QA225 QUESTION: Tonight is the eve of my wedding anniversary, and I find myself in a place of confronting an area in my life with women where I find it very painful to admit that I was wrong. I’ve been feeling very close to my mate and then violently contracted, and I’m feeling very hard. Each time the image of my mother comes up, and I realize that I have not yet taken the courage to admit to myself that I was really wrong, and that I blame her very much.
ANSWER: It is a wonderful, wonderful thing that you can come to this point. You are almost there. I say to you that I see in our reality it is already so. You are already there; that you can own here where you were mistaken, where you were unjust, and you can feel that pain without crumbling.
You can allow yourself to truly feel this pain in a life-nurturing fashion. You can do it. You can visualize yourself in this, and out of this your new attitude arises and grows as a beautiful flower.
QUESTION: Could you give me help in seeing the positive aspects of the pain, the nurturing you just said?
ANSWER: The positive aspect of the pain to be nurtured is the softness and the flow combined with the strength. For he who can accept pain in such a healthy way is indeed an extremely strong person. But it is that kind of real strength that is not brittle as an old breakable tree. It is flexible as a young tree that bends with a storm.
It is that soft beautiful strength that comes from the ability to say, “I can take the truth of the pain of my former blindness, and the destructiveness that must arise of such blindness. I can forgive myself for it. I can experience the pain of the guilt, and I can rise above it by going through it and allowing that very same feeling of pain and self-forgiveness to turn into forgiveness of others who have erred and failed and loved.” And that will be the new strength.
