Hello and welcome to five minutes in nature with me Liz Scott.
I've just slipped outside in the evening taking in a bit of a night air and I just wanted to spend a bit of time following on from the conversation yesterday.
Do you remember in yesterday's recording I was talking about different perspectives,
How we can see the same situation,
Create a story and two different people can create two opposing stories even though they've seen the same situation and had the same experience.
We don't see the world and record what we see neutrally,
We're story-making machines,
We make stories out of it and in the stories that we make we make people right and people wrong,
That's how it seems to work.
And today is all about forgiveness,
Moving on from yesterday because yesterday was an attempt to try and start to explain what happens when we inadvertently make stories and then make people wrong.
If we make somebody wrong or we think they've done something wrong towards us we can hold a grudge and when we hold a grudge we can feel that grudge grating and churning within us with a sense that we've been wronged and that someone has been unfair or acted inappropriately.
And forgiveness is something that I used to see very differently than I do now.
I used to see that forgiveness was almost like pretending something didn't happen so if somebody acted inappropriately towards you or their behavior was inappropriate I thought that forgiveness was almost like saying oh there's nothing to see here I didn't get hurt by it and pretending that everything is all right but that isn't what I see when I talk about forgiveness now.
For me forgiveness is about bringing my awareness back within me to that rock-solid space within me,
That place of peace love and wisdom,
That place of connection and from that place of connection looking at the world,
Looking at the peace love and wisdom in the other person as best as I possibly can because what I realized for sure is that when people get lost in thought and when people behave in inappropriate ways they're just lost in believing their thinking and they act from that thinking and me getting lost in my thinking,
Believing that they've done me wrong,
Believing that they need to apologize,
Believing that they've ruined my life,
Well that just perpetuates the misery and sadness experienced by me.
Today is about looking at forgiveness differently.
When I went up to East Anglia to Suffolk to just investigate research the territory that my dad was born and brought up in and that's where many of his siblings lived,
Many of them have now died and that's where many of my cousins live.
When I went up there I realized there were many cousins that had stories running that seemed to be stories they couldn't let go,
Stories of hurt,
Stories where they felt hard done by and for me that felt very sad.
It felt like they were hurting themselves by holding on to these stories and I want to contrast that with another friend who has been through a really tough time with an abusive partner taking him to court,
Making sure that she was looking after her children,
Spending a huge amount of money on the court case so that she could protect her family and she did that from a place of love.
You see forgiveness isn't about forgetting or pretending something didn't happen it's about acting from love and understanding the action of others even though you might not approve of them and that's what she did and for her as she moves on in her life it's as though she has a nourishing energy about her which she does not excuse the actions of her partner,
Her ex-husband but what she does do is she realizes that she is rooted and grounded in love and rooted and grounded in love she maintained her family,
Maintained boundaries and for me being rooted and grounded in love and not lost in stories is a way that forgiveness turns up in my life these days.
So remember forgiveness isn't about pretending something didn't happen.
Forgiveness is being grounded in love and taking the appropriate action and when you don't forgive someone you are the one that suffers.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on forgiveness what does it mean to you?
