Gelong Tubten teaches forgiveness as a mental skill in three steps: own your emotional reaction, cultivate gratitude for challenges, and understand that people act from their own inner drama. Forgiveness is active work, not passivity, and it frees you from the weight of resentment.
Chapters
Forgiveness is not saying, okay, I forgive. You can all just abuse me. No, it's not that at all. It's a skill of the mind so that we can learn to not get hurt, to stay strong and stay calm and understand people. And through that, change can happen. When we have a relationship or somebody we think about and we find it hard to forgive them, we can apply three ways of thinking all three. The first one, these three steps. The first step is to recognize our reaction. You can go deeply into recognizing. Here is me feeling hurt and upset. I am experiencing anger. This is in me. Therefore, this is something I can change. If it's in me, I can free myself from it because it's mine. So we recognizing the feeling of anger or the feeling of hurt, that's step one. Step two is to practice gratitude. Normally, when we think of gratitude, when we think of gratitude, practice, we tend to focus on the good things. You know, be grateful for all the great, wonderful things in your life. That's important. It's really important to practice gratitude for all the good things. But gratitude for the challenges, that's going deeper, that's a much more radical kind of gratitude. Compassion and forgiveness are powerful skills of the mind. And if we develop them, we become strong, we become free. But the only way we can develop them is if people push our buttons. The third phase is understanding. This is where the real forgiveness happens. To really understand the human condition, the mind is unstable. People feel thought, feel emotions, and think thoughts that they don't want to be thinking. People do things because they are somehow propelled by their own negative emotions. If we think about the human condition in that way, a kind of forgiveness arises because you start to realize that people aren't really out to get you. They're just caught up in their own drama. And you happen to be standing there. Now, my response could be compassion. It could be understanding. And through that, I could start to free myself from the pain and resentment. But also the relationship might change, because when you really understand somebody, you really. They feel it, they know it. Maybe that's what they were hoping for, was that we would understand their pain. So I think this whole topic of forgiveness is something always important, but especially now. Nowadays, we live in such a disconnected, fractured society where people are constantly blaming and judging. And sometimes, of course, there are things that need to be talked about and addressed and changed. Of course, I'm not suggesting being passive, but I think we're very divided, culturally, socially, as a race. And I think to develop compassion, love and forgiveness as skills is needed more than ever.
