CURRENTS
Forgiveness and Freedom
I sure hope this is true to some degree...
Sometimes, we take everything that happens to us personally. We think that we've been singled out by someone or a group of someones. We imagine that they are somehow better than we are, and we give them the right to make us feel badly about ourselves. Badly about our lives. Badly about our work here and our right to exist.
We don't know we're giving them all that power. And usually, strangely enough, they do not realize that they're taking all that power. They hardly ever realize that they're using the weakness of another to fill a void in their own life: it makes them feel powerful. It makes them feel bigger than they really are. It doesn't occur to them that they're hurting another person.
They might be very nice, friendly, well-meaning people. But if they find that one special, unlucky person that has a wound, a soreness, a place of woe and sadness that becomes obvious to them as they get to know that person, they sometimes will use that wound, that soreness, that woe and sadness to claim victory over their own emptiness. They almost always are blind to what they're doing. Most people don't want to be mean. They just find themselves digging their psychic knife into someone else's wound, watching the blood flow. They don't mean to ... it's an act of helplessness and despair on their part.
And sometimes we give our wounds to others, knowing that they'll use them against us, knowing that they'll hurt us and leave us broken, more broken than we were before we met them. We all have a weakness, and when we're feeling weak, those in desperate need of filling that emptiness in their own hearts will go right for that wound, that weakness in us.
And we die just a little bit more. We lose just a little bit more of our dreams, of our joy, of our love of life, and of our sacred selves ... that connection we have to the Infinite Beauty and Truth of the whole Universe gets stretched thinner and thinner, and eventually, we lose hope. We lose faith. We lose the very will to live.
Some people call it "being abused" ... and an abused person falls into a "cycle of abuse" ... they even sometime learn to love the abuser. They'll support the cycle, and they'll miss the abuser if the cycle is broken.
They'll go to every length possible to please the abuser. They'll become broken-down failures if that's what the abuser intends for them.
The strange thing is that the abuser usually is never fully conscious of what havoc they're reeking on another persons vital life-force. They'll say that they want the person to succeed, to be happy, to enjoy being alive, to create beauty and joy, to bring love into the world. To have a nice life.
But down inside, the abuser is broken. He or she was broken many many years ago - so long ago that they've forgotten that terrible moment when they GAVE UP ON THEIR OWN DREAMS. And now, being able to replay that crime that was committed against them, they do it without thinking.
And it fills them up, for just a moment, with a feeling of power and pride. It makes them feel alive even if it's fleeting and even if it's false. It's just enough to FEEL.
And then, when it's all over, and that abused person has either crashed and burned in a spiritual and/or physical way, or taken their lives back into their own possession and moved out of the reach of the abuser, the emptiness comes back, stronger than ever. They won't feel that surge of power and false pleasure again until another person with another terrible wound comes along. And there are so many among us that carry wounds of great pain and severity: they won't usually have to wait very long.
The greatest sadness is to NEVER WAKE UP from this nightmare. Once you realize that your life is sacred and blessed and beyond the judgment of other human beings, you've come awake! You won't be hurt as badly as before. You still have wounds and scars. You still are imperfect, you still will make mistakes in almost every area of life.
But you WILL NOT LET THESE THINGS STOP YOU!
I said today - to the dearest person in the world to me - that I didn't know what the right answers to the problems in life were, but I had at least 10,000 answers that definitely weren't right, and that brings me closer to knowing the Truth!
Living in a castle of sand, with fear and abandonment your only companions, you will dry up and die, bereft of joy and freedom. When you walk away from those who make you feel bad when you're around them, when you close those lines of communication with the people that want to see you hurting and failing and dying, you become open to LIFE again. You start to become AWAKE again.
When you were a little child, you felt happy, pretty much all the time. And then, gradually, things happened. One bad thing after another, until finally, in your teens or twenties or forties or sixties, you just said to yourself, "I am not good enough. They are right. They have won. Joy is a myth. Happiness is a lie. The only thing real and solid and dependable is suffering. And I DESERVE to suffer."
And when you AWAKEN from this terrible tragedy, you gradually see that you LET this happen. You can blame all you want. And the blame is truth, but it won't let you be FREE unless you LET THE BLAME GO.
And then you pick up the pieces of your self (and they are all there, intact, you must have faith and believe that, because no abuse can strip you entirely of the thing that has made you YOU) and you put the pieces together and you learn to STAY AWAKE, you learn to never let this happen to you again.
And you forgive the only person that you have the true POWER to forgive.
You forgive yourself.
Then you seek that joy. Not for revenge.
For FREEDOM.
For LIFE.
For JOY.
For YOU.
- JW, 3-24-07