Dear Prash:

You wrote, “When I think of someone who hurt me in some way, I can feel some resentment… So I look at how I can feel better about it”- we all want to feel better. But I don’t think any which way for the sole purpose of feeling better because that will work only temporarily. Instead, I look at what is true to reality. Long term mental health is about seeing things as they are.

Then you wrote that when someone hurts you in some way, you empathize with the person who hurt you, feel compassion for that person, and as a result you are “able to let go of the hurt feeling” and move on. My input is that it depends on the nature of the hurting (a friend forgetting to return a phone call is different from a friend (?) calling one names, yelling). It depends on the age the hurt has taken place (young child/ adult) and whether it was a one time event of an ongoing situation. It depends on whether the hurting party tried to correct their wrongdoing and changed his or her ways or not. It also makes a difference whether the hurting party is still doing the hurting in the present time or was it all in the past.

It also matters if the person doing the hurting is a stranger or a child’s own mother, or father, the person the child looks up to for protection, trusting, loving.

And so, the thinking and behavior that may work for you to forgive and let go in the context of, let’s say, a person pushing their way ahead of you in line, as you wait in front of the supermarket cashier, is not likely to work for you in the context of having been abused for years as a child.

anita

Dear Prash:

You asked if the nature of reality is dependent on who is seeing it and under what circumstances they are seeing or perceiving reality. You shared that when you practice mindfulness, you “feel sometimes as if there is no reality- everything is transient, comes and goes… When I go to sleep it is like a death and then I wake up again- a new day a new life”.

My answer/input: people’s perceptions of reality are dependent on who they are, their prior life experience, as well as their current circumstances, but reality is the same regardless of perceptions. When you go to sleep, you wrote, “it feels like a death”- that is a perception, based on a feeling. Reality is that every time you went to sleep so far in your life, it was not death. Doesn’t matter to reality that you feel  like it is death. In realty it is not death until it is.

“everything is transient” – in reality lots is transient, life itself is transient. But there is something that is not transient, and that is death itself. Once dead, one is permanently dead. Some perceive death as transient, saying there is life after death, in heaven or hell or in another body,  or a new earth. That is a perception. In reality once dead, the brain starts decomposing, and the person who was, is no more.

“I wake up again- a new day a new life”. Reality- it is a new day. Perception- a new life. There is newness of life, yes, but there is also a lot of yesterday in the new day.

anita

Dear Prash:

Awareness of yesterday makes it possible for us to live the newness of the new day instead of re-living yesterday as if it was still yesterday.

Regarding your second paragraph: there are lots and lots of things I don’t know or comprehend, of course, things my five senses cannot perceive and my human brain cannot process. But I don’t make up stories so to kind-of explain what I cannot comprehend. Instead, I just say: I don’t know.

anita

Forgiveness is an Art which is more for the person hurt then the person that has perpetrated the hurt.

I like what Clarissa Pinkola Estes (Women Who Run With the Wolves) had to say about their being Four Stages of Forgiveness

Four Stages of Forgiveness

1. To forego—to leave it alone
2. To forebear—to abstain from punishing/vengeance
3. To forget—to aver from memory, to refuse to dwell
4. To forgive—to abandon the debt

Note. Many people hold on to hurt because they feel that as long as they do the one that hurt them will hurt and be accountable. It is important to remember that forgiveness does not mean that the person that hurt us is no longer accountable.  Holding someone accountable is not the same as punishing or vengeance or even justice. Accountability is an attribute of Love. If you steal from me, I can forgive you – detach my sense of self from the experience – while holding you Accountable by taking back my key.

http://www.stlcw.com/Handouts/Four_Stages_of_Forgiveness.pdf