Tag Archives: forgiveness

Soulbyte for Monday February 18, 2019

Find your way to forgiving yourself so that you may move on with renewed vigor now, focused not on what you have done, what you perceive you may have done, been subjected to, or caused, but only on what you have before you—life, in all its glory and uncertainty. For without chains of regret, ties of resentment, binds of discord you are freed to truly live. It’s not about what you have done, nor about what others have done to you, but about what you will do now in the future with the knowledge you have gained, the wisdom you have earned, and the love you say you understand and own now. Your first order of business is to free yourself, forgive yourself, and embrace all that you are capable of because you have earned your place in the world as an evolving being. Isn’t it time to be who you really are? Without fear can you embrace and really love yourself, imperfect as you are? Can you fully forgive yourself and begin anew. That’s your next step.

-From the Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne

Acceptance

Acceptance… there is beauty in the darkness…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

This morning I wrote a Soulbyte* in the early morning hours, just coming out of sleep and dreams, about forgiveness and love, about how they are the same thing, unconditional energies that guide us to acceptance of who we are. The Soulbyte was triggered by a dream I was having just before waking.

In the dream I was staring at a picture of myself at about age 10. I was dressed in my school uniform. I was focused on the face, saying to myself, “Yes, that’s me.” Chuck was next to me and I showed him the photograph. “See, that’s me,” I said, and then I took in the rest of the picture, looked at the full figure of my child self, sprawled out, looking groggy and stunned, perhaps drugged.

“It happened,” I said, as I saw that my clothing was messed up, my dressed pulled up and my legs spread wide, an obvious sexual assault having taken place. Here was a picture of the truth of my childhood. I could not deny that it was me and that I had been sexually abused.

“Yup, it happened,” I said without attachment, judgment, or emotional reaction. I took in the full picture as it was, an obvious fact, and accepted it.

A sexually abused person knows firsthand how hard it is to accept what happened, to forgive the self and to love the self. And so it is not unusual that both women and men who have been abused are reluctant to speak about what happened to them. They fear being judged and blamed, but the real challenge is to not judge and blame themselves. How can we speak of these things that happened to us publicly if we can barely speak of them to ourselves?

It can take years before a person is ready to even venture into memories, memories that may be so buried as to be completely blocked. It can take years before a person is ready to stop being so hard on the self, to stop torturing the self, and to begin a healing process of acceptance of life’s unfolding. It took me until I was almost 50 to begin looking at my life at a deeper level and to dare to remember. It felt like a brave thing to do, and to this day I know it was. It is the bravest thing I have ever done.

Sometimes things just happen to us. If we are curious we might ask ourselves why they happened. What did they mean in the greater context of our lives? What did we learn? How have we grown because of them, or in spite of them? What and who have we become because of what happened to us?

Often we regret what we lost, what we did not have the opportunity to become because of what happened to us. We feel cheated out of some aspect of life that could have and should have been. But at the same time we must accept that it is how our lives went, and what happened cannot be changed. Facts are facts, as I accepted in my dream as I looked at the picture of my abused child self.

In deep inner healing work, as we explore our sexual abuse in the context of our whole life, we are able to accept our pasts and move on into new life without attachment, self-pity, or regret. We can accept ourselves as strong beings, caring beings, compassionate and nonjudgmental beings, because we know something that many others do not know. We have been there, we have experienced the unimaginable.

As we grow and heal, through going more deeply into the darkness of our past, we are able to accept what happened to us without feeling like either a victim or a survivor because we know and experience ourselves are so much more than that. We are fully alive, energetic, spiritual, ever-evolving beings, not in spite of but because we have experienced both the light and the dark sides of life. We are more complete because of what happened to us.

Whether we’ve been abused or not, life challenges us every day to live a nonjudgmental, loving, and compassionate life, to learn to accept who we are so that we can fulfill the destiny of this lifetime. Perhaps it is to become just that nonjudgmental, loving, and compassionate being we have become. Perhaps it is to teach others how to become nonjudgmental, loving, and compassionate. Perhaps it is to prepare ourselves to finally live each day to the fullest, to be open to new experiences and new adventures like never before, to learn to trust that life loves us best when we dare to embrace it and fully accept its abundant offerings.

I dreamed my dream last night because I am working on the next book in The Recapitulation Diaries. As I have worked through each book over the past several years I have faced once again the things that happened to me, the things I recapitulated during the years 2001 to 2004, and I get to experience just how healing that process was. My dream shows my complete acceptance. This is what I wish and pray for everyone who has been abused, that they too begin the brave work of real healing.

No life is meaningless. No experience is meaningless. There is something of importance in everything that happens to us.

*Here is the Soulbyte referenced above:

Soulbyte for Thursday October 19, 2017

What is forgiveness but the ability to give unconditionally without attachment, without need for anything in return. What is forgiveness really? It is love. And what is love but unconditional forgiveness, for true love is ready and willing to be given unconditionally, for it attaches to nothing and needs nothing in return. Can you forgive yourself, love yourself unconditionally? That is the greatest challenge that love and forgiveness pose. Forgiveness=Love. Love=Forgiveness. They are one and the same.

-From the Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne

-A Blog by J. E. Ketchel, Author of The Recapitulation Diaries

Soulbyte for Thursday October 19, 2017

What is forgiveness but the ability to give unconditionally without attachment, without need for anything in return. What is forgiveness really? It is love. And what is love but unconditional forgiveness, for true love is ready and willing to be given unconditionally, for it attaches to nothing and needs nothing in return. Can you forgive yourself, love yourself unconditionally? That is the greatest challenge that love and forgiveness pose. Forgiveness=Love. Love=Forgiveness. They are one and the same.

-From the Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne

Chuck’s Place: Love & Laughter—Tools Of Detachment

Incredible lightness of being... waiting to be freed... - Photo by Chuck Ketchel
Incredible lightness of being…
waiting to be freed…
– Photo by Chuck Ketchel

If we understand karma to be unfinished business, that which grounds our flight, then we can understand detachment as the necessary tool to free our incredible lightness of being to find fulfillment in this life and beyond. Detachment unhitches us from the energetic drains that keep us tied to people and situations that impede our freedom. Energetic drains take the form of intense emotional attachments, be they fear and hate or, quite the opposite, unrequited love. Either way, attachments keep us tethered, and, until released, we cannot journey deeper into life.

But what are the nuts and bolts of detachment? Often enough, Jan and I write about the formal process of recapitulation to free and reclaim all the entangled energy knotted in the lives we’ve lived. Love and laughter are tools at the heart of the recapitulation journey.

Prior to his assassination, Gandhi had expressed, “Even if I am killed, I will not give up repeating the names Ram and Rahim, which mean to me the same God. With these names on my lips, I will die cheerfully.” He also said, “If I am to die by the bullet of a madman, I must do so smiling. There must be no anger within me. God must be in my heart and on my lips.”

Rahim also means compassion. When Gandhi was actually assassinated, he raised his hands in front of him, in a common gesture of greeting to his assassin. And he did call out to God, according to some accounts, speaking the words “Ram, Ram.” In speaking these words, and with this final gesture, Gandhi forgave his assassin, leaving this world completely untethered to what his assassin had done to him, but also thanking the man for delivering him to the next stop on his journey.

Jesus similarly cried out to God while on the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” He also left this world completely untethered to his accusers, who delivered him to his future.

From wherever we come, we land; we move into life on this earth. It’s where we are now. If we turn around we turn to stone and can move no further, according to a common concept. Recapitulation, however, requires us to turn around, but with the intent of removing all the energetic strings that keep us bound in regret, anger, sadness, longing, and hate. In retrieving these energetic strings of self, we can turn to the unfolding awesomeness of continuing our journey untethered.

Buddhist wisdom guides all who leave this world to glance only briefly at the bardos of their discontent and stay focused on the light. To remain attached to the emotional ties of our life, loving or traumatic, forms the seeds of our karma and interrupts our journey to spiritual wholeness and enlightenment. Gandhi was well aware of this, as he faced his assassin in the common greeting of respect, namaste, meaning “I bow to you; I bow to the God within you.”

We all travel in and out of the light and the dark all the time... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
We all travel in and out of the light and the dark all the time…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

To release emotional attachment to those who harm us frees our karmic load. We are then freed to proceed into new life unburdened by emotional heaviness. Karmic attachment requires us to stay put, until we can free our spirits to move into new life.

The love or compassion that Gandhi and Jesus portrayed transcends the attachments we have to our lives, interrupted as they are by our assassins. Instead, it accepts the reality of our unexpected launching into a different journey. Those that launch us must then grapple with their own karma—for the choice made to act from the dark side. We can extend the love of compassion to them, as they continue their journeys into that karma, and appreciate our own opportunity to free ourselves, at their hand, from attachment to the dark side that would have us stew in powerful emotions. If we look instead to the dark side and send it love—the last thing it wants—it releases its talons from our light being.

Laughter, like love, is equally freeing of energetic bindings. The Shamans of Ancient Mexico discovered that the greatest hook to our energetic selves from the dark side is self-importance. When we are offended by another, or by life circumstances, we are drawn to the seriousness of anger, pain, and resentment. These emotions, though transiently valid and necessary to encounter during recapitulation, are equally capable of keeping us attached to the dark side, for the dark side looks for ways to hook us, to entrap us indefinitely by feeding on the energy of our fixated, negative emotions. We can completely break the chains of these offenses by learning to laugh at ourselves.

We can laugh at our attachment to seriousness. We can laugh at our own human frailty. We can laugh at our tendency to judge the self and other. And we can laugh at the frailty and foolishness of others. If we can find our way to the divine comedy of self and other, we are freed of all karma associated with the injustices we have engaged in and those that have been foist upon us—however serious!

Can we learn to laugh at our predicaments? - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Can we learn to laugh at our predicaments?
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Love and laugher are powerful tools that, when genuinely engaged in, free us from the binding attachments that tether our fulfillment to our karmic lives. As we exercise these powerful tools, we offer ourselves the opportunity for new and different outcomes. Love and laugh! Try it, and see what happens!

Loving and laughing,
Chuck