Friday 8th January: The Two Wings of a Forgiving Heart:
The Two Wings of a Forgiving Heart:
We learn to release blame and hatred by awakening the two wings of awareness: Mindfulness and Compassion. We begin by cultivating self-compassion. We look at the ‘trance of unworthiness’ and then explore a practice Tara Brach calls the ‘Yes’ meditation that helps undo the deep conditioning to contract in self-aversion.
When in the trance of unworthiness, what are you inclined to blame yourself for? Not doing or being good enough; being unkind or selfish; addictive behaviour.
Being insecure and over-sensitive I tend to blame myself for being unkind or selfish. However, I also feel insecure and over-sensitive at times when I’m trying to do more for others and it’s not acknowledged or rejected. In those moments I can get lost in the trance of unworthiness or revert back to addictive behaviours, such as graphomania, philosophy, or feel-good films, where the meek and conflict avoidant protagonist triumphs in the end.
Quite a number of people, myself included, feel we are not doing enough. I remember feeling this when my Dad died and thinking I had not done enough to include him in my life by sharing my thoughts and aspirations with him, instead of anger and exasperation with him when I was overwhelmed or stressed out dealing with my own dis-ease as well as his Parkinson’s. My mother was the one who made most of the decisions about his welfare and even though I was living with them I didn’t want to be the go-between in their relationship. I wanted to get on with living my own life and not have to deal with the stress and strife of their lives or my family in general.
I didn’t and still don’t agree with the way we educate our society to be economically productive but socially inept when it comes to caring for each other.
Money can’t buy you love, nor can it buy it for others to love in your stead. We may think it’s necessary to look after ourselves but if that means we’re too busy to really listen to the needs of others there’s something wrong with our economic system.
I’m learning to cultivate more self-compassion and forgiveness for all the ways I felt I fell short as a son by not repeating the so-called pattern of success in the present. Nor do I often succeed but the intention is there and I am willing to take the time, as I’m doing right now, writing, to nurture, what I consider, our innate compassionate nature.
Tara says, the key piece is this intention or commitment to removing the barriers and free our heart’s from layers of cultural conditioning covering and protecting us from showing our care and compassion and exposing our own need to be vulnerable and ask to be cared for.
Self-compassion and forgiving ourselves for our dissociation from our true nature and our feelings is how we begin to rekindle the divine spark within our hearts that is the origin and manifestation of life coming into human beings.
The core emotion of a separate self however is fear of the unknown, that’s there something wrong with the way things are or the way we are in relation to these other things, be they situations outside ourselves with other beings or with our being and the stories we tell ourselves as part of our self-governing or cultural conditioning to blend or fit in.
We rarely think we are right about ourselves and our caregivers or others are wrong: we believe others know us better than ourselves and learn to behave accordingly, so as to please and gain their love and respect.
Respect comes from the Latin respicere, meaning the willingness to look again. We need to pause and look around for ourselves and see where our caregivers or leaders in any guise are leading us to.
When we compare our innate selves to the expectations of others we begin to ignore or no longer listen to our own heart’s wisdom. We lose touch with our sensitive nature, our voice and vision and become somewhat blind, deaf and dumb.
Then we go through the motions with a sense that something is missing in our lives, something is lacking and we find it hard to remember what or where or how we’ve lost whatever it was and still is: our way of life. We feel we are never enough as we are and it’s that lack of self-awareness, self-knowledge that leads us to the realm of desire to discover our true nature once again.
In an individualist rather than collective culture seeking for oneself is not considered a productive or necessary practice. To do so is not doing enough for the benefit of others. But how are we benefitting anyone by harming ourselves in conforming to socio-economic norms that create such inequality?
The way to heal is to first to do no harm to oneself. Thus my presence in ‘whatever house I enter, I shall come to heal’ —The Hippocratic Oath
Systemic hegemony leads to disease, which can be cured by our innate intelligence when we’re courageous enough to listen to and ask forgiveness from our hearts to ourselves.
Rather than believe the stories of whose to blame why not try to be responsible for how you behave for just today? Because we are able to respond with the two wings of mindfulness and compassion of a forgiving heart.
In Radical Acceptance, Tara describes this chronic condition of self-blame as the trance of unworthiness in relation to how we value ourselves.
This shapes and colours how we behave and see the world: our relationships, our consumerism, our awareness or consciousness of ourselves, and the life we are living.
Circle of consciousness
Everything above the line is in our awareness and everything below the line is outside of our awareness and how our sense of self is outside of awareness and yet effecting our environment much to our own detriment.
As Tara says; ‘if your heart is closed to yourself, you really can’t love your world.’
