A ship of glass comes by even once in a while, bordering lost timezones, washing onto the lines of forever, bobbing on horizon of the mind. Every once in a while, its foghorn rings, and we are washed away into that boat.
Swept into a glass reality. These mirrors speak as though our mistakes reflect us and appearances define us. This shuddering, self-conscious terror.
Rocking back and fourth, the glass shatters, tumbling into fragments that reflect ourselves blemished and fractured. These sharp observations pierce the spectrum of soul.
Seeing our identity appear to shatter, we fragement ourselves. In those mirrors, we take the view of our blemished self, helpless in a face of fear, desperating looking for escape. Waves crash within as a resounding procession churn of figures chant the "should have, could have, would have."
This is the transparent embargo is placed upon us: a silent self-made contract. The way we excuse ourselves from meeting ourselves hurt.
This glass was never us to begin with.
Instead, this glass used to be windows. Windows of a vestige of our past selves, peering out into the edge of our being, seeing what was once lost and longing to integrate. Outside these delicate windows, these lost travellers dance on the boundaries of who we are. Reawakened fossils of identity.
From this ship, we are gifted a choice: to pull the curtains and perilously hide from what we fear or to re-invite our transfigured selves into a welcoming home.
From time to time, I find myself lapsing into the lingering sands of time. Into those moments of unrest where these memories reawaken me into moments of embarassment. My sometimes screw loose, unkempt selves that unsettle ourselves by the grounds of who we want to be. My existential longing for being who we would like to be and to be perceived in favorable ways.
Oftentimes, I need to remind myself of something:
These memories speak to how we are not being acting out of care, attention, and love or how our actions have not been received by care, attention, and love. They do not speak to who we are as people. [1]
In our upbringing, it's so easy to be conditioned into a dimissing awareness of choosing not to listen. To give these moments the presence they are seeking simply due to how uncomfortable these moments are. However, these moments can potentially be opportunities of cultivating a deep self-compassion and a practice of fulfilling origami of our torn ends.
Forgiveness can be described as the process of letting go, though this is not as easy as slipping out of one's clothes. These outfits of embarassment are dear to us, as they are our unmet needs simply clothed by hot blushed ears and cheeks. It is easy to dismiss these past clothes as foreign to us, getting tangled with what's connected to us.
To really understand the outfits in which we are still unknowingly strangled by, we need to shed them off by mourning what we thought we had lost.
What I mean by mourning is a willingness to let our typically unwanted unpleasant emotions wash over us by using discernment to eventually let them decompose. We feel the pain of those situations that could not be any other way and listen to their calling of their true face. Their calling towards ourself hurt and in pain.
By mourning, there is the possibility of a reapproach of how these moments and memories can be understood: these past experiences are signals to ourselves ways in which we would like to be. Towards a rising horizon of belonging, acceptance, aliveness, challenge, authenticity, creativity, care, mutuality, and empathy.
These memories can instead be reminders of what all our ancestors truly long for, mending the cracks of embarassment and self-judgment that are typically associated with our forsaken memories of our experience.
Mourning these unmets needs softens our typical procession of guilt, blame, and judgment, and dismissal to acceptance, mourning, and integration. Similar to melting amber to amberoid, these pressuring moments that often solidify ourself as trapped in time to reform into a jewelry of our multiple sides.
A jewel that reflects into our universal needs that we all share.
I have also found a well-written outline of this way of interacting with our mental landscape (dipping our toes off the ship into the ocean of pain of not meeting what we need to be greeted by a refreshing dose of cold water and perspective) that I am sharing from my own experience.
I was researching Miki Kashtan, an acting visionary of non-violence and making war obsolete, and found that she wrote a list of key differentiations from shifting from separation to connection, bridging off Stephanie Bachman Mattei and Kristin Collier twenty five differentiations from The Heart of Nonviolent Communication: 25 Keys to Shift from Separation to Connection. This is one I think is highly connected to forgiveness:
30. Self-compassion, or abdicating responsibility
When we have taken action that has unwanted impacts on others, patriarchal societies train us to see ourselves as guilty, often leading to punitive measures towards self, ranging from harsh self-judgments to full blown self-loathing. Within this approach, tenderness and compassion towards ourselves are seen as interfering with taking responsibility. Self-judgments are seen as the only strategy to effectively take responsibility for our “mistakes” and therefore shift behavior. The needs-based approach of NVC rests on self-compassion as a deep pathway towards taking responsibility without harshness: when we have full compassion for the needs that led to any action that resulted in unwanted impacts, we are more likely to find ways of attending to such needs that are not at cost to others.[2]
- [1]
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Adjectives and emotions are similar to salt, liable to accumulation and dissolution. If we are waves of an ocean, then picking out our adjectives, declaring them to be our finality. When this salt becomes our identity, we are conceived as static when we really still are a dynamic, ever-changing wave. This wave in a union of giving and receiving, yet it's easy to bind to our salt as permanant forms of our being.
An internalization of passing nutrients as other than ourselves. If we defract into the waves, inundations of ourselves, we begin to conceive ourselves in more integrative, healing ways. (Back to text) - [2]
- Link to Miki Kashtan's blog post on NVC Key Differentiations (Back to text)