Beginning: A 19-year Old Lesson of Forgiveness and Healing Finds Its Way Home

“When you feel pain, question it. Why is it there and how can we heal it? The body wants to heal.” ~ Cheri Clampett

In the last few weeks, there has been an opening. A pain that’s been hidden, so deep for so long, refused to lay down any longer. It had to bubble up in me so that finally after far too long it could release. The pain asked to be looked at, considered, appreciated, and then, finally forgiven.

This reminded me of something Cheri Clampett said a few weeks ago in the therapeutic yoga teacher training at Integral Yoga Institute. Pain is our friend. It may not feel like it at first brush, but it is there to teach us. You can ignore it, medicate it, and try like heck to forget about it. It will not be dissuaded. Loyally, it will wait for you to be ready, to have the strength to meet it, sit with it, and understand it. That moment has finally arrived for me and my dad. We are ready to forgive, release, and move on.

I have known this pain a long time. In some odd and uncomfortable way, it has become a friend. It’s been my fallback and my excuse for certain circumstances in my life. “I can’t do this because my dad was like that.” And for a while that was true; it’s just not true anymore. I am healed. I am whole. And I can do anything, even if I my dad didn’t he could.

Yesterday, I wrote about my regret that I didn’t go say goodbye to my dad when he was dying. What I didn’t mention is that I was 16 at the time. I didn’t have the tools to look so much pain in the face and not crumble. I needed to grow up before that was possible, and at 16 I wasn’t grown up, not by a long shot, and I couldn’t possibly have been expected to be. It was my dad’s time to go but it wasn’t yet my time to let go. Sometimes life is like that. Sometimes our timing is just off, and in those moments we do the best we can with what we’ve got. We operate with imperfect information all the time.

In the post yesterday I spoke about yesterday lessons, the lessons that our past teaches us so that we can improve going forward. Another yesterday lesson that my father’s passing taught me had to do with forgiveness. That lesson appeared more slowly, over a very long period of time, and in fits and starts: if we’re truly sorry, then pure, true forgiveness will find us. The “I’m sorry” moment starts us down the road to healing of every kind. All we have to do is ask for it. Forgiveness is a life force in and of itself. It changes everything. And if we believe in learning, in growing, in constantly evolving, then we must believe in forgiveness, of others and even more importantly, of ourselves.

In Buddhism there is a belief that every moment provides the exact teaching we need exactly when we need it. There’s no way at 16 that I could have known how deeply it would affect me to not say goodbye to my father. And in some strange, cosmically-correct way, I think the moment came and went exactly as it was supposed to be. I know so deeply that every moment comes to pass this way, and because of this belief, I have to forgive my dad and I have to forgive myself. We were two people who were doing the best we could with what we had. And even though we didn’t get a chance to meet in the middle this time around, in our own ways, in our own now separate worlds, we are both finding our way to forgiveness – of ourselves and of one another.