Dr. Fred Luskin: Forgive for Good

you know I I do I do teach about forgiveness but it's it's a much simpler quality than that that this whole for me the whole area it's some combination of relax get over yourself relax you're going to die so relax no I'm really serious it's we make this stuff so difficult you know we make like normal human things seem so complicated and so esoteric and convoluted and you know if you look just in any way mildly objectively at life you'll see that people hurt each other and that you hurt other people so what are you going to do about that I mean it some of the the extra stuff we put around all this is what makes it such an interesting thing for me like all the drama that we lay over the simple reality that most of us are unimaginably selfishly absorbed because of that we hurt other people and magnify the things done to us way out of proportion that's it like we're so narcissistically absorbed that we think that the world begins and ends with us that the rest of the world literally barely matters and and that you know some of us can keep grudges going for 50 years no it's a very right before I got in here I'm flying to New York after this just just teaching at Omega and I teach with this stuff is remarkable not not my piece of it but I teach with a surgeon who is showing people that you don't really need spinal surgery except in the most extreme conditions and that he has I don't know how many patients a hundred or 200 patients that he has helped in part with forgiveness that you know you don't have to have all this rage and stuff but he just sent me an email from a psychologist who was saying to him and he passed it on to me because he didn't know the answer he said okay I get it you're supposed to forgive the past this is what the psychologist was saying but I have all these adult patients whose parents are still irritating the hell out of them and first of all how do you take that even seriously if you're an adult if you know what your parent you're eight eight you don't communicate with them just do whatever you want you're 45 years old but so he says to me my patients were always saying I can get over the past which I don't believe I don't believe at all because if you can get over the past then you know how to get over stuff so you can deal with the present but at least they like to convince themselves that they're more noble than they actually are I can get over the past but it's the present stuff where they haven't changed and there's still like violating my boundaries and bla bla bla bla bla bla and there's still the same rotten human being they've been since I've been six that's not the sign of somebody who's gotten over the past right at all but so the therapist is asking what do I say to them and and I said well the only thing I wrote back because I get this question too often I said well tell your clients that they're asking the wrong question with the wrong couple of questions like one like why am I still expecting old people to be different than they are like haven't I learned anything and 2yr Bandai not in my adult life learn to take responsibility for how I feel like it's nothing to do with your parents anymore like you know you like asking the wrong questions and I was thinking like why isn't that a more common question like what are we all doing blaming everybody and and the and I and I understand some of it but I don't understand all of it I don't understand fully the human tendency to not want to own our own bad behavior like that that I don't fully understand that somebody who's upset with their mother for 40 years irregardless of what their mother did has a problem so their mother it doesn't matter what the mother did if you stay upset with somebody for 40 years you haven't checked life out at all like you've been living in a bunker you know with no information coming in barely air and what are you doing like 40 years later still thinking your childhood matters like are you kidding me like right now there's like I don't know I remember what the exact numbers but you know these horrible stories at like 35,000 children starve to death everyday under the age of like eight and you're still worried about what happened when you were eight go feed somebody go do something useful but the very fact that you're still thinking of your childhood now as if it matters is shocking to me not shocking because we all do that but just like are you kidding like that's a relevant question and and so that's what I mean by people are in a bunker like there it's an airtight way of having the world not really exist outside of your own head because they're suffering everywhere every way you look so why are we so obsessed with ours especially old stuff I mean new stuff yet make sense but old stuff like I know people who are still mad at dead people see that's the one that's the one that gives me like real humor you're mad at dead people sometimes a lot of dead people like I can't believe they did that when they're dead but this is our mind this is the mind that we are saddled with a mind that makes enormous difficulty for us and causes us so much pain because we don't see life clearly at all like we don't we don't we don't check it out and and the things that that I have seen again you know I'm I've been I've been running the Stanford forgiveness project now almost 20 years and and I've met a number a good number of people who have experienced real horror that I don't even know what I don't I don't even have words for you know it's like I don't know hey anybody copes with some of this stuff but 95% of this stuff I've seen it's just everyday stuff my husband lied to me my kids lied to me I lied to me you know they don't love me anymore I don't love them anymore they will mean nasty unconscious and sensitive just everyday stuff and and if you look around it's happening everywhere all over the place so what is that quality that has a success about the everyday stuff that happened to us and regurgitated endlessly awash in a world of real current suffering like how do we defend that to ourselves you know how do we defend the capacity of our mind to literally hold on to memories of things that happen to us in this short life where we could actually be useful you know to help so there's this enormous disconnect of attention and empathy you know that that that that's normative it's you know and having worked in some really awful situation so we've done a small amount of work in Catholic and Protestant thing in Northern Ireland and we've done some work post like Civil War and Sierra Leone and like places where it's like unimaginably horrific and part of that is because human beings hold on to their own stuff sometimes for generations and generations and generations like your side killed my great-grand you know like my great-grandfather is like third cousin your side did that so I'm not letting go of that family hatred or tribal hatred to your side so we have the capacity we don't recognize how cruel that is to hold on to it what an act of violence that is that where we're seeding the world with violence of hatred and contempt and all this other stuff by holding on it's like what what is unseen is how much it takes to to make a problem you know you one person to give offense but you fully require the other to take offense and if the other person is healed enough and there's no in fence taken then you don't have the same problem but we're not taught that it takes two to have a problem of the offender and the Effendi who's so identified with the role of Effendi you know I you know hi I'm Fred I had a lousy mother you know what I mean it's like what does that mean but it gives me away when I say hi I'm Fred I had a lousy mother it gives me a way to then pay the world back for not loving me enough it gives me an excuse it gives me a mental schema and it gives me a way to defend my own insensitivity well of course I don't I'm not nice to you I wasn't loved as a kid well we all do this every one of us does this and our intimate relationships what are you expecting of me to be an adult what are you crazy we all do this don't expect me to be an adult but the the pain of like not releasing the identity of victimhood it doesn't mean you forget what happened but there's a very specific kind of identity that I'm a victim I have been harmed by something like outside of me and therefore I don't have to be fully responsible for how I live my adult life which is very it's not it's it's a very delicate thing I remember and and there was some very interesting experience I had as as these ideas were forming in me I remember once I was doing a couples therapy maybe 20 years ago and I remember like couple a person a a couple a but like I have no idea what gender this person was but all makes they were female and the husband said something obnoxious to the woman and and I remember the woman turning to him with contempt and said how dare you talk to me like that you know that's the way my father used to talk to me and I told you never do that and she was angry and I'm sitting there as the therapist thinking wait there's something so wrong with this picture so wrong I couldn't articulate what was so wrong with it and it took me a little while to realize that was so wrong with it is that she needed to be apologizing to him I'm sorry I'm triggered by my past it's not you to me you're not my father in fact my father's not even my father anymore I'm 35 years old it's on me and I'm really sorry that I brought my crap to this marriage and I remember thinking I'm in a very strange field that doesn't make that abundantly clear like wait a wait a second honey um how old are you and who's sitting in front of you and whatever you tell yourself that's fine but this is not your dad he never was your dad and your dad isn't the same person anymore so except that you're damaged and own it and apologize for it and then make haste to try to heal yourself but I'm watching this and I'm thinking wow this is so bizarre like I never got any education in like anything around this kind of a wait a second this woman is the only thing I'm seeing is her unkindness he didn't he didn't try to hurt her but she is as you know attack because her role as a victim was so identified in her and not saying there's anything wrong with her reacting with pain because that's what's triggered and that's what her imprinting is that I get its the schema and the language that she uses in herself that gives her permission to be harsh to him we all do that to some degree we're all like guilty of that I'm not whole and anything that reminds me of how I'm not whole needs to be stopped and criticized so but that that's what my profession has taught us in some degree psychology it'll be very very careful with and I don't even like the word victim I mean I I happen you know to subscribe to some sense that the world is a reasonably orderly place and things happen as they should but I don't know that you know I can't know that but the idea that some things that have happened to us in life are not as they're supposed to be are somehow out of tune because they're painful to us that I don't believe because if you look at life it's regularly painful you know simply you know what I've said to so many people even if you have the most perfect life I've said it in classes one day you'll just wake up dead you know what I mean like you don't get away like even if everything goes right every single person you ever loved will die so like don't don't be so like angry at the things that remind you of your vulnerability even of your helplessness because that's what we that's what we're all fighting against when we don't want to forgive we're scared to death of recognizing how absolutely vulnerable we are at all moments that this skin is permeable this heart will stop beating that we can't protect those we love and at any moment anything can happen and so pain and unpleasantness and unkindness reminds us of how vulnerable we are and I believe it's that that we are resisting at all costs that there is no way to fully armored up and protect ourselves and so what we do is we get mad or blame or get pissy at the things that remind us of our vulnerability like what's so terrible I mean look I'm not advocating for unkindness or cruelty but what is so terrible about remembering that that happened to you it's it can be a sign of so many things besides besides and including the damage it does to our neurobiology as we are growing a parental cruelty is not good for the brain I'm not there's no advocacy of that but at any moment you can remember yes I have been harmed well that puts me in good company say 7 billion people right that kind of gives me entree into a very select group and you let me look at the paper this morning or watch the news and see how many people just today are being grievously harmed in this world just to just to to touch us that's an alternative to victimhood it's do we use some of these things that happen to us to open our heart or to close it I mean that that that's the question you know do we do we open our heart and one of the ways we open our hearts is by accepting our vulnerability by accepting at a very deep level how lucky we are that more bad stuff doesn't happen and with that vulnerability to be capable of touching the part of us that shares that with everybody we're vulnerable we're all watching someone die or you know like it's this is the this is the mix and and so to be so angry and self-absorbed to unforgive one to not forgive one teeny piece of this just one teensy slice of of what life is i I think misses the mark it's not terrible just misses the mark because it's based on a kind of faulty foundation the other simple thing that I saw and we saw is unforgiveness rests usually on a platform of a lack of gratitude that that's been probably the the strongest Association that I've seen that someone who objectively looks at their life in terms of what they have gotten that they haven't deserved versus what they have gotten bad that they have been deserved the what they've gotten good so outweighs what they've gotten bad that it's not even close like food every day I mean what some of what any of us do to be fed when we you know or or to have a sunshine us or anything but we so highlight the things that we don't think we deserved in the negative way and basically ignore all the things that we can't quite deserve in the positive way you know strongest among that the the human mind appears to be wired to struggle for gratitude and positiveness it appears to be wired that way it appears to be wired in a way that we are threat centric just that just appears to be the way it is that our brains are oriented so exquisitely - what's a threat to us and very very very roughly to what's good which is how you know when people are asked so what do you like about your marriage partner I'll say he's a nice guy what don't you like and they come out with world war and peace one of the things that I have come to see when I think about unforgiveness in its relationship to gratitude and and from what I understand from my little bit I've been reading now in terms of what makes a successful couple gratitude may top the list and it's hard to know like the ranking of it but there has been some recent research on the incredible importance of just being thankful for what your partner does just flat-out thankful but I think of it in terms of because I know how many people that I've talked to who ask how could they do that cruelty how could they do that unkindness weren't they thinking what the hell were they thinking what's wrong with them so this question of where does the son kindness come from and more importantly because they don't really care where it comes from they just want to know why it came to them if they couldn't care less if it came someplace else like go slaughter 50 people in Syria I don't care just don't do anything to me I mean that's our basic take on the day don't do anything to me but I'll read the paper and see that 300 people were bombed here and 180 you know we'll have a lanch and 300 fell off a train and 200,000 starved to death that's all fine just giving my coffee on time I mean that that's our attitude don't be late you know don't make me wait in line at the supermarket because I'm important but what do I care that you know thousands of people starve to death so there's a there's a basic problem with our consciousness of how it is that we orient ourselves which predisposes us to a lack of forgiveness the gratitude piece is the simplest entree into changing that so one of the ways that like you know I have thought about this is anybody who's in a committed partnership like you want to think about like all the ways you're loved that you couldn't possibly have caused like - it's like humility training which is at the heart of forgiveness like if I think of the one quality that is most in alignment with forgiveness is humility I'm not the center of anything I'm not that great I didn't contribute that much to the world why wouldn't it harm me every now and then harms everybody else but the peace in a relationship is like I don't know how to put this nobody has to do your laundry nobody has to go to work nobody has to feed your child nobody has to love you you're not oh you're not that important you're not that valuable it's it's a wonderful thing that people do this but we don't see it at all the narcissism is so dense that we don't even see what people do I mean maiya culpa I I think it was 15 years being married before I notice that she didn't have to do the laundry I'm just you know really it's not just done by the laundry fairy I thought that's who came in and did it but what I'm getting at is the basic consciousness that we're all struggling against it's a very basic thing we're struggling against to get over ourselves you know one of the studies that I read about couples which was really interesting and I don't know the exact particulars of it they did some couple thing which is very common is you stick a couple in a room and you ask them to have an argument I mean that's I know that sounds weird because most couples will do it without having to be stuck in a room you know they don't need any prompting to have an argument but what they would do and is they would film and evaluate how the couple fought I mean this is Godman did this work to develop most of his couple knowledge I don't know that this was his but I remember seeing this study and what was so fascinating was they were trying to relate couples in trouble - how much glitter saw in the partner so during the argument if in any actual couple there will be repair moments so like partner a can be saying to partner me I don't like you you do this this and this but a healthier couple when they say this and they notice the reaction in the couple that they've been hurt they stop for a second and say you okay you know are we getting too intense or let me put my hand on your knee and just show you we're still in this together or I'm sorry or they'll crack a joke you know look at me I'm all tense I'm like Attila the Hun here and it's just my wife but they'll do something to repair at some point the interesting thing was these repair things are happening all the time in decent couple all the time like they're attuned to each other and it's not that they're afraid of saying I don't like you what you did is wrong I don't want this but they also they don't lose sight of defective you know he's a human being but what was fascinating was when they had a Confederate or an observer watching this and then they asked the couples what did your partner do to like be nice to you like list all the you know all the things the distressed couples were the ones that didn't see it clearly the happy couples they saw it accurately that goes against so much of the BS we tell ourselves about life that you have to be realistic and you have to be hard and you know the world isn't done it at all well turned out that the couples that saw it accurately I noticed when he reached out to me I noticed when he said this I noticed when he took a breath I noticed when he turned away or it said you know my wife's a good soul I noticed all that the happier couples were the ones that saw the good the unhappy couples were unhappy because they didn't see the good they were too wrapped up in their own negativity okay there was another in this experiment I don't know exactly but it because it's fuzzy in my brain but it was relating gratitude to couple satisfaction and if you had gratitude for what they did well duh you were better off in the relationship it doesn't mean that your partner is better than the partner that you that's not grateful it just means you have something and it turns out that because we're you know we have very very very simple most of us Minds when somebody says thank you for doing that it reinforces you're doing it all right like if they say oh how nice of you to clean up that's going to get more of a response than you schmuck why didn't you clean up I mean this is all duh all done but so the gratitude piece is what I sense gratitude and humility and compassion or what I sense lacking in our world that doesn't forgive well we person who cultivates gratitude sees enough of the good in their life to be able to hold some of the bad like wait I know you know I I know that I've been given XY and Z and I have all these benefits and opportunities well I can you know okay so this crap happens I it's like okay it's not good but it's okay those who don't practice gratitude tend my belief is to have a little more free-floating hostility you know that wait a second the world's not given me what I need nobody's nourishing me so when somebody really doesn't nourish they want to they want to really hurt and and it's very easy to cultivate gratitude it's very easy I mean it's like Oprah wants you to do it I mean it doesn't get easier and more like simple than that if if she's promoting it no I'm serious it's like then it's it's like universal stuff and it's a very simple thing it's it's like asking yourself but some of it like what kindness was sent my way that I didn't fully see you know what what kindness was offered me that I was too busy for too preoccupied for or that whatever it is I've taken it for granted that's where our minds need to be occupied to balance out the almost obsessive way that we examine all the things that weren't the way we wanted like what I've seen is you don't need to go into the wound so much as place the wounds in context so if you thought wow okay so this person really mistreated me but these six have been really nice to me well why would I be why aren't I like jumping all over myself to say thank you to the six why am i obsessed with the one that's not what's that say about me right so this is this is a way of using the mind but not fighting or resisting unkindness you can't resist it it's everywhere but it means that you don't have to dwell in the wound and that's that's what our forgiveness project understood that I believe has enabled our project to have more reach than any other forgiveness work that I've seen that it's it's saying that no will happen except that prepare for it you can't fully prepare for it but prepare for it but hold that within a container of the world's also rich and loving and nourishing and I'm not the center of the universe and people suffer everywhere so what's the strategy for dealing with the world as it actually is that's that's the container that we set to hold forgiveness you know and and we've done this with you know some pretty horrendous things and some pretty like nothing things like I've talked to people whose neighbors put their fence two inches on their property and they're apoplectic they've come into my classes acting like somebody shot up their whole family what are you kidding me what were they thinking that the property line ends here and their fence is here and I don't know what the hell's wrong with them and how could they do this and on and on and on and on and on and on you know one of the things that was very interesting when we started doing our research because I was really interested in is long long ago things harder to forgive or Corin things are things from people close to you harder to forgive or things from people that you don't know and what I found out was generally speaking the hardest thing to forgive is what happened to me short long well-known unknown it doesn't matter and then I make up a whole theory about why it's harder to forgive what happened to me so I remember being in a class and I asked the class it was you know maybe not quite this big but you know number of people I asked the class so tell me which is harder to forgive somebody you cared for who betrays you or somebody you don't know at all so depending on what the hurt was that's how they responded so somebody would say well I can never forgive my brother because we grew up together and you know how could they do that after all we went through his children okay fine then somebody else would say but wait a second it's very easy to forgive your brother because you have nice times you know like you have balance it's like of course you know my brother is going to do this because 4,700 other times or whatever it is he was nice and he's not nice and it's my brother other people would say well it's really easy to forgive somebody that you don't know because they don't mean anything to you and then somebody else would say well it's impossible to forgive somebody I don't know at least if I know them I have some way of explaining it to myself but how do I explain indiscriminate cruelty you know I did some work with um people whose family members were killed in the attacks on 9/11 I did some work in New Yorker L met and I remember that was part of the brutal horror for some of those people that it just felt like bad luck you know why would my son they don't know him what he was just working in that building or he was walking across the street or he was in the subway station and got up to get up newspaper but how could I ever forgive somebody whose hatred was so indiscriminate that they didn't care that it was my son they would have killed anybody but that's what's so unforgivable that you know if maybe I could forgive something if I understood the genesis you know my son had done something or they they saw my son as something but they didn't they don't know my son from anybody how do you forgive that like it's just it's so unimaginable so the thing is what I have come to see is forgiveness is mostly a question in our mind of what we believe the world to be how we believe people should and what it is that we think is fair for us it has much less to do with the actual event now the the caveat to that is many things that happen to us require grieving and so it's not like forgiveness happens like 15 minutes after somebody does something really hurtful to you there's a period of suffering that is essential called grief you know where you feel all those emotions all those all the terror and the horror and the vulnerability and the rage and that all the outgrowths of hope of helplessness and those can take months to heal forgiveness is in my estimation like the natural end of the grieving process that you grieve and the wounds are raw and real and then you let them go but that that's what forgiveness is it's not a it's not a substitute for grief and it doesn't interdict pain totally it can't because we human beings first of all are strongly attached you know biologically to other human beings and certain wounds rip apart the schemas that we have about life they just rip them apart and to restabilized can take time even a lot of time you know when a child is murdered do you we have this schema of this young person is going to outlive me it is going to carry on my experience I'm the one who's going to go first and then when something happens to that not only is there the loss of the human being but there's the loss of the understanding about how life is supposed to be and it's a massive accommodation to bring the reality in line with the way we held it which is what most of forgiveness is when people don't want to forgive their parents what they're actually saying is it's too challenging for me to change my understanding of life it's too hard and I don't want to do the work I want to believe that parents are supposed to be kind and caring and supportive and generous and loving and I had a parent that didn't meet that standard for me whether it's true or not and I'm unwilling to do the work to integrate reality which is not all parents do that my parent may not have and maybe my expectation was out of line but to work to integrate that reality to be able to come up with a more true reality which is many many parents fail to provide a safe home for their children many parents and many children as a result have to struggle to gain emotional maturity and competence that's a gray nuanced it doesn't you know it accepts that it would be wonderful if everybody were raised well but they're not now what do we do but that takes a flexible mind and it takes an ability to hold pain and not have to have an enemy with the pain that there's a cognitive accommodation to reality and I see how hard that is for so many people you know I only have a few minutes left this all started for me when I was very badly hurt like the reason that not the reason I started teaching forgiveness but the genesis for this experience and my willingness for what ever reason to go into my own flaws and weaknesses which were pretty extensive my very close friend betrayed me this is a long time ago and betrayed me in a way that I had no there was no map at all that this was even possible like I thought this was my closest buddy and that we were going to be close buddies you know forever or whatever forever meant and so not only did the wound hurt dramatically but I had no mental place for this you know like many people have that with their marriage there is no place for the fact that my wife her husband may be a cheater or maybe the one to leave or maybe abusive or whatever it is there's no there's no cognitive space in there I had no cognitive space for the fact that this person may betray me and when that happened I was devastated both on the emotional level but more in the this world is not a safe world at all because there's nothing I can depend on not none of my conceptions of how life should be were true and so it completely destabilized me which is I see what happens to people all over the world when events happen that they don't have a place to hold them you know they have all this almost fantasy of the way life is and then reality intrudes well for the good or for bad is it took me years to recover from this years and and and I did and this is the reason that you know I'm a reasonably effective forgiveness teacher it's almost like the alcoholic who can go back and counsel and see all the that the people who are still drinking give because they've been there well I I was I mean I I saw my own BS like it was you know I I saw myself just to give you an example I would be talking to somebody and somebody would ask me about this person and I would say I would start out like it was a reasonable human being for about two sentences and then I'd attacked the heck out of them but I had this little veneer of like I'm a reasonable person you know I'm not cyclone Pathak and then about four seconds later like foams coming out of my mouth and somehow I made that his fault like you know I mean I I had such an interesting system that I could behave terribly and that was his fault and even years after that if I brought him up it was his fault like what makes me two years later need to bring out that up but anytime I had an operation an opportunity to make him appear like a bad guy I took it gleefully I alternated between depressed and angry I created a whole victim persona for myself which was partly true this is what I'm getting at if he could do this to me that I'm not safe that's true it's what do I do in a world where I'm not safe where the armoring of my heart and the anger that's not a good answer but the question is a right one since he could do this to me anything can happen that's true that's flat-out true where I went off the rails is well because of that I'm going to be bitter and mistrustful and take every opportunity to tell the world that it I don't agree with how it treated me that was my solution to a truth that I didn't want to hold but everybody who's hurt struggles with that everybody if my husband could lie like this there is no total security and stability that's true that's just true but the answer is not in becoming hostile and that's the experiment that human beings have been doing since human beings have come on the planet when we recognize that it's not safe which is always to protect ourselves we become more selfish and I don't believe that that's the solution that is best oriented for us both as individuals and as a group forgiveness allows us to say that yes this hurt was awful was inappropriate was wrong was anything but I'm not going to allow that to change my character for the worse that's what it does like it doesn't deny the harm you know I was on I was on the radio a few times and interviewed just recently about the shootings in Charleston and how quickly some of those family members forgave and and I had been interviewed a decade ago when the Amish murders where nickel mines were curd and that's a very tricky thing because there are some religious people who have so practiced forgiveness and so practiced an understanding that when something happens that's what they have to offer that it's true for them you know that but for other people the forgiveness serves as an attempt to not feel the horror of it and to not feel with compassion how often people are harmed like that's that's not an appropriate use I mean it's look it's better than going out and killing somebody but it's it's not the deepest use of forgiveness the deepest use of forgiveness is that we live in a very difficult challenging world of great harm and injustice and that while we can forgive the individual perpetrators of it because we have to it doesn't absolve us of the responsibility to continue to try to have our hearts open to make the world a better place you know to that that being harmed many of us use that to step away from a kind of trust in the world you know that that I can trust anymore that you know and you see that all the time in relationships you know somebody was in a 20-year marriage where they find out that the hubby has been having a long affair and they I'm not trusting anymore now it's the truth is it can take a while to trust again but the deeper understanding is even from the beginning of any relationship it's guaranteed to end that's the you understand what I'm saying so it's like front-loading the wisdom a little it's teaching this so when you enter into a relationship you know that that relationship is going to end and it ends either by death or by mistreatment or neglect or indifference but it's going to end and so if we looked a little more carefully at what this world is and we developed better schema for what it was and how it was that we're going to respond to it then we then we would handle more skillfully the stuff that happens so and I'm going to stop in a minute we what I have developed it I'll do a little bit of it in an hour is some methods for doing this and they asked me to do a workshop kind of thing for an hour or so to just some very simple methods for making helping people become like a little more grateful a little quieter inside a little have a little more humility and just you know to to realize again this is the the bottom line realization that unfortunately I have to work on my nervous system like no matter what happened in the present I got to work on my responses and and and there are very reasonably simple proven ways for doing that I mean meditation and prayer and exercise and affirmation and goodwill and all these stuff but all these things practiced they work on our nervous system and so you know not without with complete assurance but with some assurance we can take people from all sorts of like difficult things and and and orient them to saying okay yes this painful thing happened but it's some of what you need to work on is your mind and nervous system now so that you you release to some degree the past's hold on you and and you're more you know you're just more in present life and you know as as all sorts of converging evidence shows that's good for people you know to be more in present life anyway thank you you

Channel: Theosophical Society

Views: 39,230

Rating: 4.8247619 out of 5

Keywords: Forgive For Good, Frederic Luskin, Forgiveness, Forgiveness (Quotation Subject), Psychology, Soul, Peace, Hope, Rest, Happiness, Life, Truth, Harmony

Id: lJq5mtficaY

Length: 54min 1sec (3241 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 24 2015