"I Can Never Forgive." Part I.

On July 17, somewhere between the hours of 4 to 5 am, I received a very clear vision to start leading meditations on forgiveness. They should be available to everyone. I will create a sacred space, send out an invitation and people for whom it is right to come will come. The vision was very clear: a darkened room, candles, soft music, people entering quietly, leaving all their worries at the door, taking their places in the room, getting ready. And then – we start.

I have been taking people on meditations for very many years. Forgiveness meditation is among of the most powerful ones that I have done. You forgive yourself, and you forgive whoever it is that you are ready to forgive. Forgiveness is the ultimate healing. Without forgiveness, there can be no change. That’s why I have written so much about forgiveness in my book The Power of the Possible. The vision I had received has stayed with me, though I haven’t acted on it yet. Recently, while I was walking in the park, the vision came again, and as it unfolded I realized that I needed to start by telling a story. A story about me, something from my own experience. And then I remembered. My first time. The first time I made a conscious choice to forgive someone who had caused me pain. But let me go back. I am very young. I am leaning against the wall, talking to the man I am in love with. It is the beginning of our relationship. “I want to warn you,” I am saying. “You must know that I can never forgive.”

I am warning him: don’t hurt me. If you do – I will never forgive you. Never. I had been hurt too many times by then and I had not forgiven any one of the offenders. Mostly – I cut them out of my life. Banished them, in an attempt to be free from them.

Of course, I was never free from any of these people of my past. Banished, they had made their home right inside my body and my psyche and there they remained. I didn’t leave home without a bottle of Excedrin in my bag ever at that time. Headaches were simply a fact of life. And Excedrin was the way to go. Today, it is hard to even imagine that someone could actually say what I said to this man for real. But what is even more difficult to imagine is that the man did not recoil and did not walk away appalled and shocked, but instead nodded in complete understanding. He understood not forgiving. It made perfect sense to him… Yes, that was the kind of man I attracted at the time. The kind of man that was attracted to me. When the relationship was over, just as I predicted I could not forgive him for a long time.

My headaches remained my life companion for many more years. The time came when I could no longer take Excedrin to help with them. By then, I had been hospitalized several times with internal bleedings caused by stomach ulcers. Doubled up by pain, I was on Tagamet, which helped a little with the pain in my stomach, but did nothing for my headaches. And now I could not take anything that had acid in it. And Excedrin was all aspirin. An absolute no no in my condition.

And so a more serious drug, a prescription drug had been prescribed by the kind doctor to alleviate my continuous headaches. Only he had forgotten that the drug he had prescribed had a side effect. Drowsiness. It was simply a miracle that I had not fallen asleep at the wheel. I did get home by taxi though and slept from 3 pm until the next morning. Why I am I telling you all this? Don’t you see? Had I not stopped, had I kept on looking for a different medication to anaesthetize myself from my pain, had that drug been found and given to me, would it have been the end? I doubt it. What’s more probable, or – certain, is that one drug would have led to another, ulcers would have led to something else, something more serious, and so on, and so forth… by now I could have been on antidepressants, on medication for hypertension ( my family has this history), I could have had an adult onset of diabetes (both my grandmother and my mother had theirs by the time they were younger than I am), and I would certainly not have written The Power of the Possible, nor lived the life I lived and am living now and would not have received the vision to begin taking people on forgiveness meditations.

I will write more about it in the next blog "I Can Never Forgive. Part II."