00:00 

Hey there, welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 234, "Forgiveness and Compassion." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:21 

Alright, hello there, my friends. Welcome to the podcast today. I just want to let you know that I feel so honored to be a part of your lives in this way and to share this content with you, and step into this space of growth and learning and vulnerability with you. There's a lot of things that we learn here that make such a huge difference in how we interact and I know that I get to share some personal things with you. I appreciate you just sharing my journey with me, and I hope that the things that I share are helping you to step into a better version of yourself and to see with more clarity how you can clean things up for you that will help you to have a deeper, more intimate connection with yourself and with God and with the people in your life that you love the most. 

01:17 

This is coming out the Monday before Christmas so next time I chat with you it will be the day after Christmas and I just want to wish you a very, very beautiful Christmas. And I pray that your heart is soft and I pray that you are filled with a lot of love for the people in your lives. And that the greatest gift that you offer, is love, and I think that this cleaning up that we're doing, learning how to love better, is an incredible gift that we have to share with the people that we love the most. 

01:48 

Alright we are just going to jump in today. Here we go, forgiveness and compassion. We're going to talk about the correlation between these two today. Just to start off with, about two-thirds of the clients that I get to coach are working through some aspect of divorce. They're either considering it, they're going through it, or they are on the other side of it. And through all of these stages, we get to discuss forgiveness, why it's important to their journey and how to get there. Because the truth is, it is really difficult to heal from something like divorce and move forward if we are not forgiving the other person. The inability or even unwillingness to forgive will keep us stuck and feeling miserable. And the interesting thing is, we're not literally stuck, but it feels like it. We're actually just stuck in our thoughts of not being able to let go, and this concept does not just apply to people who are working through divorce. It applies to everyone, because we all have situations where we need to learn how to forgive. Some people are in a marriage where they are struggling to forgive. Some of us are struggling to forgive parents, or our children, for things that have happened. And sometimes these things happened a long, long, long time ago, and we still are carrying it with us. Maybe we're struggling with a neighbor or a coworker. 

03:12 

I'm not sure that any type of relationship is immune from circumstances that will require forgiveness sometimes, circumstances that will cause us pain. For some of us, forgiveness is a daunting task. The pain can be so deep, and it has been so long lasting, and it can seem all-consuming. It can occupy our thoughts to the point of distracting us from living the lives we want to live. It might be our last thought before bed, our first thought in the morning, and it may visit us too many times to count during the day. So what can we do if we're stuck in it? How can we heal from the pain and move forward past the offense and into being in control of our own lives? 

04:00 

So here's where compassion comes in. And I really believe that at first, compassion seems like an unlikely hero, because compassion is soft and kind. It can be quiet and unassuming, and yet compassion has the power to truly heal our hearts. Just a few weeks ago, we talked about other people's pain podcast number 231, and this is the key to feeling compassion. Go back and listen if you haven't. It will fill in the gaps here. That podcast and this one really need to work in tandem. The premise of that podcast is that other people's seemingly poor behavior most often comes from a place of pain. So this last Sunday, a defense lawyer taught our Relief Society lesson, and we were talking about grace. And she said that people often ask her how she can defend people who have done some really horrible things. How can she feel good about trying to help them? And I loved her response. She said that when she sits down and she gets to know them, when she understands their stories and where they have come from, when she sees their pain, she always feels more compassion for them. And when she sees beyond their behavior and into their pain, then she can feel the compassion which then allows her to do her job of defending them. 

05:29 

Now to be clear, feeling compassion is not condoning the other person's behavior. It's not giving them a free pass to get away with whatever happened. It's also not saying that it doesn't matter or that we're even okay with their behavior. Our goal in seeking to feel this compassion so that we can forgive is to liberate ourselves from thoughts and feelings that not only feel horrible, but that are also incredibly disempowering and that keep us from healing and moving forward. Our forgiveness of someone else doesn't actually have anything to do with them at all. Our forgiveness of someone else has everything to do with us. It's about moving into a place where we can let go of the pain and feel peace, where we can let go of the anger and feel empowered, where we can let God focus on them and their justice and we can focus on us. When you think about it, God is able to forgive anyone and He wants to be able to forgive everyone. And the reason why is because He understands their backstory and people's backstories allow us to feel compassion. 

06:47 

Now, obviously God is in a unique position when it comes to understanding backstories because being omniscient, He knows everything about each person. We don't have that ability, but I do believe that we can move in that direction. For example, after my divorce, I will tell you I did not feel a lot of compassion for my ex-husband for quite a while. And the reason I didn't was because I was making him the villain of my story, which then made me the victim. This is a super empowering place to be, disempowering, sorry, this is a super disempowering place to be, and a place that made it really difficult to feel compassion for him, because in my mind, he was still hurting me. In real life, he wasn't. But I was perpetuating the hurt by the story I was telling myself in my head. He wasn't perpetuating the hurt. I was. When I started doing my own work, seeing my own flaws and failures and shortcomings in our marriage, I was able to start feeling some compassion for him because I saw that I made things much more difficult than I had originally thought and I could begin to see some of his pain. And when I stopped to consider past experiences in his life that I was aware of, for sure I could start to see things more from his point of view and I could see more of his pain. When I began to step out of my own self -righteous space, constantly thinking that I was better than him and being so judge-y about his behavior and thinking that I would never act in such a way, I began to see that I actually was no better than him and that I often did act in such a way. When I really started stepping into my own responsibility for how I thought and felt and behaved in my previous marriage, then I honestly could not keep him in the villain role in my story. It just didn't make sense because I began to see my own villain role in the story. And this is when things really changed for me. I began to feel compassion for him, and I began to heal and move forward. And this is, I know that this has been my personal experience. I'm sure that yours is very different. But look to see what parallels you can make, because the truth is...none of us are perfect. All of us cross the line sometimes, and say, and do things, and sometimes unspeakable things, that we're unaware of for a long time. 

09:28 

So the next piece of this story for me was that after I became aware of my own dysfunctional patterns of behavior that I engaged in that were hurtful, then I began to see how I wasn't behaving that way because I was rotten to the core and a derelict from the beginning and just an evil person. I realized that I acted the way that I did because I was in pain and I was in protective mode, and I didn't have the awareness or the tools to behave differently. And over time, I could start to apply this same thinking to my ex-husband. He was in pain. He was in protective mode. And he didn't have the awareness or the tools to behave differently either. When I got out of my self-righteous bubble, I could see him and his situation more clearly, and then I could start to feel compassion for him. I could start to see many of the ways I had made his life difficult, that I had caused him pain and pushed him into protective mode. And once I started to feel compassion for him, the forgiveness started to come. 

10:36 

Now, I know that your situation probably doesn't sound just like mine, but if you're struggling to forgive, to let go, to move forward, to heal, we really need to look at the basic concepts. The reason God can forgive everyone is because He can see past the behaviors to the pain behind the behaviors. When he sees the pain, he feels compassion because He understands that there is so much more to what's going on than the behaviors that we see on the outside. He sees hurtful experiences. He sees times when people have rejected and abused them. He sees their fear and their insecurity and their lack of confidence. And because of this, He can feel compassion for them and create a space to forgive them. God is, after all, good. And His nature is to always return good even when our actions have been evil. But, and here's a pretty big "but," because we're probably all thinking something similar. I am not God. In fact, I'm pretty far away from being like God in my ability to hold space for people to be in pain, to act badly, and to still offer grace and compassion and forgiveness. 

11:50 

And that, my friends, is the point of our existence here on Earth, I believe. I truly believe that we are sent here to earth to be tested and tried in our ability to obey the greatest of commandments, to love God and to love others as ourselves. A huge part of our journey is learning to have this compassion like God has, to learn how to forgive as God forgives. Now God says that He will forgive who He will. And He can because He understands all the circumstances, but of us it is required to forgive all people. We're not the judge here, God is. And that can seem so overwhelming sometimes to forgive all the people when we're dealing with something big. But here's the thing, our forgiveness of the other person doesn't do anything at all for them or to them. Nothing. Our forgiveness of them, rather, gives us our lives back. It liberates us and empowers us and helps us to heal the deep wounds that are keeping us incapacitated emotionally, mentally and sometimes physically. Our forgiveness of them empowers us to move forward, to begin creating the life we really want to live, to feel the way we want to feel, to think the way we want to think. It allows us to have something else be our first thought, last thought of the day and every thought in between. Things like: what can I create of my life? How can I bless my family? How can I step into what God is calling me to do here on earth? 

13:34 

When we're stuck in unforgiveness and blaming, we don't have time to start thinking about how to create more greatness in our own lives. And it just feels so, so, so much better to feel compassion rather than anger and hatred and hurt. And the piece we get to trust is that God is in charge of all of it. Whatever laws have been broken, God knows and He will take care of it. Whatever injustices have occurred, God has it under control. The thing is, God wants what is best for us and He wants what is best for the person that we are seeking to forgive as well. Ultimately, when we become more like God, we will want the same. We will want what is best for us and we will want what is best for every other person as well as the person we are struggling to forgive. 

14:36 

I recently read a book called "Misunderstood: by Jen Hapmaker. She is a Christian author and she shares this idea. She says: "God's first bent is mercy. He longs to liberate the victim from her oppression and the oppressor from his confusion. When either emerges transformed, it is a victory for the heavens." I love that. I stopped and reread that and I've shared it in several other places because really, truly coming to desire good for the oppressor in our story may feel like a long shot at best for us. But the more we can trust God to do exactly what needs to be done to rectify the situation, the more we can let go of feeling like we need to be the judge in our story. We can let God be the judge, but also know that God wants the offender in our story to also repent. He wants them to come unto Him as well. But refusing to forgive is really all about thinking that somehow our refusing grace will give the other person the punishment that we think they deserve. 

15:55 

Okay, now this may sound a little bit harsh, but let's think about it for just a bit. Honestly, what does refusing grace, forgiveness do to the other person? It doesn't do anything to them. Generally, they aren't even aware of our angst, of our struggle, and to be honest, in many situations, they probably don't care either. They are off living their life, doing their thing, and often not spending any time at all thinking about us. And we're over here ruminating and obsessing about the situation. Not forgiving keeps us in a space of judgment of them. It keeps us reliving the pain over and over. It keeps us from healing and moving forward. It keeps us stuck in a miserable place. And the gateway to moving out of this place is compassion. And you may be saying, "but they don't deserve my compassion." And guess what? Maybe that's true. You deserve your compassion. You deserve to have feelings that motivate and inspire and heal. You deserve the peace that comes from letting go of the pain. You deserve the life after forgiveness that allows you to create something different and beautiful. You deserve a life that is fulfilling and satisfying and engaging. You deserve to be liberated from the fear of forgiving and to step into the liberation of letting go. You forgiving does not mean that God has forgiven them nor does it mean that we condone or agree with their choices. 

17:35 

You forgiving means that you have made a conscious decision to live an amazing life outside of that person and their behavior and your experience with them. I think sometimes we think that us showing up with peace and love and kindness rather than with venom and resentment will signal to the other person that we're okay with what happened. But again, here's the thing...what matters here is the experience we are choosing to have, not what they are thinking or believing about how we show up. This is where we get to have control of our experience and healing, and moving forward cannot happen until we forgive. And we cannot forgive until we choose to let go of the anger and pain and judgment and step into compassion for this other person. And compassion feels a whole lot better than resentment. And when we feel better, we do better, we create more, we become more. We experience deeper and more beautiful feelings. We're keeping ourselves stuck when we refuse to forgive. 

18:55 

So this Christmas, one of the best gifts you can give yourself: find compassion for the person you may be struggling with. Nurture that compassion. Step into it and forgive. It's the best gift you can give yourselves. I love growing up. Understanding these concepts is beautiful. If you would like to chat with me about the opportunity to work with me, you can go on to my website tanyahale.com. You can book a free, 30-minute consult. We can talk about how coaching works and if it would be a good fit for you. Love coaching, love being here with you, and thanks for joining me. Wish you all the best, my friends, in creating the life that you want to live. Have an awesome, awesome week, a beautiful Christmas, and I will see you next week. Bye.