Hi Sonya,
What a great story and a good lesson to yourself that whenever you are holding onto a grudge out of taking offence (righteous indignation) you primarily hurt yourself (by feeling bad), apart from affecting the atmosphere of those around you. In a bigger context it can be an eye-opener how a strong sense of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ is afflicting your interactions and that it “makes more sense” to emotionally accept what maybe intellectually unacceptable. It is particularly delightful that you could see how easy it was to dissolve once you determined that enough is enough – nothing else was needed.
You may find this informative –
Respondent: … stuff like righteous anger or other person feeling superior and acting cocky and insulting/ castigating/ ignoring me, my point of view opposed, etc., or I feeling superior to the other and doing the same.
Richard: Sure, there is a whole range of reasons for getting angry (which vary according to different situations and circumstances) … maybe the following will be of assistance in regards righteous anger (aka indignation):• [Richard]: ‘One of the major issues the identity inhabiting this flesh and blood body all those years ago attended to very early in the piece was the indignation – ‘anger excited by a sense of wrong, or by injustice, wickedness, or misconduct; righteous anger’ (Oxford Dictionary) – which had dogged him from almost as early as ‘he’ could remember (‘he’ was often moved to indignancy because of injustice/ unfairness whilst still in grade school for instance) as righteousness, being oh-so-readily justifiable, is such an insidious feeling’. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 79, 9 February 2005).
• [Richard]: ‘… one of the most persistent forms of anger is indignation (or righteous anger/ justifiable anger): it can be eradicated rather simply by the realisation that its raison d’être – a guardian against injustice, unjustness, unfairness, inequality (partiality, discrimination, and so on) – is as much a human invention as those concepts it defends … justice, justness, fairness, equality (impartiality, indiscrimination, and so on).
I have touched upon this elsewhere: (Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 66, 27 April 2005).• [Richard]: ‘There is no ‘chaos’ and ‘order’ as a ‘sub-stratum of the universe’ … they are but human inventions and do not exist in actuality. The same applies to fairness/ unfairness, justice/ injustice and any other human concepts that, whilst being useful for human-to-human interaction, are futility in action when applied to the universe. Male logic is as useless as female intuition when it comes to being free: the everyday reality of the ‘real-world’ is a veneer ‘I’ paste over the top of the pristine actual world by ‘my’ very being … and ‘being’ is the savage/ tender instinctual passions (giving rise to feelings of malice/ love and sorrow/ compassion etc., with the resultant concepts of bad/ good and evil/ god and so on) which cripples intelligence by invariably producing dualistic concepts. ‘Tis all a fantasy … feelings rule in the human world’. (Richard, List B, No. 33c, 3 August 2000).
Put simply: nature is neither fair nor just – a volcanic eruption (for just one instance) does not discriminate between who or what it obliterates/ destroys – and thus coupled with the basic resentment at having to be alive in the first place is the further grievance that life is inequitable/ iniquitous. (Richard, AF List, No. 76, 16 Jun 2005).
Sonya: We ended up having a lovely day in London and we are back at work with nicer vibes in the office. From the outside it looks like I’ve ‘forgiven’ but it’s more like I would much rather spend my time being happy and harmless as much as I can whilst I’m alive rather than waste it feeling bad or making someone else feel bad. Just being reminded that we are all living life for the first/ only time and what a waste it is to remain feeling bad. It kind of put into perspective that feeling bad does nothing ‘good’ at all.
Ha, you are so right, “feeling bad does nothing ‘good’ at all”. And the outcome of you deciding to be sensible (at last, after much suffering) was having had “a lovely day” and “nicer vibes in the office”. Instant confirmation that you made a thoroughly sensible decision.
It’s fortunate you haven’t used forgiveness to resolve the situation. You may have read the audio-taped dialogue how “Compassion Gained Through Forgiveness Binds” –
R: (…)
Q(1): Well, that’s what you do: you love them through forgiveness.
Q(2): And for me, forgiving means I’m finishing with that hate … and the opposite of it.
Q(1): You’re finished with love?
Q(2): Hate and forgiveness is the same thing … the opposite of hate … with a parent it is forgiving them and having compassion. And to do both – first you emphasise the hate, then you emphasise the forgiveness. And for me that was a complete way of getting rid of both. Getting rid of the relationship to the parent – they’re not ‘The Parents’ any more. I’m not a ‘Child’ of my parents. I’m a free human being and I can actually decide what to do with my life and I’m not … I can see this and this and this is a conditioning I got from them – and they didn’t know better – so I don’t need to hate them for it and I don’t need to forgive them for it …
R: Good. For if you do forgive you are still trapped because forgiveness gives rise to …
Q(2): No. Forgiveness is just there to balance the hate – because when you end up with just hating them you’re still trapped from the relationship.
R: Of course – trapped by hate. But the people who forgive have compassion. It is inevitable. Then one is trapped by the very compassion that seeks to cure the hate. There is still a relationship because compassion is but an antidote won through the act of forgiveness.
Q(2): For me it’s a completion. For me it eliminates the hate and the forgiveness. For if there is no hate, where is there forgiveness anymore? There is just an understanding that they live their life and I live my life.
R: Well, that is excellent then. Look at the parent’s situation and see that it is not their fault that they are as they are for they are the result of their parent’s conditioning and so on back into the mists of time. Everybody is a victim.
Q(2): It took me some time to integrate it – I had to do the group eight times!
R: Do you know of anyone else who has come to this understanding of absolutely no need for forgiveness of their parents? You are the first person I have met who has done this course who has said there is no need for forgiveness.
Q(2): I don’t know … I would have to ask. I know there is no forgiveness because I’ve just visited my parents and there is nothing there.
R: Mmm … because most people get trapped in the forgiveness – and the compassion which is the inevitable outcome. Therefore there is still a relationship, there is still a link, a connection. It is a heart connection. With this connection they still remain ‘parents’. They do not become what they actually are, which is fellow human beings.
Q(2): Well, if they were totally ‘fellow human beings’ for me, then I wouldn’t have gone to visit them. So there is still something there that I …
R: So what is this connection?
Q(2): I don’t know … well they spent twenty years bringing me up … and … and now they are in their seventies …
R: Is there a loyalty? (Richard, Audio-taped dialogues, The Compassion Gained Through Forgiveness Binds)
Sonya: Hopefully it won’t take months next time. (link)
The way to avoid wasting more time this way by feeling bad is to learn not to take offence in the first place. It takes a bit of affective awareness working out what belief or principle or attitude it is causing you to take umbrage at what someone says or does, and then recognize that each of those beliefs/ principles is not worth sacrificing feeling good, no matter how just or virtuous they are. Besides, the only person you can, and need to change is yourself.
Cheers Vineeto