EarthThunder: Articles
Forgiveness
Many notions of Forgiveness Earthbased questions to seek teaching

October 17th 2009 - FORGIVENESS



FORGIVENESS


BeLoved TASOM and Earthbased movement do not have a word ‘forgiveness’. The action is just that,

Do you want to move?
Or
Do you want to be stuck?
What are the consequences to both or either?


Manmade religions made forgiveness a death code of guilt.

Therefore, confusion, reaction, avoidance and/or complex behaviors ensue. Consider some of the notions below and shake up what you have known in the past.

On the Edge of Forgiveness
If you like your shoulders and back to be flexible then set forgiveness in motion and be free.
To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover the prisoner was you. – Unknown

Forgiveness allows the mental, physical, emotion bodies to flex. Clutching the luggage of the past misses the adventure. To forgive yourself for hanging on to the experiences is to transform the issue/issues into a story. Thusly, issue/issues can transform into teaching stories.
Forgiveness does not come easily and for many it is an unknown emotional story. It requires patience and is rarely a hasty proposition. It cannot be forced but it is a way of thinking that has to be chosen. The most arduous and sometimes insurmountable part of forgiving is that one must fully feel the injury and acknowledge it before anything can be forgiven. This is why so many families never heal. The children don't have the language and emotional maturity to express themselves. The parents, often suffering with their own unresolved childhood pains, have little insight into the damage they have done.

From many resources:

Forgiveness: The Action Verb
Love is an act of endless forgiveness. -- Peter Ustinov
If love is a verb, than forgiveness is the action verb. It is the highest form of love and the single behavior that most distinguishes our human potential. In an ancient tale from the Kaballah, God told some angels in training that the capacity to forgive is the most excellent gift in the human experience, more essential to the continuity of life than the courage to sacrifice your own life for someone else or enduring the pain of giving life. God explained to the angel, "Forgiveness is the only reason my creation continues. Without forgiveness, all would disappear in an instantaneous flash."
Certainly some might suspect this to be true with a quick glance to the Middle East. What would it look like if the rule of power and force were replaced with a mandate for the strength and courage of forgiveness? The comment by Desmond Tutu that "Forgiveness and reconciliation are not just ethereal, spiritual, other-worldly activities. They have to do with the real world. They are realpolitik, because in a very real sense, without forgiveness, there is no future," speaks volumes about the state of things.
And yet we don't have to look that far, for most of us, right in our own homes we struggle with hurts, real and imagined that separate us from the ones we say we love. The smallest of details in sharing a life with someone can easily and often without notice turn into a story line about the person you love. For years, my disregard of my husband's need for order and his disgust at my laissez-faire approach to house cleaning came to mean everything. We weren't talking about behaviors where we dramatically differed, instead each housekeeping incident was a personal insult that with just a small push inflamed to fury about the other weak points in our relationship.
Before Christ was born, Marcus Aurelius said "our anger and annoyance are more detrimental to us than the things themselves which anger or annoy us." The petty arguments of life are the cracks in the foundation of the relationships we are building and left unresolved often fall into the established patterns of retreat and attack which impact both partners' ability to be emotional available and vulnerable. It is not that big a stretch to see how these behaviors adapt into the extremely common, no-win situation of the sexual initiation complex. The questions of who asks and who says no are salt in the wound and all the small disagreements come to mean everything about being both loveable and loving.
And what of all the broken hearts in the Middle East? Anyone you would ask, on any street on either side, would tell you that they want the shooting, the bombing, the killing to end, and yet probably each and every one would also tell you why it must continue... for the cousin, the brother, the lover, the parent or the child who was maimed, killed, forever injured. Every person living in that region has a story to be forgiven and a heart so heavy with grief that the courage to open to the pain and loss is often more than they can bear.
I have only experienced the deep, life-changing balm of forgiveness in my life one time. Right at the moment when my marriage hung on the precipice of its end, we decided instead to forgive. I can't say who initiated it or even exactly how it happened, all I can say of that moment is that I couldn't remember any longer what it was to not be wanted, that all the years of fighting over who we weren't for each other evaporated and what was left was a space to love someone for who they were. My intimate life, very much at the core of my marriage, reinvigorated itself with a curiosity and genuine interest that had always cowered behind our relentless arguments. I was blessed and have since that time tried to understand just how that could have happened and how I can do it again.
I think that forgiveness is an act of the imagination. It embraces the child's heart, which is always ready to risk for a better moment and give up the hurt of the last one. Forgiveness is an innocent place where your hurt and pain does not have the final word. Yet there is little wisdom or strength that has more power to transform the world than the courage to bear witness to your pain and let go of it.

Sexual Forgiveness
Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit. -- Peter Ustinov
Sexual healing is only possible through forgiveness. The injuries and betrayals that we sustain as we negotiate this most mysterious human interaction of sexuality are as diverse as life itself. How these injuries imbed in our identities defines our sexual relationships, sometimes for life. While this is also true for other emotional injuries we sustain, the pain associated with sexual encounters is deeper by definition and encodes itself on us viscerally. Because sexual education is almost non-existent and sexual topics mostly taboo, most of us have very limited language to express our sexual experiences, good and bad.
The hidden scars and unhealed injuries from our intimate past often don't even show themselves until a new lover has breached a body memory that we didn't even know we had. The transformation of grief that occurs when a hidden injury is met with the light of expression and the warmth of a loving ear is life changing. The courage to expose events and self deprecating thoughts that attach to sexual betrayals of all kinds is both heart wrenching and heart opening. Deeply loving someone through this process can feel almost as hard for the partner. The feelings of powerlessness and empathy that sharing sexual injuries provokes can be almost equally intense. Yet, like all storms, after the raging emotions are vented, there is a calm space of refuge. Something is made new in the process. The emptying leaves room to begin again.
There are times when talking about it provides nothing. The words are all inadequate to the experience and it is actually only through the tenderness of touch that injuries can be felt and released. This is human alchemy, impossible to describe even after you have experienced it and even more impossible to instruct someone else in finding this path.
The ancient quote by Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, "The sexual embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer," provides a hint into this process. Among its profound mystery is the power of intimacy to heal and often it is enough to move forward with the right intention and an open heart.
These are the most fragile and tender of exchanges that we humans are capable of sharing and so it is easy even with the best of intentions to hold too strongly, to let go too soon, to not feel the other person's response in a timely and sensitive way. To err is human and oh, how human we are. Yet to forgive in this process is divine and the only way to stay together. Feel the pain with someone who loves you, even imperfectly, because that is the only way to feel the love. One of my all time favorite singers and heartthrobs, Bono of U2 sings, "Of science and the human heart, there is no limit. There is no failure here sweetheart, just when you quit...."
We are not trained well in love or sex or forgiveness and they are the trinity of a life well lived, each impossible to understand or live without the others. Here is to a truly new year of release and rebirth.



The first humans to walk naked
embraced ignorance of others complexity.


“I am not angry for the reasons I think?”








Wa-do, Talking Stick is now passed to you, listening
and dreaming,



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