One of the things I find interesting about this process is that the Presence Activating statements do not necessarily imply what the reading supporting them will be about. It’s refreshing.
In this week’s case, the reading centers primarily around forgiveness. Brown speaks to the idea that while we hold judgments in our minds and hearts toward other people we remain imprisoned in the emotional holding patterns of un-forgiveness. So even if we feel justified in holding others responsible for our pain, it only hurts us by keeping us in it. Realizing and reinforcing in our minds and hearts the idea that we really are all doing our best, that we are all working with wounds and blind spots formed by our experiences in this world, is key to being able to forgive and free ourselves.
Every one of us at some point was a small child doing our best to make sense of the world. The only things we had to work with were the examples around us and what little skills we may have already developed.
I remember as a child noticing when it became appropriate in social settings to act like things didn’t matter. I remember feeling pain inside when other children or adults told me to calm down or made fun of me for caring about things too much. I remember being really sad that this was how things were going to have to be from now on, that caring was no longer something that was ok to do, that loving something too much or being too excited about something was just no longer an option within the social realm. That to me was the loss of my Disney dream moment.
I look back at that child now and I want to tell her that loving things and being sad about things and being angry sometimes is absolutely ok. She can have all those feelings and not have to push them away or act like they’re not there. I understand that many of us are taught that feelings are shameful, immature, un-ladylike, childish, foolish, all the things we are told about our feelings. Or at least about expressing them. This includes our parents. Our parents were those children too, doing the best they could to form themselves into people in the world. They looked to the examples around them to determine how to be. Perhaps their examples had wounds and blind spots as well. Can we hold our parents responsible for recreating some of the same things that happened in their consciousness before they were old enough to understand what was happening? And by the time they were old enough, the patterns and beliefs were already so entrenched that they FELT LIKE TRUTH.
Can we blame the people in our lives now for enacting their versions of these childhood plays that became part of the their consciousness before they could make any sense of things? Who is there in their lives to help them? Quite possibly no one. And there’s no reason it has to be you. But what you can do is try to be as kind and understanding with them as you can be to your own inner child, the one who did the best (s)he could. It can free us from the tyranny of judgment, the prison of un-forgiveness. And it helps us realize that we really ARE responsible for our own peace of mind. Not our parents, our boss, the government, the weather, no one outside ourselves has that kind of power over us once we can see this.
Can I get an AMEN?
