able to recalibrate our experience and to step out of the reverie of the psychological self, we stop falling into negative patterns and begin to reunite with our essential truth.
0:13:44.4 JA: A conscious alignment with life is possible then from which we can operate with kindness and peace. We finally come to understand that our egoic behavior does not reflect the truth of who we are and that there is no intention to harm. This reaffirms our commitment to the practice. As we have seen forgiving ourselves, prepare us to forgive others. By seeing and acknowledging the ego’s theatrics at work within us, we start to understand and acknowledge our innocence. We become better able to extend forgiveness not only to ourselves, but to others as well.
0:14:28.2 JP: The ability to recognize that I have been ruled by my ego for many, many, many, many years is allowing me to see that others are doing the same thing that I did and it’s allowing me to be forgiving towards them and more compassionate towards them. When I see my mom ruled by her ego, I mean, I’m still angry in the very beginning, but it’s helping me to be more compassionate towards her. And although I feel triggered for certain things she does and she says, but I’m starting to slowly, slowly be more, yeah, as I said, compassionate towards her and and seeing her innocence and seeing that little girl that is inside her that has wounds that has grown into a mature lady right now.
0:15:17.6 JA: Forgiveness does not require us to agree with what has been done to us. It doesn’t have to be fair. Nobody has to be right. Others neither repent for what they have done or ask forgiveness from us. In some cases, the experience needn’t be communicated at all. We are talking here about an internal act of humility and unity in which we transcend what was done and begin to forgive from where it was done. It’s a compassionate and loving understanding that frees us all.
0:15:56.9 CB: It was not a new concept to me that my father made the best choices and did the best he could throughout his life, given what was available to him. What’s really become clear to me through this work is translating that intellectual understanding that my father’s done the best he can to true acceptance of not necessarily who he is or what he does, but more from where he does it. And so being with my father deeply present to him has given me a real compassion for him and I can see in a very comprehensive way that he absolutely is doing the best he can from where he is and what he knows and what he understands about himself and the world.
0:16:47.0 JA: As the Russian author Leo Tolstoy once said, to understand everything is to forgive everything, I should note that forgiveness does not mean accepting all types of abuse or giving others carte blanche to mistreat us. Of course not. We can internally recognize the innocence of people who harm us while learning to set limits and protect ourselves from whatever unconsciousness dominates them.
0:17:19.4 CB: Now, to be clear, there’s still a need for me to manage my boundaries with my father because there are many ways he interacts with me that I find pretty unhealthy. But the internal experience is one of acceptance.
0:17:33.7 JA: Ultimately, forgiveness is realizing that there is nothing to forgive, that there is only innocence. In its broadest sense, forgiveness is love. It is an understanding from the experience of universal love in which we coexist alongside but separate from the one who harms us. Forgiveness is love. Love is oneness. It’s all the same thing. The point is to realize it.
0:18:03.6 JP: There was this sentence from the Bible, Jesus Christ said once, forgive them because they don’t know what they are doing. So basically like realizing that if you look with innocent eyes to others and you really see them as individuals ruled by an egoic state, and they actually don’t know what they’re doing, that really just puts you, I mean, it really puts you somewhere and where you are capable to pay forgiveness just with almost any effort, you just see innocent people doing whatever they can in the best way they can. Although it seems to create separation, it creates union because somehow you are aligning with an essence that you are able to see from them that they are not. So from that essence, forgiveness happens without any effort.
0:18:57.7 JA: Now that we have reviewed some of the essential aspects of forgiveness, let us investigate how different elements of mindfulness practice help us become more capable of forgiving. Meditation can help us develop skills to observe and release the egoic states that keep us trapped in pain or stuck in the roles of victim and culprit. As we have seen, becoming aware of the egoic mechanism within us activates compassion and forgiveness. With our emotional processing tool as Casey reminded us, we learn to take charge of our pain and process it to avoid projecting it unto others or getting bound up in it ourselves. The active practice of conscious alignment, integrating presence, and surrender in as many mundane situations as possible, reconnect us with the love that defines and reconciles us with this truth, we are all one.
0:19:54.3 JA: The ego is constantly accusing, blaming and separating. Therefore, both forgiveness and the practice are an ongoing mutually reinforcing effort. The practice is forgiveness. Forgiveness is the practice. As we close this episode, I leave you with some reflections on why practicing forgiveness is essential to living a fulfilling life. Forgiveness is fundamental for peace, both for our inner peace and for the peace in the world. It isn’t easy, but we have to make an effort to bring it into the world, to let the sermons of our spiritual leaders touch the ground and become reality through us. Let them not remain in hollow words or even worse ideas we add to our egoic identity, creating more separation and more harm. When our family members, our employees, our clients, our neighbors harm us.
0:20:58.3 JA: It’s important to remember that without forgiveness, we remain trapped in the ego, drunk with hate, unable to move forward to our fulfillment. When we forgive, we show the other the perfection of our highest humanity. And who knows, perhaps this will move them and inspire them to begin the journey to achieve it themselves. I encourage you to create a ripple effect. We are all capable of inviting love and togetherness rather than hate and division. Dear friends, we come to the end of this episode, and with it we close the first season of Life is the Practice. Thank you so much for accompanying me with such love and kindness on this adventure. We look forward to seeing you on our next season.
0:21:35.5 Speaker 4: Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
0:22:00.3 JA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Life is the Practice Podcast. If you found it valuable, please subscribe. Leave us a review. You might help others live better. And if you want to learn more about the practice, please explore the online course that is available to you @lifeisthepracticepodcast.com. Thank you and be well friends.
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