Transcriber: Ivana Krivokuća Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Forgiveness is difficult, I get that.
But it's not impossible,
and I want to make it a little bit easier for you.
My story starts in 2011,
after a six-year relationship ended, abruptly.
It left me depressed; it left me angry; and it left me disappointed.
And yet I knew, I just could not allow those following few months of resentment
cancel six years of love,
which means I knew, albeit reluctantly, I had to forgive.
And I wanted to do it in a way that was both symbolic and concrete,
so I decided - a card.
And from the moment I decided to forgive,
to the moment of actually delivering the card,
I sobbed every step of the way.
So, of course, once I got into the card store,
I broke down sobbing, yet again.
And I thought to myself,
"I'll just conceal my face in the sympathy section
as an excuse for sobbing so much in public."
(Laughter)
Only to realize, they don't even make forgiveness cards.
(Laughter)
Because nobody likes doing it.
So I made my own.
I got a blank card,
because I had paragraphs upon paragraphs upon paragraphs of what I wanted to say,
but I decided to whittle all of that down to the three core sentences:
I miss you; I love you; and I forgive you.
Along the way, this whole journey has had me constantly questioning,
"What even is forgiveness?" because it's so latent.
So I researched it.
Thus far, I've spent the past five years researching forgiveness
or other acts of forgiveness
just to come to one clear definition.
So let me start with what forgiveness is not,
or misconceptions of forgiveness.
Forgiveness is not the act of trying to justify whatever happened to you;
it's not sarcastic; it's not hollow; and it's not shallow.
And forgiveness will never compromise your integrity,
because forgiveness is rooted in love.
Forgiveness is the direct acknowledgement of whatever occurred to you.
Forgiveness is the acknowledgement that it cannot be changed
or returned to its original state.
And forgiveness is the humbling acceptance of that.
Forgiveness sacrifices the ego.
It sacrifices the ego's attachments to things
and expectations of how the past should have gone.
And finally - get your pencils ready, get your status updates ready -
(Laughter)
forgiveness is a realignment with love and a reunion with peace.
While researching forgiveness,
it helped tremendously to use metaphors and analogies to try to explain it.
My favorite is the weather; specifically, how we acclimate to it.
Because it's constantly changing.
So if, for example, it's going to rain, what do you do?
You've got your umbrella, you've got your boots,
and you just go on with your day.
Because, yes, there are so many things in life that change.
Some good, some bad.
But the bad ones can leave us feeling all sorts of confusion and stress,
and some people will even say that life is suffering.
And, yes, life is suffering,
but this is the reason why forgiveness is even a virtue at all.
So believing that suffering is the only experience of living,
not only neglects the validity of joy,
it also leads us down a path of resentment.
And resentment,
the very etymological definition of the word itself,
comes in two forms, or two parts.
The root word, the 'sent', means to feel, and the prefix 're' means again.
So that makes resentment
the act of seeing things that have happened in the past
and feeling emotions attached to them over and over, again and again.
Resentment is the proliferation of negative thinking.
And in my circumstance of a breakup,
I very easily could have looked back at movies and music
and TV shows and photographs,
and felt all of my resentment and all of my sadness
all over again and again.
But I chose not to;
I chose to forgive; I chose to let it go.
And when you let something go,
when you let, or allow, or permit it to go or to be released,
you invariably are realigning your own identity
with someone who is compassionate and who is loving and centered.
And if you so choose to not let it go,
if you're reluctant to forgive, as I was for at least a year,
then understand that you're letting it stay,
and letting it sit, and letting it stagnate and fester.
And the longer it stays, the more poison it gives you,
so practice letting go.
Practice letting go of attachments your ego has made to items,
or expectations your ego has made
to how it believes the past should have been.
And practice letting go of resistance you have towards certain individuals.
And I challenge you to seek out those troubled relationships.
I know you know the people in your lives:
find them.
Realign yourself with love,
and seek to forgive by realigning yourselves with love,
and reuniting yourselves and others with peace.
Challenge that resistance.
So, the core of my message is the following.
Letting go is less about actually letting go,
and more about focusing on that which is better.
Focus on love; focus on gratitude;
focus on joy;
and focus on why you love in the first place.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
And align yourself to love.
And once in alignment, the letting go becomes easy;
it becomes innate.
Another weather analogy for you.
(Barking)
(Laughter)
(Whispers)
Another weather analogy for you: thunder happens with lightning,
and forgiveness happens with focused alignment to love.
This is the nature of how it goes 100 percent of the time.
In that same state of love, you can let go of anything.
In that same state of love, you can take on anything new.
This is the beauty of forgiveness; this is the power of forgiveness.
So no matter what the cause of your tempestuous inner storms may be,
whether it's anger or anxiety or self-loathing
or judgement or fear of being judged,
through the power that is this virtue called forgiveness,
you can realign yourselves with love, you can let it all go,
and you can reunite yourself with your inner peace,
and that is certainly an idea worth spreading.
My name is Joe Sielski. Thank you so much for your time.
(Applause)