I grew up in a violent house. The violence began when my father left, and my mother started dating JW. One of the earliest memories I have of JW is coming home to find him handcuffed and removed from the house. He threatened to shoot my mother and himself. I was nine years old, and this is a story of forgiveness.
The incident with JW trying to kill himself and my mother wouldn’t be the last time he would threaten to harm members of my family. In fact, for close to ten years he hurt members of my family. There would be restraining orders, shelters, lots of moving and more visits from the police.
What I experienced as a child shook me to my core. I developed issues trusting adults, especially men. I had trouble developing positive relationships with kids my age, and I lost the ability to empathize with others. If I wanted to pass the blame onto someone else, there were plenty of people to choose from, and so that’s what I did.
As time went on, the violence got more intense. I found a release from the pain. When I was thirteen, I got high and blackout drunk. By the time I was seventeen I had been hospitalized three times for major depression and drug addiction. What I thought to be a way out became a dangerous trap, and I continued to point the finger at all those around me until I hit rock bottom.
Stepping Towards Acceptance
For years I struggled to try to forgive JW and the power of forgiveness, the comfort that comes from acceptance and letting go, was nowhere in sight. I was filled with so much anger.
How do you forgive someone who made your life a living hell? How do you forgive someone who abused you? How does this happen to children? These were big questions, and sometimes big questions have easy answers if you’re willing to listen.
After years of therapy and beginning to experience life on my terms, things began looking up. In my twenties, I discovered yoga and meditation and started some serious soul-searching. I got clean, which helped clear my mind and pave the way to explore my heart.
I also cried a lot. Both of my parents cried a lot too. It was authentic and raw. We were all dealt a firm hand, and twenty years later I was finally able to open up about it. Those conversations allowed me to remove a massive weight from my chest so that I could go more in-depth with the exploration of my heart.
I thought I had forgiven JW too, but recently I had an experience that made me wonder if that was true?
Learning to Let Go
About two months ago I was sitting in a Dharma class, and the teacher was discussing forgiveness. Up until that moment, I hadn’t thought about JW, but for some reason, he came to mind.
I was having a hard time paying attention and relating to the teaching. The teacher was speaking about forgiving a spouse or co-worker after an argument or disagreement. Little things, I thought.
The instruction did not include how to forgive someone who emotionally and physically abused you. However, I decided I was going to focus on just that during the meditation. I was done trying to act invincible, and I needed to face this once and for all.
During the meditation, I visualized JW and brought compassion and love to my heart. I thought about what it must have been like for him to live a life filled with so much violence and how hard it must have been for him to carry so much pain.
JW was a victim himself. He was continuing the cycle of abuse, his abuse. His mother did some truly horrible things to him as a child, and the trauma left him with multiple personality disorder.
I began to direct the compassion and love towards JW. It wasn’t too long before I started to cry – I couldn’t stop. The deeper I went into meditation; I began to peel back the labels of “aggressor” and “victim” to reveal that they were in fact just labels. I couldn’t pinpoint who was playing what role anymore.
A wave of peace washed over me.
The Practice of Sending Love
Meditating on sending love to a friend or family member is easy, but sending love to someone who has hurt you is a bit more challenging. However, it is necessary to heal completely.
For the first time, I was able to send love to the man who abused me, to a man who I hated with all my being for most of my life. I was finally able to claim responsibility for my states of mind and to see JW as just another person who, like me, has problems.
Nothing he did to me emotionally or physically could hurt “me,” the true me that is pure white light born out of emptiness. It was time to stop fighting fire with fire; it was time to take in all that forgiveness had to offer – peace of mind.
There’s a good chance that I will go for the rest of my life without seeing JW. I won’t get an opportunity to confront him and lay everything out on the table than in a moment of catharsis tell him that I forgive him.
But that’s okay I don’t have to because in my moment of clarity, in that meditation, I stopped drinking the poison of anger. More importantly, I quit blaming others for the poisoning. All that time it was my anger causing suffering to arise, and now I can choose to move forward in rage or I can decide to go ahead in love. As my teacher says, “Love is the real nuclear bomb that destroys our enemies.”
Taking and Giving
The meditation practice I used to find forgiveness and to send love to JW is known as Tonglen meditation, which translates to taking and giving. In this exercise, we use a mind of compassion to imagine that we are taking on all the sufferings of an individual or group. We do this with joy knowing that we are taking away their pain. Then for giving we imagine that we can give that individual or group all that they need to experience lasting joy and happiness.
Tonglen starts with self-practice. The more we practice Tonglen, we begin to scale up to include friends and family, then strangers, next “enemies” and eventually all sentient beings. This practice is a beautiful way to generate compassion!
An important note:
If you or someone you know is suffering from abuse, please seek the help of authorities. The practice of Tonglen is by no means intended to mitigate domestic violence.
If you’d like to learn more about Tonglen practice or have any questions, please feel free to contact me here
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Originally published on Charles Minguez
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