Compassionate Understanding
Lift up your eyes and look on one another in innocence, born of complete forgiveness of each other’s illusions.
—A Course in Miracles
Because every intention behind every action comes from love and even though some of those actions have had detrimental or even horrific effects, compassionate understanding rather than judgment is still the only healer. Compassionate understanding helps us reach beyond judgment and mistaken beliefs that are the cause for negative emotions and behavior. Compassionate understanding offers healing in a way that our general, historically ingrained comprehension of forgiveness cannot. Our traditional knowledge of forgiveness comes from ancient scriptures and paradigms of all the world’s long-established religions, which preach that we must forgive others regularly. Forgiveness means, literally, to let go.
More recently, we’ve become aware that, without first forgiving our self, the act of forgiving another is ineffectual and more a suppression of our anger than a true letting go and healing. To fully let go, we must not only forgive the other for what we perceive they did to us, we must also correct, within ourselves, any self-blame we are holding that we had something to do with the other person’s actions. This is the belief that triggers our anger. If we don’t rid ourselves of the self-blame, we will carry this unresolved anger energy inside of us, causing a detrimental effect to our mental and physical health.
Throughout my 30-plus years of counseling, I’ve heard many clients express that they knew it was important to forgive themselves or that they believed they had already forgiven themselves only to find that they were still angry. They stated that