In the spirit of Mothers’ Day, I’d like to share a story that a coaching colleague told me. It contains a powerful message and a call to action that touched my heart.
It’s about a woman for whom things were going really well. Her life was changing in delightful ways that included love, adventure, friendship, beautiful places and much, much more. She was grateful for all her blessings and good fortune.
You know how, when things are going really well, there can be some aspect of life – a chronic work situation, a relationship, a health issue, a financial blind spot – that keeps cropping up to remind us that schools not out yet, there are lessons to be learned and that life is an unending opportunity to grow in wisdom and in love?
Well, this was what was happening for her and it had to do with her relationship with her daughter. She described the relationship as full of strain, poor communication and resentment on both sides. During coaching, as she spoke of this relationship, her relationship with her own mother kept coming up. She described that relationship as strained, with poor communication and resentments. She could summon up feelings of anger at her mother more than 10 years after her death at the age of 91.
She started to see that she was doing some of the same things that her mother did that had made her feel bad, judged and ‘not good enough’. She said, “Oh my God, I don’t want to do that to my daughter and I think I am.”
It was as though a light bulb went off in her head and heart. She heard an inner voice say, very clearly, that forgiving her mother and healing that relationship would change her relationship with her daughter. She heard the words, “Look in the mirror. Stop complaining about how bad things are and blaming everyone else. Look in the mirror.”
She looked in the mirror and she saw herself. Coaching had helped her appreciate her good aspects more and more but she gasped at other things she saw and wanted to make some changes. Her first step in this process was finding a way to forgive her mother. Later she moved on to forgiving her daughter, herself and others and she spoke of the wonderful ripple effect it had had in her life.
In the way the universe has of lining things up just when you need them, she’d run into a friend who shared a forgiveness exercise that had changed her life.
Here’s the simple exercise/prayer that she shared. I have to admit that I’ve been doing it myself and I like how I feel when I saying it. Like the woman in the story, I know that as I’m saying it I am healing those difficult relationships that contain my most powerful lessons.
This is how is goes. You pick the person you most need to forgive and say, preferably out loud:
Namaste ______name______
The spirit in me honors the spirit in you.
Forgive me ______________
I forgive you______________
I love you ______________
Thank you _______________
When I do it, I feel like some frozen part of my hearts starts to break up like northern rivers do in the spring. After a long winter of thick ice, the river ‘goes out’, making a thunderous, underground noise as the ice cracks and moves downstream, melting along the way until the river flows freely to the sea.
If there’s someone in your life, past or present, living or dead, who still bugs you and arouses anger or resentment (whether it’s your mother, yourself or someone else), give this a try. It’s simple, easy, short and very powerful.
Forgiveness is not forgetting. It’s remembering something else.
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