Breaking the Cycle with Forgiveness
Yikes. Just the title of this blog entry brings on the pressing desire for distraction, or a deep coma nap.
Nobody had perfect parents. Even when you see their faults clearly, and can understand where they might have come from, it’s still hard to forgive. In fact, it’s easy to fall into the trap of fighting your way through life, in an attempt to avenge yourself as a child. When you’re ready to take that deep look back at your childhood–you can see that you were very much conditioned to be the way you are as an adult. Even well-meaning parental influence that steers you in the direction of a stable career with a liveable salary was incredibly harmful to you. What we really needed was a parent who discovered who we were and supported that, no matter what. We needed to be seen and heard.
In the famous words of Johnny Rotten, “Anger is an energy!” And so it is–we can run on anger our whole lives–turning it into a relentless need for forward progress (whatever that means to us.) Eventually, however, we burn out. Like an engine that runs at peak power, we eventually burn out. As Tyrell puts it in Blade Runner: “The flame that burns twice as bright burns twice as fast.” Before we know it, we have reached rock bottom.
Rock bottom may include anything from a chronic illness to a deep depression. Or, it may be walking through life in a dispassionate haze. No matter what it is–it is a gift. Alan Watts talks about this as a dark night of the soul–a place where you learn who you really are. It’s a place where you realize that when everything is stripped away–all that’s left is love. And based on love, we rebuild our values–and the blueprint for the rest of our lives is based on this.
The tricky part can be finding ways to forgive those that harmed us in the past–including our parents. It’s not really enough to say, “They tried their best.” What does help immensely is recognizing that anything your parents or anyone else did to you–is really a generational problem. Generation after generation after generation has formed a near-infinite cascade of conditioning that is imprinted on a child.
This is the cycle that we all must break. That is the challenge of any life–can I overcome this conditioning, forgive–and move on with love as my guide? “Can I break the chain?” When we do this, we are embracing life and all its challenges as our authentic selves–free from the conditioning of the past. The sharp blame we may have assigned to our parents is recognized as the multigenerational conditioning that it is. We are then empowered to be our true selves.
Through this process, we are able to start loving ourselves unconditionally. We are able to care for ourselves in a gentle and loving way. We have broken the cycle.
We may never know the meaning of life–but certainly breaking our familial cycles is part of it. It helps us respond to any of life’s challenges in a new way. Maybe that is the true meaning of life–to be able to remain loving despite what life throws at you.
Until next time
Scott and Lennart