The Practice of Understanding, Compassion, Forgiveness

When we run into resistance, or it feels resistance has run into us, our first inclination is usually to blame the situation or the people around us. However, if we look a bit deeper we see that the resistance, the push, the actual pain we are feeling arises from what we are saying about ourselves. When we diminish ourselves we feel it as a push.

Our bodies are so perfectly designed that when we misidentify ourselves or have a misunderstanding of our value we feel it as resistance. When we are aligned with our true self and have a clear understanding and appreciation of our value we experience it as a pull.

The practice of understanding-compassion-forgiveness will support you in transcending your pushes into pulls. It is a practice you can use over and over each time you experience a push. When you first encounter a push you listen for the should/shouldn’t, identify the survival/scarcity rule if you can, and determine how you are misidentifying yourself with your diminishing thoughts. Once you have that information you are ready for the practice of understanding, compassion and forgiveness.

The Practice of Understanding

Understanding involves having awareness and information about what is really taking place. Very often when we become aware that we are feeling, thinking and acting based on a misidentification of ourselves or a misunderstanding of our value, we feel powerless to do anything about it. We have become so conditioned to believing the false perception of ourselves that we may act as if that perception is true. However, we know that those beliefs can’t be based on the truth of who we are because they diminish us.

When these thoughts arise take a deep breath and say to yourself “that’s interesting.” I love that phrase because it gives you room to look further into the belief without judgment. You may say to yourself, “It’s so interesting that I believe I am selfish, too sensitive, too loud, lazy or that I have to be subservient.” Why do I believe this? When do I first remember coming to this conclusion?”

If you are able to separate yourself from the diminishing thoughts, you will gain more clarity. For example, your parents may have taught you to keep your head down and not make waves. Or you may have learned, to be noticed you always had to be the one excelling. That if you weren’t the one at the top you were lazy or a failure. With that insight, whatever insight relates to your push, you can see how you continued that thought process throughout your life. You can understand how you got into this way of thinking.

“Oh no wonder I feel I can’t speak up. I have been living inside of the belief that if I speak up I am rude and will offend people, or if I speak up I will lose my job. I can see how this feeling started with my family, back when I was growing up. But I’ve been the one keeping this going all these years.”

Think about the belief or diminishing thought of misidentifying or judging yourself, or better yet the feeling behind it. Why would you believe you are less than who you are or that you should be more than who you are? Why do you believe you have to earn or deserve the right to be you? You’ll start to get a sense of where that message came from and understand why this scarcity rule has you gripped. There was something at stake. If you didn’t follow the scarcity rule, you would lose something you valued.

The Practice of Compassion

When you start to see into your thoughts and feelings and where they are coming from you begin to feel compassion for yourself. You might say, “It was difficult always having to hold back what I wanted to express while listening to others share their opinions and experiences. I can see why I have been feeling angry and resentful all these years. It is not true that I can’t speak up or that I am rude or foolish for having the desire to share.”

Or, “No wonder I judge myself as a failure even though I have accomplished a lot in my lifetime.” Or, “My mom always called me selfish because I wanted something different from my life than she wanted from hers.”

Once you get to this place where you can look at the way you have been misidentifying yourself and the false limitations you have been living within, you’ll notice compassion for yourself creeping in. With the softening of compassion what is false begins to dissolve. You are no longer feeding it, believing it and it begins to lose its power over you.

The Practice of Forgiveness

Forgiveness is not something that is given prematurely. We often hear we should forgive and move on, but this sort of thinking just keeps us stuck in the should cycle.

Actually, forgiveness is not something we have to consciously do. If we are trying to forgive and we can’t, we haven’t yet had a deep enough understanding of the situation. Instead of trying to jump ahead to forgiveness, to attempt to force forgiveness, it is much more effective to keep deepening your understanding of yourself and your situation. Keep looking at your diminishing thoughts and the situation you find yourself in, from various angles. Stand back from the situation to see if this gives you greater clarity. If you can, observe the situation as a detached bystander.

If a diminishing thought you have about yourself originated with your parents, ask yourself if they were afraid. Did your parents express and live mostly as their true selves or as their false, compromised, selves? Too often we allow the fearful reaction that people have define us.

Once you have a greater understanding of your own and other people’s situations, what naturally follows is compassion. Again, you don’t have to try to be compassionate. Compassion will be the natural outcome of understanding. The same is true for forgiveness.

As you understand more, you will feel more compassion for yourself. With the softening effects of compassion for yourself, you will naturally begin to release yourself, to forgive yourself for having a misunderstanding of your value.

Once the feeling of compassion for yourself begins to flow through you, the grip of your compromised self begins to release. As your compassion for yourself flows more and more, the thoughts you have to compromise yourself to survive or to get what you want will have less and less of a grip on you.

This is because your perception has shifted. You will be able to understand why you got into the habit of compromising yourself. This will lead to more compassion for yourself and what follows is forgiveness of yourself and forgiveness of others who were involved in you making the decision to compromise yourself.

Know that you are the only person who has the power to forgive, to give up, the misunderstandings you have been holding onto. Another person can’t do this for you. Someone can say whatever he or she wants to you, but until you are able to forgive yourself for your misunderstandings and release the false, you will not have a realization of your wholeness, your true self, the gift that you are. And without that realization your giving and receiving flow will be constricted.