Breathing in forgiveness

I was reading parts of Stephen Levine’s book Healing Into Life and Death yesterday and it reminded me of how much armoring we can develop around our heart and body due to trauma, neglect or abuse. Levine and his wife Sondra worked with the dying for a long time to help them address old unresolved issues as well as buried grief or trauma. The book makes moving reading.. In some instances their clients died, some lived on to open to deeper levels of awareness, healing and forgiveness.

As many of us know forgiveness must be worked towards through feeling all our feelings, even the defensive ones that served to protect us and led us to armor ourselves and our hearts. Alexander Lowen’s work with those who are blocked from needing and longing and expressing in childhood also shows how narcissists build up an armor to block out softer feelings often hiding them behind a wall of anger or musculature… He also helps those who were not allowed to cry, get angry nor shout loudly “no” to ventilate these feelings and so loosen clenched jaws, guts in spasm and tight fists. Many of us suffer in later life if we were not allowed a valid and healthy “No’, by not being able to set boundaries and recognise intellectually rather than just somatically what a boundary violation is. (Lately I have become aware that I start to find it hard to breathe when someone is violating my boundary or blocking and invalidating my emotions.)

Today in the bath I thought of Levine’s work and I offered myself and all those who hurt me in the past forgiveness. I am seeing lately there are times I failed to show up and love when it was needed, there were times I pushed people away in anger who only wanted to love me. That was a part of my fear of feeling mentioned in a post yesterday…and I have been on the receiving end of this distancing and pushing away by a partner who also carried a lot of trauma from his alcoholic father… Recently I have realised that we can all be blind at times… there is no one who understands all of what we or others have suffered or endured…

One of the reasons I love the Al Anon program is that in it we are asked to show awareness of what the alcoholic or dismissive barricaded person suffered. Yes, we must deal with our own hurt and know their behavior was not right and learn to set boundaries, however it is part of growing up and becoming more aware in a Universe full of multi-generational trauma that these things happen to us and act as learning for us. We are all trying to evolve out of trauma and the emotional ‘dark ages’ in my humble opinion..

We have to start looking deeper and more wide rangingly on our healing journey. Mother earth is literally crying out for us to ‘grow down’ and stop taking flight away from our bodies that may be crying out for love and forgiveness… we may find in nature, too a place of holding that can witness our cries and set them free. We find in nature a place of peace where every single tree and plant and flower has a unique place, a right to be, a meaning to serve just as we do.

Today this practice softened me..

To all those who ever hurt me through blindness, I offer forgiveness.

I forgive myself for all those I ever hurt with my own blindness.

I forgive myself for all the times I did not listen to, take seriously and try to learn from my own emotions or pain