Forgiveness

[AtLast]

Originally Posted by Nat

I ran across this today - thought I'd share:

"There are three aspects to the Buddhist idea of patience: patience-persistence, patience-under-insult and acceptance-of-truth.

The fourth is forgiveness...which in the Buddhist context is based more on Karma - the causal chain that's put into effect by your behavior. With karma, there is no external force or person or being that can intervene with your karma. There's nobody else responsible for your karma but you. So the idea of forgiveness of someone else is not as important as it is for you to do your own work. What forgiveness is really tied to in this context is releasing our anger we have toward others.

When I forgive you, I am no longer going to hold anger toward you. I can't free you from your karma, you're still going to have to work this out for yourself in some way, but you know now I'm a safe person for you. I'm no longer going to hold my anger against you and make things difficult.

One of the reason's it's so powerful to release our anger toward other people is that a healthy way to change the course of our own karma is to not hold onto anger."

Gil Fronsdal, Audio Dharma podcast

This way of thinking about my own work and forgiveness has always won out internally. I have to take responsibility for working through anger and hurt. Until then, I can't possibly meaningfully attempt to process with someone else.

Sometimes I wish I could do this more efficiently when I know that want to work through something with someone else that although we have had a rift, I want to make amends.

I have had far too many people I cared about die (family & friends) to not realize that my moving through my faulty reasoning slowly has caused me to miss the opportunity to experience the gift forgiveness can be.