I didn't find a way to forgive

It had been about 13 years into my “healing journey”, and at least 5 years of intensely studying A Course In Miracles (ACIM), a spiritual text and self-study program centered around forgiveness, when something occurred to me;

I wasn’t actually practicing forgiveness, at least, not in an embodied sense.

Though I could tell you all about forgiveness as a concept and recite various inspiring passages and information related to it, I wasn’t living it, and I knew it.

According to A Course in Miracles, or at least my interpretation of it, forgiveness seemed to enable access to inner peace, and inner peace was something I had spent my life relentlessly seeking.

So, when this conclusion surfaced, I reached out for help, inquiring about my identified dilemma to an online group of fellow ACIM students. I was pointed to a particular method for applying forgiveness, and it resonated with me deeply. I ended up traveling to the center where they taught it and immersing myself in it over a year after first hearing about the method.

With its help, a serene, meditative environment, and perhaps some divine intervention, I finally found myself practicing forgiveness. I remember the sense of peace that washed over me, and how I was struck with awe. At this point I had spent over half of my life relentlessly seeking a sense of inner peace, and for the first time, I was having genuine glimpses of it, along with an additionally long-awaited sense of spiritual fulfillment. Finally.

When I returned from the center, I told my family that going there was “the best thing I ever did”, and I meant it. Yet, within less than a week, it seemed like the method that had been so helpful was being taken over by my intellect…the mental loop, if you will…and what had finally enabled me to access what I’d spent so long seeking became increasingly inapplicable. The more I tried to make it work, the less it did. I was devastated.

I knew there was something to this forgiveness work because of how it made me feel, and because I had been pointed to it in a powerful way years prior. Yet, without a way to sustain it as a living, embodied practice, one that was immune to intellectual takeover, it seemed like the sense of inner peace it helped foster would remain forever out of reach. I was at a loss.

I thought maybe I’d never find a way to truly apply forgiveness, do so sustainably, and experience the peace that seemed to come with that.

Then, almost a year later, life happened, and it brought me to my knees. I was faced with the deepest discomfort and fear that I’d ever encountered.

There was a gift in this; I realized that my resistance to discomfort in my awareness, especially on a felt level, seemed to actually magnify the suffering associated with it. It took having no capacity to resist the discomfort, on account of its intensity, for this realization to occur.

In the weeks and months that followed what I was faced with, I remained in a raw state, with limited to no capacity to resist what was coming up. It felt like the floor I was standing on had fallen out from under me.

One day, I found myself listening to a teacher of mine, seeking her wisdom in hopes to determine some helpful next steps. Something she said struck me viscerally, and an urge to conduct an experiment overcame me.

“What if I just allow whatever is here in my awareness to be exactly as it is? To inquire as to what’s here, notice and acknowledge it, and allow it permission to be here as is?”, I thought.

I took this idea and ran with it, later coining it “the awareness experiment.” For about two weeks, taking it day by day, hour by hour, without a particular time frame in mind, I acknowledged, allowed, and embraced whatever I witnessed arising in my inner world, still taking appropriate action in the outer world.

I couldn’t help but notice that a sense of genuine relief seemed to stem from applying this practice of inquiring, acknowledging, allowing, and embracing whatever was here for me, especially uncomfortable feelings.

Then it hit me. This WAS forgiveness, and I hadn’t even realized that I was practicing it.

One of my favorite lines from ACIM popped into my head, "Forgiveness, on the other hand, is still, and quietly does nothing. (...) It merely looks, and waits, and judges not."(ACIM, W-pII.1.4:1,3) When I’d inquire into “what’s here for me?”, and notice, I was looking. When I identified what was there and stayed with it, I was waiting , and when I embraced what was there…not because it was good or bad but simply because it was…I was judging it not.

I went from practically giving up on my ability to truly practice forgiveness, to life intervening, to having this idea for an experiment, to realizing that I was applying forgiveness without meaning to.

Why?

Because it finally occurred to me that forgiveness couldn’t be lived from a place of fighting what was here for me, and that peace couldn’t be attained through intellectualizing that which wasn’t peaceful.

Just this morning, while having a stomach full of knots, I found myself resisting the discomfort. It had a similar flavor to what was coming up for me when life had brought me to my knees years ago. Then I remembered the awareness experiment. Even in this state, one that used to consume me, I was able to access a sense of relief.

I couldn’t help but feel a sense of satisfaction, thinking back to those months between returning from the center and the deepest discomfort arising for me, when I didn’t think I’d ever find a way to apply forgiveness in an embodied sense. In the end, I suppose I didn’t find a way. Instead, by the grace of life itself, a way found me.