FORGIVENESS
What is forgiveness?
Forgiveness is letting go of past suffering and betrayal, a release of the burden of pain, hatred and resentment that we carry.
Fred Luskin: “Forgiveness is making peace with your life when you don’t get what you want.”
“Forgiveness is the process of shedding the self-as-victim belief and asserting personal power that leads to healing for the person choosing to forgive. This [choice] to take personal responsibility for oneself and forgive the other person leads to an enhanced sense of self-efficacy.” (Jacinto & Edwards, 2011, p. 426).
Luskin (2002) considers five aspects inherent to forgiveness: (1) it is a learnable skill, (2) it benefits the forgiver, not the offender, (3) it is an opportunity to assume control over the situation and reassert personal power, (4) it is an action that enables the individual to take ownership of personal feelings, and (5) it is an opportunity for personal healing.
My Work
Through facilitating support groups for cancer patients I became acutely aware of the pernicious consequences of unforgiveness. Like everything I teach, I needed to cultivate forgiveness in my own life so I began practicing and studying forgiveness. This led to a variety of different workshop formats (ranging from 2-hours to daylongs) for The Cancer Support Community, The Compassion Institute, and the UCSD Center for Mindfulness, as well as talks on forgiveness at a variety of conferences. Seeing the impact even a short course forgiveness had on participants of my classes inspired me to include a forgiveness component in a research protocol I co-developed for overweight women at UCSF as well as the program I developed, Mindfulness-Based Emotional Balance.
20 minute Guided Forgiveness Practice