If forgiveness doesn’t cut the cord to pain, then it is not be applied correctly. The double-bind of forgiveness, the lose/lose of forgiveness where you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t is a Dharma gate that must be penetrated. The double-bind is that to be Christian I must forgive, but I don’t feel it. My Hurt is connected to the story of who did it, and the story of who did it is in the past, in my memory. I can’t go back in time, so the past and the cause of my pain is inaccessible to me. Yet I must forgive.

These incompatible commandments are (1) I should forgive (2) I don’t feel forgiveness. So I am divided in my own nature, a wound between mind and body. The Cause is in the mind; the pain is in the body. The gap is immense and uncrossable because body (feeling) and mind (thought)don’t talk to each other.

What to do? I can’t do both imperatives at the same time. I can forgive the cause of my pain (in thought) and repress the feeling of pain. (That doesn’t work long) I can keep the pain and say I forgive the other person. Now I’m a hypocrit. And that pains me. No matter what I do, the effort reaps more pain.

What is if accept the Hurt by allowing it to be there without avoidance, and bypass the cause of the Hurt? Forget who did it and just put your attention gently on the Hurt and just sit with it. When the thought of who did it rises, you just let it go, keeping the pain.

The Hurt now disconnected from its story is allowed to dissipate. It is the story of who did it in the past that holds the Hurt in place. The past is the anchor for present pain. Keep the pain, disconnect the anchor. There is no no resistance to the Hurt, and with no resistance you are no longer at war with your own feelings, which is the Hurt. Nothing holds the Hurt now, so it can be dissolved like an ice cube in water. The energy crystalized in the Hurt is now liberated into free creative energy you can use to love, hug, or clean the house.

This is called getting out of the fire by sitting in the fire.

This talk is about self forgiveness. You can’t forgive another is you can’t forgive yourself. And we can’t forgive our self because of our misperception of the cause of the wound. The Other is not the cause of our pain. The cause of the pain is the separation from the pain and our strategy to avoid it, to give it back to the Other. We feel we can get rid of the pain or at least balance the pain by giving it back to the other, at least as much as they gave us. Justice is what we want. Revenge.

But forgiveness see that the pain will not go away by giving it to the other; that only makes it worse. You get into a vicious circle of reciprocating pain. This never ends well.

We have to go to ground zero, the exact fact of the feeling before it becomes a story of who did what to me. Once the pain becomes lodged in a story, our attachment to the story holds the pain in place in our body. We suffer. And out story also holds the sense of a separate Me. Our story is all about Me. All pain comes to me.