Forgiveness is both the province of the well and the door to wellness.
You will notice those who struggle to forgive, struggle also to be well.
Just Be Like This Today: “Today I am holding open the door to Forgiveness”
This is a daily invitation to grant yourself permission to drop all your other nagging ‘Musts’ and ‘Shoulds’ about self-improvement, personal development and living a virtuous life. Just enjoy this one cup of Living Wisdom, just choose this one thing and sit with it today.
Trouble finds us, one way or another.
Wherever you are today, whatever trouble has found you, however your heart is hurting in a way that makes it want to close down and withdraw its touch from the world, you know that ultimately you belong in the world.
Life is not for the faint-hearted. You have to be made small by life sometimes and sometimes the wound you sit with is so raw, you just need to cradle it and be the shelter. If this is where you are today, just drink this cup of medicine and let it find a home in you, without feeling the pressure of having to get up and open the door to face the world, yet. That can come tomorrow. Just be like this today.
Sometimes it is you that you are struggling to forgive. If it is you that you are struggling to forgive, be careful of what you can’t forgive yourself for, someone impressionable is watching and they trust you, and they will believe that there is something to forgive, and they will be less forgiving with themself.
Either way, you don’t have to accept the wounding to care for the wound. You don’t have to forgive the behaviour to forgive the person. You do not have to forgive what was done, but you can forgive the person who did it. People will make mistakes with you, and you will make mistakes. That is what it means to be a person in this world—it means to not always know, or understand or remember how to show care to ourselves, and to others and to the world we live in.
If I cannot love and forgive others for the wounds they gave me, I have missed the lesson of the wound.
If I cannot love and forgive myself, for the wounds I gave others, I have missed the lessons of love and forgiveness.
Forgiveness is always so much less about someone else than it is about you. And yet paradoxically, only when you hold the same wish for the other person to also be made again both whole and free, do you find a way for yourself to be both whole and free.
If the wound was great, we will have to let it go many times.
PRACTICING FORGIVENESS I release you, so that you may release me. The place that I take in your heart, the way you speak to yourself in my voice, and conjure my face, let it be now only the part of me that you knew to be good, that may serve to guide you home towards your truth. By this; I make the way clear again between us, and allow the bonds and chains that we felt as wounds, to be loosened, so that we may connect again with that in the world which we loved in our hearts about each other. By this, I make the way clear again for me, to connect again with that about Life which I loved in my heart about myself. I release you, so that you may release me. That we may put down the weight that we carried from our time together and our parting; and have washed clean at last, the lingering taste of the way we parted, and acknowledgement of the scars that we held, each in our own manner and measure of reckoning more by the lessons they describe than the manner or measure of wounding. I release you, so that you may release me. That we may be left to carry only that part of our song, which knew only how to love and be loved, something that may yet grow into a faint hymn of fondness and appreciation that is overheard being sung, unbidden in the garden of our hearts by a bird whose name we never learn. Here at the end of this cycle there is nothing left to forgive. I let it go, so that I may belong, fully, to the next cycle, and leave all that is small in me, behind me and take all my inheritance with me. I honour the one that walked the road, that bore the chains, that gave and received the wounds, I carry your essence with me, in the form of Understanding. I am free. I wish you to be free also, and by that I am made free. I am whole. I wish you to be whole also, and by that I am made whole.
I wrote this poem one night when I was trying to step through a door to my own tomorrow, and my heart spoke a knowing to me, saying: “You can only greet tomorrow, standing naked of yesterday.”
The poem came through me and I have shared it and lived with it ever since that dark and beautiful and deeply necessary night. The other ‘knowing’ I heard my heart speak was “If the wound was great, you will have to let it go many times.”
Keep this practice close and come back to it whenever you need it.
I encourage you, to just be like this today.
If this post resonates with you and you are looking for a more gentle listening ear, or a way to deepen your practice of forgiveness and letting go, the other half of my day job is meeting with people and helping people with precisely this: Schedule a Call
—Everything is Waiting for You.
The voiceover was truly beautiful and profound... much better to hear your voice than an AI voiceover