When it comes to recovering emotionally from a violent event, forgiveness is the elephant in the room. We know we “should” forgive, but many of us cannot, or simply do not, want to go there, even though years later, our hurt and anger have not eased. We justify those feelings in a misguided belief that they preserve loving memories or keep us strong. However, when we see our situation through a forgiving lens, it softens the pain by releasing at least some of the anger that we have been carrying around since the traumatic event.
Relax. There is no rule that says you must forgive or that you will be punished if you do not. Nor does it mean, “forgive and forget.” That’s for fairy tales.
“All situations are basically teachings. Not everybody is ready,” says Buddhist monk Daie-en Friedman.
If forgiveness does not feel right for you, or you are simply not open to it, that’s your choice. If the idea of forgiveness makes you uncomfortable, you are under no obligation to read this chapter.
The Five Gifts are available to you but accepting all of them, or perhaps one or two, is completely up to you. You have free will and the right to choose whatever you need from these offerings:
Humility. Patience. Empathy. Forgiveness. Growth. Although each gift serves as a booster for the next one, you don’t have to take them in sequence or all at once. Or at all. They are gifts, not regulations!
Humility. Patience. Empathy.
Forgiveness. Growth.
Although each gift serves as a booster
for the next one, you don’t have to take them
in sequence or all at once. Or at all.
They are gifts, not regulations!
A Gospel of Forgiveness
Alan Clyne takes exception to that idea.
“I do believe that forgiveness is a requirement for peace and healing,” he says. “For a Christian like myself, Christ’s death made forgiveness possible for everyone. This, for me, gives hope.”
According to Clyne, “The word ‘forgiveness’ is mentioned in the New International Bible (NIV) exactly 14 times—once in the Old Testament and 13 times in the New Testament. Forgiveness, as a concept, is mentioned more frequently. For example, the word ‘forgive’ appears 42 times in the Old Testament and 33 times in the New Testament. The word ‘forgiven’ appears 17 times in the Old Testament and 28 times in the New Testament. And the word ‘forgiving’ appears six times in the Old Testament and once in the New. As for self-forgiveness, we do punish ourselves if we cannot forgive or be forgiven here on earth, and God only knows how much I need to be forgiven. Thank God I am.”
Empathy and Forgiveness
Though interrelated, the third and fourth gifts are not interchangeable. You can receive the gift of empathy without forgiveness, but you cannot forgive without some degree of empathy for the perpetrator, and, ultimately, for yourself.
“Forgiveness is a gateway,” says journalists’ security expert Frank Smyth. “It requires humility and patience to develop the empathy where you understand forgiveness on a core level, not just conceptually. It’s very hard to forgive yourself, but it’s essential.”
Healing after Genocide
Soon after his arrival in Rwanda, Leslie McTyre was put in charge of burying more than a million victims of genocide.
“My boss told me that I should get started and he would get the financing,” he says. “Many communities were empty because people did not want to return to hometowns where three-quarters of the population were dead.”
McTyre organized teams to go to the main villages where between forty and fifty-thousand people were in mass graves.
“We had these incredible burial ceremonies of thirty, forty, fifty-thousand people at one time,” he says, “and Rwandan television broadcast the ceremonies. In my bad French I said, ‘Those of you who are still guilty and running around, you have to repent and come into the communities and offer to help undo the harm you have done. Those who are victims and who have survived death threats, you have to forgive. You have to forgive if you saw anything that upset you or if someone in your family died.’ ”
His formula for forgiving was simple.
“If you saw it, remember it in detail and take it into your heart. And in your heart you say the word ‘love’ to the person who did the bad thing. And from your heart you send love to the person who did the bad thing, and you say consciously and sincerely in your heart, ‘I forgive you’ three times.”
McTyre cautioned that it might take time for forgiveness to take hold.
“You are not going to feel like you have forgiven them right away, but eventually it will sink into your brain, and your brain will make you realize you have forgiven them.”
Choosing Forgiveness
After her husband, Orlando, and his aide Ronni Moffett were killed by a car bomb on the streets of Washington, DC, in 1976, Isabel Morel Letelier struggled for years with post-traumatic stress disorder. Her friends and family became afraid that associating with her made them a potential target, and many turned away or simply refused to get in a car with her. (During my visits with Isabel after Orlando’s death, it never occurred to me that riding in a car with her could be dangerous.)
As if losing him was not harsh enough, the Letelier family was punished by a social stigma that attaches to anyone who has gone through a catastrophic event. This layer of trauma is like pouring salt into the trauma wound. Isabel’s four sons were ostracized when friends were forbidden to visit them because their friends’ parents were afraid that associating with the Letelier boys could be dangerous.68
Over the next decade, Isabel channeled her grief into empathy. In El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras, she worked with a priest to help women who had lost loved ones to political violence.
“I was not focused on my pain, my loss,” she says. “There were so many who had terrible losses that it helped me overcome the lack of Orlando.”
In 1988, twelve years after the car bomb claimed the life of her husband and his research associate, Ronni Moffett, Armando Fernandez Larios was convicted of the charge of accessory to murder.
An agent of the Chilean secret police, Fernandez Larios was responsible for surveillance on Orlando Letelier. It was Larios who informed the lead assassin about Letelier’s daily route from his home to the office and back.
On the stand, Fernandez Larios professed not to speak English, but the judge refused to believe him.
“You were here in this country because your father was an attaché to an embassy here and you went to primary school in this country,” Isabel recalls hearing the judge say in court. “I am going to charge you in English and you have to answer in English.”
In court, the attorney for Fernandez Larios produced a letter from his client, expressing his sorrow for the pain he had caused the Letelier family. Remorse notwithstanding, Fernandez Larios confessed in English and pleaded guilty. Having informed on his Chilean bosses, he worked out a deal to avoid jail time by living and working in the United States. Fernandez Larios’ plea deal included a non-extradition clause protecting him from being returned to Chile to face criminal charges.
After the trial, the defendant’s lawyer caught up with Isabel and Orlando’s sister, Fabiola, a respected human rights lawyer in Chile. Ronni Moffett’s father and several colleagues from the Institute of Policy Studies, where Orlando, and later Isabel, worked, stopped to listen.
“Mrs. Letelier, I have a question. My client wants to know if you will ever forgive him,” Fernandez Larios’ lawyer asked her.
Recognizing the question as a profound test of her belief in God and her Roman Catholic faith, Isabel responded, “Sir, I am a Catholic. I know you are not but we have a sacrament called penance.”
Isabel told him that if you are genuinely sorry for your sin and confess your sin in order to accept the punishment, the Catholic religion believes that God forgives you.
Speaking to Fernandez Larios through his attorney, she said, “You wrote a letter and confessed your sin and accepted your punishment and said that you repented,” she told Fernandez’s lawyer. “I forgive your client with my personal pardon, but I am not pardoning him for my children or for the Moffetts.”
According to Isabel, Ronni Moffett’s father took offense.
“It is not possible; I am a Jew, and I think that an eye for an eye. There is one thing worse than sinning and that is to cry ‘I am sorry.’ We don’t forgive.”
Isabel’s sister-in-law was shocked.
“I cannot believe what you have just done,” Fabiola told Isabel.
Their anger had no effect on her.
“It was like I had a huge building on my shoulders, and all of a sudden, I was totally light. The feeling of forgiving him was so wonderful, so positive that I felt enriched myself. I have done the most selfish thing of my life, forgiving Fernandez Larios,” Isabel said. “He is a criminal. I cannot forgive him for all the other things he has done in his life. But from that day on, I am ready to forgive anybody that asks for forgiveness.”
That’s not an easy task, even when you practice every day.
Isabel says, “Loving your family, friends, and your children is natural. The tough thing is to love people who don’t love you.”
After the initial euphoria dies down, finding a way to stay in a forgiving state takes some practice.
“I have been saying, ‘I forgive you, I forgive all of you’ in my heart. You have done terrible things, but it is not my role in this life to hate you,” Isabel says.
When a friend recently sent her an email signed, “No forgiving, no forgetting,” Isabel tried to convince her that forgiving is the most selfish thing she can do for herself.
“Odio rots the soul,” she says. (Odio means hatred in Spanish.)
Two Types of Forgiveness
Researchers have identified two types of forgiveness: decisional and emotional.
“Emotional forgiveness is the replacement of negative unforgiving emotions with positive other-oriented emotions,” wrote the authors who published their findings in the August 30, 2007 issue of the Journal of Behavioral Medicine.69
They defined decisional forgiveness as a “behavioral intention to resist an unforgiving stance and to respond differently towards a transgressor.”
One of the most effective ways to become more forgiving is to make a decision to model forgiving behavior. In “Hypertension Reduction through Forgiveness Training,” two groups of subjects with hypertension were studied for eight weeks. One group underwent an eight-week course of forgiveness training. The control group that did not receive forgiveness training continued to show symptoms of hypertension, while the group that attended the forgiveness training showed significantly lower blood pressure than the control group.70
The lead researcher on the hypertension study was Dr. Fred Luskin, Director of the Stanford Forgiveness Project and author of Forgive for Good. Dr. Luskin’s forgiveness research has taken him to Sierra Leone, where one dozen people whose families were murdered in that country’s civil war found healing in forgiveness training. Soon after apartheid was abolished, he worked with a group of South Africans who were horrified by apartheid.71
“They needed to forgive themselves and their country so that they could be useful,” he says.
Because forgiveness was a necessary step for making a helpful contribution to their society, participants in Luskin’s program made conscious decisions to forgive.
Whether emotional or decisional, forgiveness can be good for your health.
“The act of forgiveness can result in less anxiety and depression, better health outcomes, increased coping with stress, and increased closeness to God and others,” writes E.L. Worthington, a pioneer on the frontier of forgiveness research, who edited the 1999 classic Dimensions of Forgiveness: Psychological Research and Theological Perspectives.72
Seven years later, his conclusions gained additional validation after a study of emotionally abused women showed that those who received forgiveness training instead of anger validation and assertiveness training “showed significantly greater improvement in trait anxiety, PTSD, self-esteem, amount of forgiveness, environmental mastery, and finding meaning in suffering.” 73
Not Pass-Fail
The path to forgiveness may be blocked by old hurt, anger, and a fierce desire to protect yourself in the future by remembering how badly you were hurt in the past.
“Almost everybody has unhealed pain that limits us to a certain degree,” says Dr. Luskin. “Forgiveness takes us out of a place of self-pity or rage. It says, ‘You have a choice.’ You can clean out the wound and be open to what comes next.”
You might be thinking that if you forgive, you will forget the powerful lessons of your painful experience. But any wound, physical or emotional, cannot heal if you keep touching it. “Some people like to nurse grudges and enjoy a sense of righteousness. Long-term resentment blocks access to the healing intelligence,” says Dr. Luskin. “Forgiveness is a blessing to ourselves and those at whom we are angry.”
Like the other four gifts, forgiveness is not a “thing” you can measure, weigh, or buy. It’s a state of mind and heart, which you can activate by switching the term from forgiveness to forgiving. When you step into what it is like to be forgiving, you immediately feel it begin to flow. Believing that forgiveness is an on-off switch that produces an all-or-nothing response makes receiving the fourth gift more difficult.
The Forgiveness Spectrum
Instead of seeing forgiveness as an on-off switch, try imagining it as a dial or a spectrum. When I think of someone whom I have a hard time forgiving, I might be at 20 percent. Tomorrow, it could be 80 percent or perhaps 5 percent. The spectrum model offers flexibility in forgiving, which in turn makes the fourth gift easily accessible when we cannot forgive the other by 100 percent.
When it comes to forgiving, many of us find that we go back and forth, forgiving a little more one day and then not forgiving a few days later. It’s like recovering from the flu: up and down, back and forth, not quite there yet, until “Wow! I feel better.” That doesn’t mean we will never feel hurt or angry when thinking about it. With the second gift of patience, we can get there in our own time and our own way.
Liberating the Soul
The power of forgiveness to heal societies and communities as well as individuals has been demonstrated in many parts of the world. Two of the most powerful examples that can be found are the nations of South Africa and Rwanda.
“Forgiveness is the way we mend tears in the social fabric. It is the way we stop our human community from unraveling,” writes South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his daughter, the Rev. Mpho Tutu, in The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path to Healing Ourselves and Our World. One of the world’s spiritual leaders, Archbishop Tutu won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 and has since been awarded numerous international peace awards.
An outspoken critic of apartheid, Tutu was threatened with jail for saying, “We refuse to be treated as the doormat for the government to wipe its jackboots on.”
Instituted in 1948, apartheid was a series of government policies to segregate whites from nonwhites. Political dissent of any kind was against the regime’s draconian regulations.
I got to witness the cruelty of apartheid firsthand when, in 1983, I led a human rights mission to South Africa and Zimbabwe for the Committee to Protect Journalists. In the black township of Soweto, we met with families of black journalists who were imprisoned for reporting the truth and the government ministers responsible for the regulations that led to their being jailed.
Apartheid ended in 1990, after opposition leader Nelson Mandela was released from prison by then President Frederik Willem de Klerk. Nelson Mandela shares the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with de Klerk, as their award says, “for their work for the peaceful termination of the apartheid regime, and for laying the foundation for a new democratic South Africa.”
As South Africa’s first black president, Mandela appointed Tutu to chair the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a program designed to heal racial wounds by inviting all injured parties to dialogue in a safe, structured setting. Tutu’s work on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission convinced him that everyone is capable of healing.
The 2009 movie Invictus, starring Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela, tells the story of how Mandela used the national sport of rugby to help South Africa recover from the trauma of apartheid. For many years, the all-white Springboks rugby team had been a symbol of white supremacy and their long-sleeved, green and ruby shirts symbolized white oppression to millions of nonwhite South Africans. When Mandela wore a Springboks shirt to the 1995 World Cup Final, he became a walking symbol of post-
racial equality.
In awarding the World Cup trophy to the team’s captain, Francois Pienaar (played by Matt Damon in the movie), Mandela signaled the rest of the world that South Africa was now united.
The new foundation for South African society was built on a platform of forgiving and reconciliation, which Mandela himself embodied. Not only did he have lunch with the state prosecutor who had demanded the death penalty during Mandela’s trial for anti-apartheid activities, the new president invited prison guards to his inauguration and to a dinner celebrating the twentieth anniversary of his release from jail. He strongly believed that “forgiveness liberates the soul. It removes fear. That is why it is such a powerful lesson.”
Forgiving the Ocean
As with any work in progress, forgiving does not happen in a straight line.
For Paula Crevoshay, the experience of nearly losing her partner, Martin Bell, created her own personal tsunami of rage toward the sea. They were swept up in the ocean-borne disaster that killed more than a quarter of a million people on December 26, 2004.
Standing on the beach near Khao Lak, Thailand that morning, Bell noticed a “racing white line that kept extending itself in dash after dash, as if it were playing an endless game of leap frog with itself.”
About fifteen minutes later, the hotel staff politely told everyone to get back. After packing a few belongings, Bell was flabbergasted to see about half a mile of empty sand where all the water had receded.
“That represented a hell of a lot of water, and all of that water had to come right back where it had come from, and fast,” Bell writes in his essay “Tsunami.”74
As he started running to safety, he noticed a man standing on the beach and rushed over to warn him of the danger. That moment of empathy was nearly fatal. Seeking shelter on a temporary stage constructed for the previous evening’s Christmas show, Bell was soon “lifted and carried away with sudden great force and speed.”
“I was battered by tables and chairs and umbrellas and chunks of coral . . . my greatest difficulty was in navigating through big sheets of plywood and scaffolding from the stage,” he remembers.
Pushing up for air, Bell was sucked down and swept towards a wooded area near the resort. After a failed attempt to grab hold of a tree, he managed to hold on while continuing to get battered by debris. About twenty feet away, a small group of people were calling out names in many different languages. A Thai man stepped across a logjam to pull him to safety. When a woman wiped Bell’s face, he realized it was covered in fresh blood.
“I was covered in scratches and wounds and dirt and muck from the sea,” he wrote.
Paula Crevoshay was doing morning yoga with a friend at the resort when she noticed something different and said, “Oh my God, look at the ocean. It’s a different mood.”
The tide was high, and she noticed spiral patterns in the sea, which she had never seen before. As they began their meditation, Crevoshay said, “We are here today to experience the power of the sea and take it back and share it with others.”
Little did she know . . .
A few minutes later, the jangling sound of her friend’s bracelets caused Crevoshay to open her eyes.
“What happened to the sea?” her friend asked.
Fifteen minutes earlier, the tide had been full, but now a vacuum force seemed to have sucked out all the water. At the horizon line, she noticed a white line, whiter than anything she had seen in nature. She witnessed fishing boats drifting into the white, never to return. Then she knew.
“Tsunami! We have to go now,” she urged her friend.
They rushed to the top of a sixty-foot mountain, twenty feet above the tsunami line.
“People were screaming. Thais sound like cicadas when they scream,” she remembers.
Because she could speak some Thai, one of the hotel staff asked if Crevoshay could save her baby. The Thai men were putting on sea gear so they could go out looking for survivors, and she asked one of them to look for the baby.
Standing in the middle of chaos, Crevoshay and her friend spread out their arms and projected that they were throwing out a net to bring people to safety. Then they mentally envisioned a mental compass to guide them back. Intuitively sensing that Bell was alive, she kept shouting his name until she heard him call out “Over here!” Crevoshay found her partner covered in blood. Her friend’s husband was shaken, but safe.
Concerned that his wounds could become infected, they joined thousands of people heading to the nearest hospital.
“We saw lines of trucks filled with body bags high above the sea beds. It was bedlam,” she says, adding that Bell refused treatment because everyone around was close to death and he did not want to take anyone’s place. He received emergency medical care in Bangkok where they were able to let their families know they had survived.
“I knew if I could not forgive the ocean I would never heal from this impact,” says Crevoshay.
For several years after, she planned every business trip to include a few days near the water. A few years after the tsunami, Crevoshay and Bell went back to Thailand. One morning before sunrise, she gathered big bunches of jacaranda and bougainvillea, which she carried to a rock jutting out to the sea.
During meditation, she told the ocean, “I forgive you. I know that you know what you do and where you are going. You are a blessing to humanity. I don’t like what I had to accept because there were thousands of deaths that I witnessed, but I forgive you.”
As she inhaled a surge of forgiveness, Crevoshay exhaled waves of forgiveness to all beings who were suffering similar losses.
Breathing in to feel forgiveness within us, and releasing it to all living beings, is a Buddhist practice called metta.
More than a decade later, Crevoshay’s life is informed by her respect for nature and its power to give and to take life.
“We must never underestimate the force of Mother Nature,” she says. “Wind, rain, fire, and ice can create life or annihilate it. I know that well, more than most.”
So does tsunami psychologist Dr. Ronna Kabatznick.
“It takes a lot of strength to be humble, to forgive, because we realize these things are out of our control,” she says. “We need to forgive the water, the rain, the universe. What are you going to do?”
After speaking to so many people affected by natural catastrophes and considering the incontrovertible evidence that we humans have done tremendous hurt to the world of nature, I can’t help thinking perhaps we, too, need to ask forgiveness of the water, the rain, the earth, and the universe itself.
Forgiving Yourself
Soon after the third anniversary of 9/11, I was leading a journaling workshop at a day-long retreat for family members who had experienced direct loss. Journaling gives you a chance to reflect privately on your thoughts, feelings, and actions. They do not have to be directly related to the event. Writing whatever comes into your mind or heart frequently releases something you were not aware that you were holding onto all this time. Letting words take shape through your hands frees up images and impressions too deeply held for words. Sitting quietly with a journal can prove surprising when you read your thoughts later on.
Sitting in a circle, we began introducing ourselves: Wives, mothers, fathers, husbands, and siblings of men and women who died that day spoke about what it looked like, sounded like, and felt like three years later. One of the common themes was getting used to the constant sensations of loss, often an empty or tight feeling in the upper abdomen. About two-thirds of the way around the circle, two women started arguing.
“You have to!” one said to her companion.
“I can’t,” replied her friend.
“It’s time.”
We waited for maybe ten seconds. Apparently, being watched by us was more uncomfortable than having to talk about the most painful event in her life.
“I told him to go to work,” she said, breaking down in tears. “We were going on vacation, leaving on Wednesday. I told my husband that if he went to the office on Tuesday he could finish some paperwork so his mind would be clear to enjoy the trip.”
It was hard holding back tears. Rocking back and forth, she kept repeating, “It’s my fault. I told him to go.”
Her friend held her shoulders.
“You are not being fair to him,” said a woman to my right. Her husband was also among the dead.
“What do you mean?” asked the crying woman.
“You are making him feel bad. It would hurt him to know that you hate yourself for what happened to him. He wouldn’t want you to suffer anymore,” she said, smiling gently.
“Can you forgive yourself?” she asked.
No longer crying, the woman looked stunned. The idea of forgiving herself had probably never occurred to her. She sat quietly for a while as we finished going around the circle. During the first writing exercise, she looked at us through her tears and nodded. She disappeared quickly as we were closing, and I never learned her name.
When people asked me why we were still providing support for the community of 9/11 families, I would ask myself, What would have happened to that woman had she not released her guilt? Some of us hold pain inside until it becomes unbearable, while others feel better talking it out. A concerned community of people with similar losses can provide the emotional safety needed for the gentle, slower process of long-term mourning.
A Self-Forgiveness Spectrum
Most of the time, forgiving is a conscious choice whether we say, “I forgive you” out loud or internally. Occasionally, we see flashes of spontaneous forgiveness, as when Isabel Letelier forgave Fernandez Larios for his role in her husband’s assassination.
Forgiving ourselves takes work. As with forgiving someone else, it does not have to be a yes/no or on/off decision. If we picture a spectrum of self-forgiveness with an ombre progression of dark to light shades, where on the spectrum of forgiving yourself would you be right now? Where would you like to be? What stops you from being as self-forgiving as you would like? (Please save that answer.)
Write an affirmation:
“I am not the best. I am not the worst. I am doing my best.
I ask for humility, patience, and empathy, so that I can
learn how to begin forgiving myself.”
Write that statement for five minutes a day for five days.
“It’s very hard to forgive yourself but it’s essential,” says Frank Smyth. “Once you realize you are deserving of forgiveness, growth becomes the fruit of the whole process.”
Smyth says that learning the Five Gifts is “the most important journey of my life . . . they have helped me in ways I couldn’t have possibly imagined before embarking on that journey.”
Gratitude Guilt
“Thankful for what?” a friend asked after her home flooded and her husband was diagnosed with stage III cancer. The house had to be gutted. When the wet Sheetrock came down, the contractor couldn’t help noticing that most of the plumbing had survived since the Victorian era. Nothing was going right, but she was fighting exhaustion while keeping her chin up and putting one foot in front of the other.
But another friend implied there was something wrong with her because, “it’s not like you’re living in Syria.”
The implied judgment that she wasn’t feeling exactly grateful at that very moment was troubling. I couldn’t help asking myself why anyone who was doing her best to get through each day, while caring for her husband and dealing with both medical and homeowner’s insurance, while managing a major construction project, was being shamed for not expressing gratitude. In that situation, would your heart be overflowing with thanks?
More distressing to me was the implication that my friend had no right to be upset because people in Syria had it worse. This was a variation on the Auschwitz argument often used to “persuade” survivors that they are not entitled to feel pain because people in Auschwitz had it worse.
I wish I could say this was an anomaly, but unfortunately I’ve heard too many accounts like these to regard this as somehow unusual. My friend felt better after learning that, sadly, this type of comment to someone who is struggling through significant hardship occurs all too frequently.
I explained that Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl admonished those who demeaned or discounted someone’s pain by comparing it to life in a concentration camp. Just because other people have it worse did not mean she wasn’t entitled to feel miserable.
I told her, “Some people have it better. Some have it worse. It doesn’t matter. You are entitled to what you feel.”
In speaking about the Five Gifts, I am often asked why gratitude is not one of them. First, gratitude is embedded in that sense of release that comes when you bring each gift home. Second, no one needs to feel ashamed or guilty about not feeling grateful for having her heart ripped out. Forcing yourself to keep a gratitude list when that’s not where you are in your emotional process is an express route to “gratitude guilt.”
Seriously, aren’t you going through enough? Do you really need a dose of guilt? Or can you learn to forgive yourself a little bit at a time?
“I live my life and that’s all I can do,” my friend told me.
Isn’t that enough for any of us?
The Element of Earth
In Chinese medicine, earth is the element associated with forgiveness. It is easy to see why. Just lie back on the grass, looking at the sky on a summer’s day, and you can feel tension, worry, and sorrow releasing from your body. It’s as if Mother Earth cradled you in infinite compassion, absorbing and absolving your pain.
In the southern hemisphere, her name is Pachamama, and the mother of the sea is Iemanja, also known as the mother of compassion. When you go to the beach to unwind or relieve stress, the sea also absorbs and absolves heartache.
We need water in the form of humility to be ready to receive the fourth gift. If you meditate and/or journal, place a glass of water next to a small vase with a white flower and invite earth and water to open the way for humility and forgiveness.
Incorporating elements of earth and water can open the way for a more forgiving environment at home. The soothing presence of flowers and plants can soften and cleanse your space so that you can experience calm in every one of your senses. When your mind and body are calm, unhealthy stress levels drop. Angry thoughts and feelings begin to resolve.
If you do nothing else for five minutes a day, do something that makes you aware of the connection between earth and the fourth gift. Earth is associated with nurturing, grounding, supportive, and giving traits, all of which pertain to forgiveness as well. You can also bring earth into your home with vanilla, cinnamon, and nutmeg scents.
Still not in a forgiving space? Nurture yourself. That path from the stomach to the heart might just do the trick.
Taking the Next Step
For Scarlett Lewis, whose six-year-old son, Jesse, was among the twenty young schoolchildren shot by twenty-year-old Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, forgiveness is a core component of a social education curriculum she has developed to honor her dead son. Six adult staff members and the killer’s mother were also murdered that day before Adam Lanza died after shooting himself in the head.
The Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement distributes The Choose Love Enrichment Program™, a free, downloadable, pre-K through twelfth grade, evidence-based social and emotional (SEL) classroom program, which focuses on four important character values: Courage, Gratitude, Forgiveness, and Compassion in Action, which cultivate optimism, resilience, and personal responsibility. Elements include positive psychology, mindfulness, neuroscience, and character values. That means learning how to identify and manage our emotions, how to make a conscious choice, to be kind in the face of anger, cut the cord that binds us to hurt, and harness the power of post-traumatic growth.
While Scarlett and Jesse’s older brother JT have dedicated their lives to forgiveness in action, reactions among townspeople in Newtown remain mixed. Both the site of the massacre and the home where shooter Adam Lanza lived were demolished in 2013 and 2014, but Dr. Joseph Schippa says that the jury is still out on whether demolishing these visual reminders of horror goes deeper than a Band-Aid.
He says that people in Newtown don’t talk about how they are still affected years later.
“I think many were relieved to have the school and Adam Lanza’s house destroyed, although I am not sure that ‘erasure’ like that is entirely helpful,” says Dr. Schippa. “Some people have been silent, some have been vocal about changing gun laws, some have pursued working with schools to become kinder places, some have forgiven, and some will never tell you that they haven’t forgiven.”
But for Scarlett and JT Lewis, the takeaway message is clear: Forgiveness brings hope. It is a way of cutting the cord between you and the person who hurt you.
Phyllis Rodriguez lost her only son, Greg, on September 11, 2001. An IT specialist, he worked on the 103rd floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center.
“We realized very early the morning of the 12th that our government, given its history, was going to do something military and violent in the name of our son,” she says. “That wasn’t going to do any good.”75
Phyllis and her husband, Orlando Rodriguez, became vocal opponents of the death penalty for Zacarias Moussaoui, the man known as “the 20th hijacker.” In the spirit of forgiveness, Phyllis reached out to Moussaoui’s mother, Aicha el-Wafi.
“We realized that what we had in common was our common humanity,” she says. “We were human beings. It is a very valuable part of my life and my healing.”76
Forgiveness does not make her miss her son any less. Nor does she condone the attackers. But in the aftermath of 9/11, Phyllis Rodriguez has dedicated herself to forgiveness projects and human rights causes.
“I don’t think it happened for a reason,” she says. “But it did happen and I feel fortunate that I had the inner resources to respond in the way that I did.”77
The Star of Hope
In Greek mythology, when Pandora opened a secret box, which she had been forbidden to touch, she released all sorts of evil into the air. Only one thing remained behind: Hope. The star of hope that hovers over Pandora’s Box shines bright when we acknowledge the healing power of the Fourth Gift.
Practice. Practice. Practice.
In one of my favorite teaching tales, a concert violinist is asked how she got to perform at Carnegie Hall. Her answer was simple: “Practice. Practice. Practice.”
So it is with forgiveness.
Five Minutes a Day to Forgiveness
Choose one activity to practice for five minutes a day for five days.
Imagine that you can step inside this emerging version of yourself. Look out through your own eyes, listen to your thoughts, and feel what it’s like in your body to have already forgiven someone, or what it’s like to have forgiven. Yes, it’s you. Any time you want to access a forgiving (or forgiven) state, repeat this process.