To forgive is to heal the separation from your inner light — your loving presence — by dissolving the veils of separation.
Leonard Laskow | Excerpt from the book 'For Giving Love' Amazon
When I started exploring healing and forgiveness in my practice selectively with patients, I noticed that almost all the suffering, distress, and many illnesses were associated with a perceived sense of separation — from others, from our environment, or most importantly, from our spiritual nature. Specifically, I noticed a tendency to “dissociate” or deny a part of oneself from an experience or wound too painful to hold in consciousness. Often this wounding came in early childhood, and sometimes it even went back to being in the womb. It’s not uncommon for people to pick up feelings from their mother or father or the collective consciousness while in this precognitive state and then attribute these to themselves. For example, “I’m not good enough,” “I’m a mistake,” “My father wanted a boy, and I’m a girl.” Sometimes they sense the fear the mother has about her own capability to care for her infant, particularly if they are the firstborn. Again, because they are precognitive, these are feelings without language. If they did have words, the words might say, “How am I go- ing to survive if she feels that way?” or “There must be something wrong with ME.” We are, of course, rarely conscious of holding these early beliefs and decisions about how the world is and how things are. And yet, they are so often at the root of our problems, our suffering, and most of our illnesses. These emotional wounds initiate our sense of separation from others, from our environment, and ultimately, from our essential nature.
Forgiving yourself dissolves the veils that obscure your inner light — your loving presence. What are these veils of separation? What are these structures in consciousness called the conditioned mind? Unconscious identification with your mind-made self veils you from your loving presence as: thoughts, feelings, sense perceptions, as your story, illness, pain, suffering and loss, your attachments and aversions, your judgments of others and especially of yourself. So forgiveness is about letting go, about releasing, about dissolving these veils of the conditioned mind. Forgiving yourself is one of the most powerful ways to unveil your essential nature to let your inner light shine. And through forgiveness, we experience freedom, truth, love and peace. You may ask yourself where is this freedom, truth, love and peace? It is within. It’s about what is happening inside of you, the forgiver. So forgiveness is not about another, although that is the common misperception. Perpetrators need to forgive themselves. However, everything is non-locally connected, so when you release them through forgiveness, they frequently feel it. Another way to say this is that, since we are all interrelated, actually entangled at the level of consciousness, when you change, the relationship changes. Forgiveness is about letting go. Letting go of what? It is about releasing attachment to the past, and attachment to resentments, grudges and anger. It’s letting go of attachment to judgment, blame, shame, guilt, suffering and loss, victim-victimizer perspective, and especially identifying with the story. It’s letting go of the story of abandonment, betrayal, loss, and the need to control through continued judgment and anger. Fundamentally, forgiveness is letting go of the charge around the memory so that upon recalling what happened in the past, there is no longer an emotional reaction, just the memory. Now you are free — free to love and free to be. Forgiving heals the separation from your inner light — your loving presence — by dissolving the veils of conditioned perception and belief. When you release the identification with the story, when you release the illusion that who you are is the story with its experiences and memories, when you really release the illusion, what remains is love.
© Leonard Laskow – All rights Reserved