Can I Forgive Myself?
Four years ago, a wonderful healer introduced me to the Hawaiian prayer Ho’oponopono.
The prayer translates to: I’m sorry, please forgive me, I love you, I thank you.
He told me that reciting this prayer clears energy and can be very healing. I didn’t do much with it but as time went on, the prayer kept finding its way into my space and I started reciting it, not as a practice but rather as a last resort: Whenever I find myself feeling intense fear, disconnection, agitation, and general internal darkness, in moments when I feel like there isn’t much hope and the window of light is closing (or closed), I remember the prayer and I start reciting it, focusing on my breath and spending time in forgiveness. To say that it has been a lifeline, is not an exaggeration. There have been moments of unbearable anxiety and states of nails-on-chalkboard discomfort where these simple, repetitive words of forgiveness have led me back to myself.
Let’s talk about forgiveness:
Why is the act of forgiveness so healing and who/what have I been forgiving?
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about this and reflecting back on myself in these dark spaces, wondering what might be happening when I am there and what starts to happen when I invite forgiveness into the space. These are some of the insights I am grateful to have received:
The darkness, mentioned above, which for me is always marked by a sense of disconnection from myself and a lost trust in life, is usually accompanied by obsessive thought cycles of future events and is often topped with a joyless sprinkling of self-loathing… a secret wish that I was someone more worthy and just slightly less despicable.
The darkness can often be so powerful that the stories in my head lead me to behaviours which inevitably take the darkness to even deeper shades of black with acts of self-sabotage and hours spent in my mind, agreeing with the voices that tell me how rubbish everything is. Once I have reached the absolute bottom of the pit, some kind of crash will usually occur: exhaustion and inevitable sleep, or perhaps I will behave really badly and it will upset me, or I might eventually get so tired of being in this infertile state of mind that I’ll take active steps towards finding a different way.
No matter how it plays out, there is always a suffering in the darkness and not too long ago, I had an experience of this incredible suffering that gave way to an equally incredible break-through within it whereby I felt, with visceral intensity the textures within the darkness and I saw with painful clarity, the parts from which it is constructed.
Distilling the understanding I got has not been an easy task, so I really hope to do it justice here as I explain that so much of the darkness references the parts of me that feel guilty; shameful and responsible for everything that is not “good” in and around me: the part of me that believes I am bad and, cannot accept my messy, mistake-making, prone-to-failure, humanness.
This part of me is unable to feel connected because it is not based in truth. It comes from my emotional wounding and is guarded by an aspect of my mind that seeks survival at all costs (a story for another day). The difficulty is that when I am in the darkness, I cannot see the truth of my wounding; all I hear are the voices in my head that serve to alienate me, from me.
This may sound a bit up in the air, so let’s get grounded for a second with the basic facts: Inside me there is pain, guilt, shame, fear, insecurity. When I start to feel these feelings, my mind distances me from them because they appear to be too difficult to actually experience. The distancing creates disconnection and a secondary effect ensues (separate from my true emotions as they are), which takes shape as anger, isolation, loneliness, agitation, frustration and several others that typically can be dumped either into one of two categories that you may recognise at “depressed” or “anxious”.
This is the dark space.
Finally, let’s circle back to forgiveness, because, what I realised within the suffering is this: If I have these wounds that carry guilt, shame and misguided blame and if I hold myself at gun-point for mistakes I have made, or for realities that are neither my fault nor in the realm of my control, then, don’t I deserve to be forgiven? Don’t I need to forgive myself in order to heal these painful parts that live in me and continue to hold an unjust authority over me?
The true answer to this question is obviously, yes. I do deserve to and need to forgive myself. But there is another truth which is that it is really difficult to forgive myself, especially because, I experience all of this, not through clear thought, but within my more-murky and disjointed mind, and I seldom understand what needs to be forgiven.
This is exactly why trying to understand it intellectually is really not necessary, because none of these wounds come from the intellect (also a story for another time).
What is necessary, is to practice forgiveness, especially when what we see in the proverbial mirror is someone who doesn’t deserve to be forgiven. This is precisely when we need to show ourselves true mercy and compassion. This is when we need to forgive ourselves for feeling so awful, for thinking such awful thoughts — in fact we need to forgive the thoughts themselves for being so misdirected and the feelings too for how they got to be there in the first place. Instead of calling the judge and the jury, we can choose to forgive and surrender to the lack of clarity that lurks in the darkness.
And so I have come to understand why Ho’oponopono has been such a gift for me. It has given me a forgiveness tool to use in the darkness, when I can’t see or think clearly but I know that forgiveness is the one thing I am able give to myself.
Ps: And this is important: My knowledge of Ho’oponopono, born from beautiful, ancient, Hawaian wisdom, is very limited and I speak about it, only in terms of how I took something that resonated with me and through my own interpretation, made it work for me.
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