Fred Luskin, PhD: Forgiveness Is Trainable

we developed a forgiveness training based on four very simple trainable skills become more grateful practice that religiously relentlessly open your heart all the time to what you have so you recognize what the open heart is that that's a central practice of forgiveness because the opposite is what we do which is the world didn't give me enough therefore I'm entitled to complain you want to focus on the fact that the world did give you enough and there's nothing to complain about to balance that out second it's a stress management approach that you have to calm down your nervous system you just have to do that otherwise the stress chemicals going to cause your thinking to become very limited and very narrow and very hostile so if you don't manage the stress of the unforgiveness you it's very hard to get past it third and Linden alluded to this and when I talked to Maryland the other day both of them was struck by the simplicity and the necessity of changing that story you tell and how many people are just attached to a story that paints them as helpless victims of something unpleasant that story is probably the worst thing that we do to ourselves not the events that happen to us that a story of helplessness creates a helpless immune system creates nervous system dysregulation creates all sorts of patterns in the brain for thinking that's just what happens when you change the story to something else you give your body different pathways to function and you give your mind different pathways to open to that's in itself a very simple trainable skill and last we teach certain arguments very simple arguments about whether or not the world owed you anything different like prove that you really were there was an error and you didn't deserve them whether you got I mean prove that and so these simple skills are trainable but I would have to say that I still don't know actually how to teach forgiveness I can teach these skills and they tend to make people more available to forgiveness but there's still something ethereal or consciousness or spiritual or grace or something that still has to fill that human space beyond just those skills and I don't fully know what that is and forgiveness is a trainable life skill yeah it's one that we need to do a lot of work to re-educate people about its power and the definition of forgiveness and what it means and what it doesn't mean there's a trainable life skill I teach forgiveness and in the same way that Lyndon I think feels unfortunately in order to teach it or advocate it you have to learn how to do it and and that's that's tough and I'm struck by often how much resistance there is to people taking that challenge personally really personally and doing what they can to make their little peace of this planet like a hate free zone and and you would be surprised at how rare that is and it's a little shocking to me how hard that is for people to grasp that forgiveness means that opening my heart means I can't hate George Bush or forgiveness means and opening my heart means I can't condemn my mother for 12 years because she failed as my parent and I can't condemn my lover because they didn't love me right it means the most basic and simple renunciation of hostility here and here it almost doesn't matter what we believe in and it has no meaning how we get there when you can call yourself a Christian or you can call yourself a Jewish person or you can call yourself anything for each of us our contribution to this world is our presence and and the way we comport ourselves and the thing that trips most of us up on this planet is how painful this planet is and how easy it is to want to strike back at the people who caused us pain and how that's a very very sensual choice for what our legacy is you know how did you respond to the unkindness that was sent your way I mean I I meet people at all ages who are still defending like their malevolence or their lack of grace or their inability to keep their heart open I meet people who tell me 10 15 20 30 years later that it still makes sense to them to say nasty things about other human beings and and I'm truly astonished by that I'm astonished by it in the sense that most of us fail to deeply embrace our mortality so we think we have forever to spew this stuff out you know that that there either there's no accounting or there's not this profound temporal like power that that no matter what has happened to us no matter when it's happened to us we're done soon

Channel: Institute of Noetic Sciences

Views: 22,972

Keywords: noeitc sciences, noetics, IONS, Fred Luskin, consciousness, forgiveness, intention, gratitude, Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol

Id: Uns5ik6qEeA

Length: 6min 13sec (373 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 15 2009