Forgiveness

On the drive to my Sunday yoga class, a song came on the radio. There is a line in it that stayed with me:

"This life is the only life we know. Hold on to it tight before you let it go."

(The Life, by Marc Scibilia).

It didn’t arrive as a dramatic question. It felt quieter than that.

Almost practical.

Not 'how long will I live, but how long can I continue to live this way, carrying what I carry, holding what I hold, and still feel alive within it.'

There is, as far as we know, this one life. And then there are all the beliefs humans hold about what comes after. Some believe this is it. Others believe we are reborn. Others believe in heaven, or another realm, or a continuation we cannot yet imagine. Each belief says something about the person holding it.

For me, what I know is this life.

The one happening now.

I don’t fear death in a big or dramatic way. But I very much want to be here. Even on the hard days.

Of course, I get caught up in the small and big problems of my mind. I worry, I ruminate, I lose perspective. And yet, beneath all of that, there is a deep gratitude for having a body, for being alive, for being able to experience this life at all.

Not only the good experiences, but also the difficult ones. Because even the not-so-good moments often bring something else with them, learning, evolution, growth in ways that are not always obvious at the time. So much of what hurts us may grow out of attachment, development, and the defences we needed in order to cope.

And then there is connection.

Connection can be difficult, sometimes even with myself, and often with others. It’s messy, imperfect, full of misunderstandings, bickering, and rupture. And yet, when it works, even briefly, it can be one of the most precious experiences there is.

I’ve come to believe that conflict is simply part of life and of relationships. What matters is not the absence of rupture, but how we repair. How we tend to what has been injured. Whether together or alone, repair asks for care, attention, and time, much like we would offer to a broken bone, an injured animal, or a damaged plant.

There is, in that process, so much forgiveness. Not as forgetting or excusing, but as understanding, mending, and allowing something to soften again.

And perhaps this is where it touches something even deeper.

What I’ve learned, though, is that being alive is not the same as feeling alive.

Aliveness, as I experience it, comes through the body. Through the nervous system.

Through the senses taking in the world and the brain making meaning of what arrives. We gather experiences, good and bad, and they shape us. They shape how safe we feel, how much we trust, how easily we belong.

Over time, different parts of us develop, shaped by our neurophysiology and lived experience.

Some parts were formed in moments of love, care, and attunement. Parts that knew warmth, affection, and being met.

Other parts were shaped in moments where those things were missing. Parts that learned sadness, rejection, disappointment, invisibility. Parts that learned to hide, to brace, to adapt. Parts that learned rules and conditions for belonging, unspoken passwords for being allowed to stay.

The idea that we are not just one thing isn’t new. It exists in psychology, philosophy, and spiritual traditions. In yoga philosophy, it’s often said that there is one observer, one unified awareness.

I’ll be honest, that idea doesn’t come easily to me.

I find myself returning, again and again, to trying to experience life in an embodied way, to live through all my senses.

There was a time when I didn’t face my senses at all. I didn’t feel. I didn’t deal. I didn’t really know how to belong to myself.

Over the years, through study, therapy, and simply living life, I’ve learned to allow feelings that once felt unbearable. Feelings I didn’t like. Feelings I wanted to avoid.

And often, it’s those darker feelings, the ones we try hardest to push away, that turn out to be doorways into something more sustainable.

This brings me to anger. And to letting go.

I notice again and again that beneath anger, beneath grievance, beneath fear, there is almost always a thick layer of sadness. And I wonder what we’re so afraid of in feeling it.

I’ve heard people say, 'If I go into sadness, I’ll never come out.' That it won’t end. That they’ll fall, disappear, drop into something bottomless.

But sadness isn’t the same as depression. Depression isn’t an excess of feeling, it’s the absence of it. Sadness is alive. Sadness moves.

When we’re sad, we grieve. And grief is necessary. We need to grieve to make sense of the life that has been, so that something new can emerge. As Marsha Linehan once said:

"we have to visit the graveyard, but we’re not meant to build a house on it."

There is a kind of circularity in birth, in creative processes, and in letting go. Not only in the bigger picture, but also in smaller ways, in our minds, our bodies, relationships, projects, even places and countries.

Sometimes something old needs to be carefully dismantled, not because it was wrong, but because it no longer offers safety or stability. Like a house that once sheltered us but now needs rebuilding, or a garden that needs clearing so new life can grow.

When grief is allowed, something surprising happens. At some point, it no longer cancels out joy. Grief begins to coexist with happiness, with presence, with beingness. Feeling alive doesn’t require the absence of pain.

Life, though, is not fair. It isn’t just.

Children know this instinctively. They want things to be equal. If you have half a cookie, I want half a cookie. Preferably exactly the same half. And if I want the whole cookie, then… well, you shouldn’t have one at all. There’s something almost funny about it, and something deeply human too.

We carry that longing for fairness into adulthood.

Anger often arrives when that longing is violated. And sometimes it needs to. Anger can be protective. It can signal that something matters, that a line has been crossed.

But anger isn’t meant to be a permanent home.

What lingers is our association with the feeling, the memory, the energy that could not safely discharge at that time and got stuck , what we hold on to, what we replay, what we carry forward in the body.

For me, learning to let go wasn’t something I could do entirely alone. Especially not the big things that I carried in my mind and body.

That goes against what I believed growing up. I thought independence meant doing everything by myself. That this was all I had control and certainty over. And yet, we are born into relationship. We come into the world through another body. Nervous systems connected, then slowly separated, ideally held long enough to learn what safety feels like.

Learning to care for ourselves matters. But learning to feel ourselves often happens in relationship.

I was reminded of this recently during an argument with my someone. He said something that landed deeply for me. My response was tears, something my nervous system does easily. He felt uncomfortable and wondered whether I was being manipulative.

I told him I wasn’t. I was just feeling what I felt.

He said he felt guilty for making me sad. And I realised something important. He didn’t make me sad. What he said touched something old. He wasn’t the source, but the contact point. A ripple across a much wider field.

When he asked me what I was sad about, I surprised myself by saying, I’m sad for me.

I’m still not entirely sure what exactly this means. And I think that’s okay. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Neither is understanding ourselves.

What I do know is this: letting go of grievances isn’t about erasing what happened. It isn’t about forcing forgiveness. It’s about allowing the process to move through us fully, in its own rhythm, until the time has come to let it go.

Sometimes what we thought we had let go of returns, and we are invited to move through the circle again, perhaps to know ourselves, or another, a little more deeply.

In my work, I see this often. When people finally speak what they’ve been carrying, something shifts. Slowly. Gently. And when letting go happens, what often follows isn’t first joy, but tiredness.

Deep tiredness.

Yawning.

Relief.

The nervous system starting to rest and reset.

No emotion is meant to be permanent. Emotions arise quickly in the body, move through us, and pass.

What tends to stay is not the emotion itself, but what formed around it, the feeling we couldn’t fully allow at the time, the thoughts that tried to make sense of it, the images or memories that attached themselves to the experience.

When something doesn’t feel safe enough to move through, it can remain held in the body, quietly shaping how we respond, what we expect, and what we protect ourselves from. Over time, this becomes what we replay, what we carry forward, often without realising it.

The realisation: I didn’t know how much I was carrying.

We understand weight when it’s physical. But we’re less practiced at noticing what we carry in the psyche, how it settles quietly into the body.

When something is finally laid down, space opens.

And in that space, something else becomes possible.

This life is the only life we know.

Perhaps staying alive in it isn’t about holding on tighter,

but about learning, again and again,

in your own rhythm and time,

when it feels right,

to let something go.

Perhaps that is why forgiveness matters.

Not as virtue, but as relief.

Not as forgetting, but as choosing not to carry what no longer needs to come with us.

Sometimes forgiveness begins with the other.

Sometimes it begins with ourselves.

But whatever its direction, it moves through us.

What is released outward softens inward.

What is given inward changes what we offer back.

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Word - Forgiveness

The word forgiveness carries many meanings. This is how I currently understand it.

The word forgiveness comes from Old English forgiefan, meaning to

give completely, to give up, to grant.

At its root, it is not about excusing harm or reconciling what was broken.

It is about release.

Forgiveness was never meant to be an obligation placed on the wounded.

It is not a moral achievement.

It is not something owed.

Sometimes forgiveness is simply the moment we stop rehearsing a story in the body.

Sometimes it is choosing not to keep someone alive inside us through pain.

Sometimes it is turning away, not in bitterness, but in self-preservation.

For me, forgiveness does not mean saying what happened was okay.

And sometimes, forgiveness is not for the other at all.

It is for the part of us that has been holding on, believing that letting go might be dangerous.

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