HAPPY NEW YEAR, Lovelies!
I have always disliked New Year’s Eve, but I have always loved New Year’s Day. It always feels like such a generous day to me — a day upon which we are each given an entirely new space to live into. A year that is a blank slate, a do-over, fresh and clean with that new-car smell. A year with no dinks in it!
Of course, time is arbitrary and none of this means anything — but it’s still a nice feeling.
May your new year be blessed, Lovelets!
And whatever may come, may Unconditional Love walk alongside you the entire time.
Our special guest this week is the legend, the force, the flame, and my beloved GLENNON DOYLE! Holy moly!!!!!
This is the person so many of you have been asking for — and she is, I have always felt, the person we were ALL waiting for. So here she is, to help us ring in the new year. Glennon asked her Love to tell her what she needed to understand about forgiveness. And it seems like what Glennon needed to understand about forgiveness is also what I needed to understand about forgiveness. But that is always the way with Sister G. She forages for her own truth, and always — always— brings me what I need to learn as well.
So here we go, dear ones. I bring you Glennon, forgiveness, love, perspective, truth, and HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Love, your Lizzy
Dear Love, what would you have me know today about forgiveness?
Little peanut, stop and take a breath first.
This whole subject fills you with overwhelm, and always has — and your whole body clenches, waiting to experience the shame that can flood your mind when you hear this word. Shame about the things you have not forgiven in yourself, shame about the things you have not forgiven in others. Here is what your mind tells you when it hears the word “forgiveness.” It says: “I AM NOT A GOOD ENOUGH PERSON.”
Take a breath. Pause. Shake out your arms, stretch your neck.
“Not a good enough person” — this is your biggest fear about yourself, and your strictest judgment against others.
How did we get here, dear? How did we get from the beautiful word “forgiveness” to the fear, insecurity, and judgment tangled up within the statement “I am not a good enough person and neither is anyone else”?
You got there through misunderstanding, my love. Just through simple misunderstanding.
Here’s the thing. You’re perfectly good at being a person, and so is everyone else — because what it means to be a person is to be messy, inconsistent, unreliable, confused, selfish, dishonest, destructive. . . . That’s not all it means, but all that stuff is definitely included in the full humanity package. And when you cannot forgive either yourself or others it’s because you don’t want those traits to exist. You don’t want those traits folded up into the package of humanity. You don’t like that deal. You want everything to be the opposite. You want you (and others) to be only the good things. You want everyone to be clear, steady, reliable, wise, generous, healing. . . . You want to live in heaven with the angels, my child, not down here in the shit tornado of contradictions that is life in Earth School.
Yet here is where you live, lovely. And it is hard.
Sweetheart, I ask you to have some mercy on yourself and everyone. “Mercy” is a word that settles your nervous system, whereas “forgiveness” just leaves you feeling like a failure, because you don’t know how to do forgiveness. You don’t need to know how to “do” forgiveness for me to love you, and by the way I will never make you do anything you aren’t ready to do, or are not skilled enough yet to do, so take it easy. There are no demands.
But you do know how to feel mercy. You do know that.
Because mercy is not an action, but a knowing, an understanding.
Mercy doesn’t demand forgiveness, nor does it bestow forgiveness. Mercy is not tangled up in morality, or in any grand, heroic gestures. Mercy doesn’t need to “let stuff go” or “move on” — because it understands that this is not always possible for human beings. Mercy doesn’t insist that every wrong be made right, nor does it make you put yourself in the presence of abusive people again, nor does it tell you to be the bigger person, nor does it tell you to turn the other cheek, or tell you that bygones should be (left) bygones.
Mercy just looks upon the whole twisted, sweating, impossible tangle of humanity and says, “Yes, I see. We are all struggling here, aren’t we?”
Let that be enough, my love. Let it be enough to look upon yourself and others and say, “Yes, I see. We are all struggling here, aren’t we?”
Because you know that to be true, don’t you?
No action necessarily needs to be taken from that knowing. No grandiose gestures are needed. It is enough to stand softly in that truth. Just stand, mercifully, in the truth of what your friend-you-never-met Ram Dass called “the shared dilemma of our humanity.”
Don’t ask for bigger answers than that today, child. What if I told you that there is no bigger answer than mercy?
Drop your arms, peanut. Take a breath. I love you and I’m right here, and you’re doing as good a job as you can do at being human, and so, believe it or not, is everyone else.
Have a soft day. I love you.
Prompt
As always, we have a few suggestions for you, Lovelies! If you feel moved to do so, you might want to ask Unconditional Love what it has to tell you about the subject of forgiveness. If this doesn’t resonate with you for any reason, you can always use the simple question I have used for years to write these letters: “Dear Love: What would you have me know today?” And, of course, you can also do nothing at all, or just draw pictures in your journal of birds. No pressure, my friends. We are just happy you’re here.
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