Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘By reconciling with one’s own feeling, one’s own experience, by coming into contact with one’s own feeling and own experience, a lot of the ways that we then turn our attention to what the other people have done, it dissipates. It goes away because what we’re really wanting to do is to have some healing around the hurt that that has caused us. And the fact is that if we have to wait for everyone that has done something to us to come and we have to reconcile with them and fix it and have them say they’re sorry, we have a long journey of suffering ahead of us. 

And I’m about liberation. I’m about us being able to be free in and of ourselves enough to be able to move through our lives in a way that allows us to be as thriving and powerful and dignified and OK as we can possibly be.

So the forgiveness is actually our way of ritualizing permission to move on, to not have our ability to reconcile pain and difficulty be incumbent on working it out with the other person. So it isn’t about forgiveness– I go and get them and tell them that now I have forgiven you– but it is a self-practice of releasing ourselves from the dynamic in which we’re wanting something from the other person that we can’t necessarily ever get. If we do get it and that comes about, that’s great.

But for me, liberatory practices are about what we can do for ourselves, how we can get ourselves free of the ways in which we are caught or stuck in the dynamics of the past or fixations on the future and allow ourselves to simply be present.’ (from Sounds True)