Forgiveness, Feeling Good and Ho'oponopono

   In an earlier post about defiance,  I shared how my dad spanked me using a belt when I was younger. As I looked back at what I had written, I realized that I missed an integral part of the story.  

   Not that it happened all the time, but being spanked as I was, with a belt and for as long as I was, well into my late adolescence, I carried a lot of shame around. The message I got was one of unworthiness. It is very humiliating to be over powered that way.  That shame manifested in my eating getting out of control and my becoming bigger and bigger every year.  

   In the past few years I lost over 100 lbs., It only happened after dealing with a lot of my childhood pain. I discuss a lot of that here if you'd like to read about it. 

   The beautiful thing about revisiting old hurts is that you can so many times see them in a different light than when you were in the thick of it living it.  It’s all about perspective. Time can give you a much broader perspective. And so it went with my own past as I began to explore it.  

     I remember my mother being hurt by some things I wanted to discuss up. She asked me why I wanted to dredge up hurtful things from the past and talk about them.  I reassured her that I only wanted to talk about things so I could figure out why I am the way I am, so I might change some things I didn’t like about the person I'd become. I wanted to let go of my resentment, anger and shame. My insecurity reared its ugly head time after time in my marriage and in my other relationships and I wanted to have more self confidence. 

   After my second daughter was born, I was reading lots of self help books written by very wise people and learning ways to move forward and let go of the past. I wanted emotional freedom.  Having kids will do that to you.  You see their beautiful innocence. You see their unsullied selves. You see that joy is their natural state. It becomes apparent that almost any issues kids have are issues that we their parents and society as a whole give them. It becomes obvious what precious gems children are and what an immense responsibility parenting is.  

   And I so wanted to be an amazing parent. I dreamed of it my whole life!  I had waited 10 years to have my kids and I now had the two girls I wanted. I was in my late 30s, calmer, wiser, more stable emotionally. I had a wonderful marriage. I felt like a grown up!  I felt ready!

   But, I still harbored unresolved feelings of anger toward my father that would come up almost every time we’d spend any amount of extended time together. I could hold my stuff together for a little while, but give it a day or two and something would trigger it and I’d go off and end up a sobbing mess in tears feeling like I was 14 again unloved and so alone.

 And not only did it affect my relationship with my dad, the insecurity and anger would cause me to react from a place of fear every time something didn't go right in my world. I would get angry, cry, yell and complain a whole lot.  Even though I thought I was a happy person and there was a smile on my face, those hurt feelings were all just under the surface waiting to bubble up when the heat got turned on. 

  To make matters worse, through my learning and reading, I was understanding that all these unresolved feelings within me were not good for my health at all.  Dis-ease can contribute to disease. Emotional stress can cause a state of inflammation in your body in which diseases thrive.  This was a huge wake up call for me.  I had to get my stuff together!

I knew it was really important for me to deal with my issues. I could see I was emotionally stuck in a rut and I needed to pull myself out.  I was looking back figuring out why I acted the way I did, but now I needed some tools to use to move past the hurt into healing. 

One of the major themes along the way for letting the past go had to do with forgiveness. When we forgive someone, we release the negative energy we are putting into holding the grudge or resenting them for what they did, so we can focus our energy on what we want instead.  

   A helpful strategy was to imagine the person I needed to forgive as a child of around 5 or 6 years in age. It seemed a bit silly at first, but  I closed my eyes and pictured my dad as a kid. I saw him standing in his own boyish innocence.  Unsullied, trying to navigate his own way through the world. 

   I then realized that my grandfather, who had once popped me in the mouth from across the dinner table without warning, was my dad’s dad. My dad treated me like that when he was mad at me, because that’s how he’d been treated. He didn’t know any better way. Even my grandfather was living from the previous cycle of his own life and his parents before him and so on.  I could see that. Children learn what they live and then they become adults who have kids who live what they have been taught and the cycle goes on and on and on.  

   When I saw my dad as the boy he once was, it hit my heart like a bolt of lightning. And I wept and wept for him.  I wept for the child he was, I wept for the man he might have been and I wept for the girl I might have been too. One who wasn’t hit. One who didn’t have a root of rejection and feelings of unworthiness she was trying to rid herself of.  Oh, how wonderful it must be to not have to do this kind of work as an adult!  Do any of us make it through unscathed? Probably very few.  

   Seeing my dad so vulnerable and helpless helped me to see that he too was a product of his environment. As was his dad and his before him, and so on and so on.  It made it easy to forgive my dad for the mistakes he'd made.  And I could let the resentment and anger go. I saw my dad was doing the best he could with the tools he had. As Bob Marley once wrote:

"The biggest man you ever did see was once a baby... In this life... we're coming in from the cold." 

   We are all just doing the best we can. Most of the time, when I think of my dad, I remember so many good times. Seriously, my dad was cool.  He even had a motorcycle!  I think of the music my dad exposed me to, from Dave Brubeck to The Doors,  the work ethic he instilled in me, the rock concerts he took me to, the father/daughter talks we would have, the wonderful vacations he took us on as a family, how when I was 16 he drove me and a girlfriend around and around O’Hare airport looking for a band I was a huge fan of because my girlfriend had gotten a tip the band was landing at a certain gate!
Oh my goodness the things daddies do for their little girls! And my dad did it all!  

He was a total trooper!  And always, always there when I need him. Even to this day. I have so much love for my dad. He's a wonderful man and father. The good stuff totally out weights the bad stuff, but I had been letting the bad moments basically run my life like a computer program that’s open in the background but you can’t see it.  I thought I had closed that window a long time ago, but man... it was really slowing things down. But, I ran some forgiveness software and cleaned it up! 

   

I heard Dr. Matt James talk about ho’oponopono years ago and it resonated with me deeply.  Ho’oponopono is an ancient Hawaiian forgiveness exercise in which you forgive hurts of the past in a step by step process.  It’s not about condoning the behavior in any way, but instead using the experience and learning from it, but releasing the hurt. 

   He also spoke of using the practice of forgiveness and release on people who were no longer in the physical world. In those exercises, you imagine the person you’d like to forgive sitting in front of you and follow the steps with them as you would if they were there physically. 

   I have found it to be very freeing and it has helped me to begin to move on and stand in my own authentic power. It has allowed me to forgive my grandfather and see that he too was doing the best he could. I forgave, but took the wisdom of the experience with me. The wisdom is knowing I do not want to repeat the same mistakes. 

   Now that I have my own children, I am bound and determined to break the cycle. I realize the importance of taking the time to discipline my children with respect and love. I know that these choices I make will have a rippling effect for generations to come and I want the ripples I make to be ones of unconditional love and hope. 

Some people don’t want to forgive because they think it excuses the behavior somehow.  I don’t condone or excuse any of it.  But I understand. One of my favorite quotes is: 

                       “Do not weep. Do not wax indignant. Understand.” ~ Spinoza

    I didn’t want to drink the poison of unforgiveness anymore.  I am the one who will suffer from swallowing the unforgiveness and it is me who will benefit from putting it down!  To carry it around would weigh me down.  I can forgive the mistakes of the past and move forward. Not forgetting the lessons, but taking that wisdom with me into a lighter and brighter tomorrow for myself to live unencumbered by the burdens of the past while blessing generations of the future. 

Defiance- A Different View

   We have a little under the table joke in our house that goes something like:

    “Had our second child been born first, she’d be an only child.”  

    We all laugh, but there is a grain of truth there.  Our first child was our angel baby. She seldom cried, she was happy, talkative, compliant and fun loving. She was a pleaser. She was spanked ONCE in her life. She made it super easy to be the parents we dreamed of being.  She made us look good! 

   And the second one? She was happy, content and all the rest, but not so much in the compliance department. She is a strong willed girl, who quickly exasperated this mom, so regrettably the “no spanking” rule we decided upon before we had kids went straight to hell in a hand basket more than once! She has a mind of her own for certain! She is sometimes downright defiant! 

   As her parent, I had to ask myself a fundamental question: Do I see it as my job to break my child of her defiant nature? Or am I here to guide her and help her hone that energy into something positive?  Spanking says to the child, “I am going to hurt you, until you do it my way!”  When we spank, we intend to ‘break’ the child of the undesirable behavior.  but we also have a tendency to break their spirit in the process.  Furthermore, do I really need to rid my child of her defiant nature or is a little defiance a good thing every now and then?

    As a girl, I was spanked because I had a sassy mouth on me and I didn’t tow the line. I had an independent spirit that was hard to handle sometimes. My poor father would take all he could and then he’d pop. His fuse was short. He’d go from calm to struggling to get his belt off quickly enough before I could get away.  This put welts on my back side, but made me shut my mouth. For the moment. It got the immediate result. But in hindsight, there is much regret.   My dad and I have cried over the past. He feels horrible for it all and I have forgiven him for everything. He did the best he could with the tools he had. And there were so many things he did and still does absolutely right!  We all learn as we go on this parenting journey.  When you know better, you do better. Plus, he is the best grandfather in this whole wide world!! 

    My dad confided in me once that he was glad that I had that independence and spit fire spirit as a teen and as an adult, even if it was hard to deal with at times as a child. He told me that he knew I would always be able to take care of myself, wouldn’t be walked on or let a man take advantage of me  So, it was a good thing in the end, I just needed to learn how to use that energy in a positive way.

   Let’s think for a minute where we might be without people who defied authority? What about the people who dared stand up to Hitler? Or Galileo standing up to the conventional wisdom of his day? What about the women who defied those who told them they couldn’t vote? I would be proud if any of them were my child. Standing up for what they believe even when it was incredibly difficult is admirable.  But I wonder if the defiance had been beaten out of them at a young age, if they still would have had the same spirit within them to stand up against such a formidable foes later in life.  

    We as a society need to consider that as we myopically continue to reinforce the use of force to teach our children how to behave, we are doing a huge disservice, not only to them but to society as a whole.  Do we really want a society of blind followers? Do we want a bunch of people who’ve lost their sparkle and independent streak?  Do we want well trained militia that reacts out of fear rather than learn to trust their inner voice?  These are the teenagers we eventually send out into the world and the adults of tomorrow.  What kind of children are we rearing?

    We need to, as Steven Covey wrote in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, begin with the end in mind. We need to see the adults we want our children to grow to be. ANd we need to know that doesn’t happen by accident.  They learn what we teach them good or bad.  Do we see that defiant spirit rise up and beat it down time and time again until our child no longer feels comfortable raising her hand with a question in class or trusting her inner voice that tells her to run like hell in the other direction if a man she is with ever treats her with anything less than the utmost respect?  Nope.  Not this mom.  I want to rear children that are happy and confident and yes, even a little defiant.  

   I pledge to cultivate that independent spirit within both my daughters and allow them to refine it and use it to their advantage.  And in order to do that, spanking just isn't an option. I pledge to find better ways to get the results I want.  I hope you will join me in that pledge!

   No one said it was easy to be a good parent.  Finding other ways to discipline your children is hard.  Raising your hand  might seem easier and quicker.  But, in the end you will be much happier with the adults they become, so will they and so will the rest of the world!