Forgiveness - Thay Phap Nhat

Martin Günther / pixelio.de

Do you want to run away from the past? Do you want to get rid of the image of the person who has hurt you?

Sometimes you even want to punish or revenge the people who make you suffer. You feel like you are not able to forgive their words or behaviors, and your heart hurts every time you think of them. Or maybe you thought you had forgiven the person, you thought your wound was healed, but after some time when you face the person again, the pain is back, somehow it is still there. You still haven't forgiven. The pain the person caused you is still affecting your present, or even future. So how can we obtain the real forgiveness and let go the hurtful past?

The real forgiveness is to recognize the sufferings of the people who caused you pain, recognize that all what they have done to you comes from some deep reasons conditioned by the unhealthy environment of which they created, or inherited from their parents and grandparents. They probably didn't want to do those things to us, they didn't mean to hurt us. They said those mean words, or did those hurtful things, because they are the victims of what they say and do. When we are able to see this, forgiveness and loving kindness will naturally come into our heart. This forgiveness and loving kindness will be the nectar of compassion healing the wounds. In order to see those things, we need time to practice looking deeply.

Love yourself and learn to take care of your emotions – Thay Phap Nhat

If we don't know how to love ourself, how to take care of ourself, how to understand ourself deeply, it will be difficult for us to love another person. Therefore it is very important that we learn to come back to ourself. First of all we need to truly be there for ourself. Often we are not there for ourself, we work very hard, we don't have much time for ourself. We have to earn money, raise our children, and there are many things that we worry about. We even forget that we have a body. That's why we have to be there for our body. We can use the first mantra from Plum Village: „I am here for you.“ In many traditions, for example in the tibetan buddhism, mantras are sacred words in a foreign language that we don't understand. In Plum Village we continue the tradition of using mantras, but we use our own language so we can understand the words. So the first mantra is: „Darling, I am here for you.“ First of all we are here for ourself. We need to learn how to relax our body. When we have strong emotions, like anger or fear, our body can get sick. That's why we need a technique that can help us calm our emotions. When we are angry, we have the tendency of wanting to speak immediately in order to express our anger. We want to react immediately. In the past we have done that many times. Later we often regret what we have said, and we wish that we wouldn't have said it. But in that moment it is already too late. We vow that next time we will not react again in the same way. But the energy of anger is so strong that next time it makes us say something unkind again. We suffer from that, and the people around us suffer as well.