Forgiveness with The Sufi Poet Rumi
Image by Rochak Shukla at Freepik.com
The Forgiveness Process with Sufi Poet Rumi,
a Five-Step Process by Ashley Heacock
(You can listen here, or read below)
1. Acknowledge
Acknowledge and affirm your feelings and intuition about what happened and acknowledge it being real. Feel the energies that arise. Accept your emotions, honor your pain and suffering, feel where it came from. Talk to your inner child. The story will not leave until the energies leave first because you have healed the situation with compassion, understanding, forgiveness, and love.
“This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight. How
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.” -Rumi
2. Understand
Feel into the energies of your “adversary” or “adversaries”. Seek to understand and have compassion and love for the other person/people and why they did what they did. Also, do the same for yourself and your inner child, and show her or him understanding, compassion, and love.
“Love comes of its own free will, it can’t be learned in any school.” -Rumi
This means feeling your emotions, allowing yourself to cry, being courageous.
Patterns can be passed down from generation to generation. Would you like to have more understanding and compassion for your enemy so that you can be free and take the higher road of wisdom and self-empowerment? Take your time. Be gentle with yourself. Our ancestral trauma goes back generations. So breathe deeply, listen to your heart, Higher Self, God, or a spiritual guide, and allow yourself to release energies in your body that are ready to be transformed into the Light.
3. Learn
Learn all you were meant to learn as part of this soul contract. How did it serve and benefit you as part of your personal and spiritual growth? What did you learn about your ancestral and family karma? Why would your soul have chosen this path? Are you ready to move forward, reframe, let go of a victim story and advance towards more empowerment and choice over your own life decisions?
“Borrow the beloved’s eyes.
Look through them and you’ll see the Beloved’s face everywhere. No tiredness, no jaded boredom.
“I shall be your eye and your hand and your loving.”
Let that happen, and things
you have hated will become helpers.
A certain preacher always prays long and with enthusiasm
for thieves and muggers that attack people
on the street. “Let your mercy, O Lord,
cover their insolence.”
He doesn’t pray for the good,
but only for the blatantly cruel.
Why is this? his congregation asks.
“Because they have done me such generous favors.
Every time I turn back toward the things they want.
I run into them. They beat me and leave me nearly dead
in the road, and I understand, again, that what they want
is not what I want. They keep me on the spiritual path.
That’s why I honor them and pray for them.”
Those that make you return, for whatever reason,
to God’s solitude, be grateful to them.
Worry about the others, who give you
delicious comforts that keep you from prayer.
Friends are enemies sometimes,
and enemies friends.
There is an animal called an ushghur, a porcupine.
If you hit it with a stick, it extends its quills
and gets bigger. The soul is a porcupine,
made strong by stick-beating.
So a prophet’s soul is especially afflicted,
because it has to become so powerful.
A hide is soaked in tanning liquor and becomes leather.
If the tanner did not rub in the acid,
the hide would get foul-smelling and rotten.
The soul is a newly skinned hide, bloody and gross.
Work on it with manual discipline,
and the bitter tanning acid of grief,
and you’ll become lovely, and very strong.
If you can’t do this work yourself, don’t worry.
You don’t even have to make a decision,
one way or another. The Friend, who knows
a lot more than you do, will bring difficulties,
and grief, and sickness, as medicine, as happiness,
as the essence of the moment when you’re beaten,
when you hear Checkmate, and can finally say,
with Hallaj’s voice,
I trust you to kill me.” -Rumi
4. Empower
Recognize the mirror of the other person to your own self, your own feelings of unworthiness and lack of self respect. We are all One and tend to hate in others what we also have in ourselves. Empowerment and self-love and the decision to manifest new situations for you and your children and your children’s children is a positive movement towards the Light, a new karmic path, and a life filled with more vitality.
You now may be able to chart a more beautiful course forward for your life, incorporate new beliefs, manifest healthier relationships, develop self-love and self-respect, exist in a higher vibrational state of being, and thus attract your desired relationships and life.
“You yourself are hitting your own self with a club oh base one,
this egotism is a reflection of you in my actions.
You have seen a reflection of yourself in my form
in the battling with yourself
You have become boiling hot,
just like the lion that dove into the well
when he saw his reflection in the water
because he imagined That his own
reflection was his enemy.”
“You have agonized much and still you are within the veil
because dying was the basic axiom
and you have not yet experienced it
until you die.
You’re dying is not finished.
Without a complete ladder.
You cannot get to the roof.
When two of the rungs out of 100 are missing,
the one attempting to get there
will not be permitted.
If a rope is lacking just one meter out of 100 meters.
When will the water go from the well into the bucket?
Oh Prince
you will not sink the ship until you put the last three kilograms into it.
Know that the last three kilos is the axiom
It is the bright star at night
it is the sinker of the ship of obsession and temptation
because the ship of consciousness is sunk
it becomes the dark blue domes sun because you did not die
the souls agonizing becomes prolonged
be amazed in the morning light.
Oh, beautiful faced candle until our stars have become hidden
know that the world’s sun is concealed
hit yourself with a club,
smash your egotism.
Because the eye of the body has become like cotton that is stuck in your ear.
You yourself are hitting your own self with a club oh base one,
this egotism is a reflection of you in my actions.
You have seen a reflection of yourself in my form
in the battling with yourself
You have become boiling hot,
just like the lion that dove into the well
when he saw his reflection in the water
because he imagined That is own
reflection versus enemy.” -Rumi
5. Forgive
If you feel ready, let go of the past pain and trauma. Perhaps introduce your inner child to a beautiful, magical place in nature so he or she feels safe and loved with you, your Higher Self, God, or another Protector/Shaman/Healer.
Incorporate the lessons you learned from these experiences into your life, going forward with self-love, forgiveness of the other person/people, and gratitude to God/Your Higher Self/Ancestors/Angels/Spirits or anybody else who helped you understand this experience with more love and wisdom.
“The soul unbound from the bedlam of the body flies with the wings of the heart without the body.
If your contemplation is the flower then you are a flower garden.
If it is a thorn then you are merely the dried kindling in the public baths stove.
Whosoever wakes up his Heart even if his heads eye were put to sleep he opens up a hundred eyes.” -Rumi
