Moving Beyond Forgiveness

How would it be to finally realise and accept your own humanness:  your fallibility, your struggles and challenges, your imperfections?  Wouldn't that give space for everyone else to be utterly human too?  We hear so much about forgiveness in healing and self-development circles, but do we really need to forgive?  What does forgiveness actually mean?

If we unpick forgiveness, we realise that inherent in any idea of forgiveness is the judgment of something as bad or wrong that needs to be forgiven.  Yet aren't we also encouraged to give up all our judgments?  How can these two things go hand in hand?  Aren't these two concepts mutually exclusive?

Imagine what happens to our internal relationship with ourselves when we try to cultivate self-forgiveness.  On one hand, we are believing the judgement that something we did was bad and wrong, and then on the other hand, we are telling ourselves that we are a good person: big enough to forgive and deserving of forgiveness.  It’s really giving ourselves mixed messages!

Last week I had the experience of realising that it was possible to recognise that something I had done did not serve me without making myself wrong for it.  I didn't need to forgive myself because I was able to distinguish that I didn't need forgiveness.  What I needed instead, was to acknowledge that the choice I had made did not serve my highest intentions. I also needed self-love and compassion to understand what limitations had held me back.

If this is true with something we ourselves have done, would we be able to apply it to the actions of others or even past events that we have carried with us?  So often we get caught in the trap of feeling stuck because something happened in the past that we are unable to let go of.  If I want to forgive you, I am actually belittling you by judging your behaviour as wrong and then being the big person, the one who forgives you!  It is in effect a power play, a way to strengthen our own egos, in the guise of being good and right and loving. 

In the process of trying to forgive past events, we solidify them in our own minds as wrong in order to cultivate the forgiveness that we seek from ourselves, from others, or for others. We are underscoring the idea that we or another person ‘should’ have done better. Is it not true that we all do the best that we can at any given time? We may not live up to the highest capacity that we know resides within us, but we do what we are capable of in that moment. If we drop the idea that we or others have done something wrong and ‘should’ have done better, we can investigate in a much more constructive manner. We can calmly analyze, with love, not criticism, why our capacity was limited at that moment, and learn from this reflection.

What does it mean to ‘move beyond forgiveness’?

The idea is simple, instead of judging and determining that a particular behaviour is bad or wrong, you simply look and see: did it really serve your or the other’s intentions?  Did it reflect your/their highest capacity?  Was love present in the choice and in the action?

Look for what you know to be good and loving in yourself or in the other person, and then acknowledge any limitations you or they might have – challenges from the past, insecurities or fears about how you/they will be perceived or whether you/they will be liked, guilt because you/they didn’t communicate as clearly as you/they would have liked, difficulty in expressing your/their needs.  For whatever reason, recognise that you or the other person were just not able to do any better in that moment. 

It’s all very basic human stuff at the end of the day, and the more we can allow ourselves to be fallible and admit our weaknesses, the more we can give the same space to others.