Beyond Forgiveness and Into Love

“Forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn’t know before you learned it.” — Maya Angelou

“Be melting snow—wash yourself of yourself.” — Rumi

“I learned that every mortal will taste death. But only some will taste life.” — Rabia al-Basri

There was a time when I believed forgiveness was the destination. I thought if I could really forgive—fully, cleanly, completely—then I would finally be free. That belief carried me for years. Through therapy, through group work, through the honesty of 12-step recovery, and through every piece of self-help work I committed to along the way. Forgiveness wasn’t just something I understood conceptually. It was something I worked at, returned to, and practiced over and over again as different layers of the past surfaced.

And it did help. It softened something in me that had been hard for a very long time. It created space where there had been none and allowed me to respond differently instead of reacting from old patterns. For a while, it felt like I had found what I had been looking for.

I also went deeper into what’s often called Radical Forgiveness, developed by Colin Tipping, and that shifted something important in me. It helped me move out of a place where everything felt personal and into a perspective where I could begin to consider that there might be something larger at play. It gave me a framework to release blame in a way that felt real at the time, and for a long time, that perspective held.

But even with all of that, something remained. Not the same anger, and not even the same pain, but a quieter kind of holding. A subtle place where the story still lived and where, in some way, I was still centered in it as the one it had happened to. It took me a long time to recognize that healing doesn’t necessarily stop where we think it will, and that forgiveness, as meaningful as it is, can still be part of a deeper process.

There’s a story that feels like the closest way I can describe what came next. A group of people boards a bus because they’ve heard the view from a mountain is incredible. When they arrive, most of them take a short hike to a restaurant overlook. The view is beautiful, expansive, and honestly enough for many of them. They settle in, take it in, and decide to stay.

The guide then tells them the view gets better the higher you go. A smaller group decides to continue, and the path quickly becomes more difficult. The terrain is jagged, the air gets thinner, and it requires more effort than they expected. When they reach the next level, the view is undeniably more spectacular. They are tired, but they all agree it was worth it.

Then the guide says something that changes everything. He tells them the view from the very top cannot be translated. Not because it’s just better, but because something else exists there, something that can’t be understood from below. Something like love that has to be experienced directly. At that point, almost everyone turns back.

Except one.

That one keeps going, not for a day or two, but for weeks. Through snow, high winds, exhaustion, and being worn down in ways that go far beyond physical discomfort. There’s no validation along the way, no reassurance that it will be worth it, just a quiet pull forward. And eventually, that person reaches the top.

The view is beyond anything that can be described. Not just more beautiful, but different in nature. And when they return and try to explain it, the others can only interpret what they hear through the lens of what they themselves have already seen. They compare it to the lower views. They try to understand it in familiar terms. But they can’t actually know it.

That’s what this next level of healing has felt like for me. Forgiveness mattered. Radical Forgiveness mattered. Everything I did through therapy, recovery, and self-help mattered. But it wasn’t the summit. It was part of the path.

The deeper shift came slowly, over decades. Through sitting in rooms where people told the truth about their lives and hearing my own experiences reflected back to me in ways that made them feel less isolating. Through therapy, where I learned language for things I had lived but never fully understood. Through group work that required honesty, even when it was uncomfortable. And through meditation, which has been the most consistent thread through all of it.

Thirty years of turning inward changes something. On the Path, there is this understanding that the soul is already whole, already connected to the divine current of Love and Sound, and that what we experience here is part of a larger unfolding. That teaching didn’t make me bypass anything. It gave me a way to hold what I had lived through without becoming defined by it, and over time, it gave me access to something deeper than the story itself.

In her Satsang on February 9, 2014, Kathy said that everybody who looks so saddened, so sick, so desperate for help is actually experiencing the very thing that signals their readiness to become more aware. That as awareness increases, we grow spiritually—not in a way that can be measured by time or space, but inwardly, in a way we often can’t yet see. She talked about how every challenge, every hurt, every circumstance, and even the act of forgiveness itself—along with loving and praying for help—connects us to something positive and freeing within us. And that there is a bright light of God within us, already present, dissolving the walls between us and Love.

When I look back now, I can see that the very experiences I spent so long trying to move past were also the ones that opened me to this great Love inside me. Not in a way I could see at the time, and not in a way I would have chosen, but in a way that ultimately led me deeper into awareness, into spirituality, and into something that feels real in a way nothing else ever has.

Finding out that my mother had died in 2024, long after it had happened, created a kind of space inside of me that I don’t think I would have been able to hold years ago. There’s a particular kind of grief that comes with relationships that were never fully resolved. It doesn’t follow a clean path, and it doesn’t offer the kind of closure we tend to expect. But I wasn’t meeting that reality as the same person I had been before. The work I had done over time, along with the support I received from people like Kathy, who consistently reflected love back to me when I couldn’t yet access it myself, has shifted something fundamental. I can see more clearly, and more importantly, I can feel from a different place.

What I now understand is that the people who hurt me were not separate from the same human condition I have spent my life trying to understand. They were acting from their own pain, their own conditioning, their own limitations, and their own unhealed places. That doesn’t make what happened okay, but it changes how it lives inside of me. When I really see that it wasn’t about me in the way I once believed, something begins to loosen. The identity of being the one it happened to starts to fall away and give true unconditional Love space to expand, to grow deep inside of me and all around me.

From there, compassion begins to emerge, not as something I tried to create, but as something that naturally arises when the separation softens. As I began to see more clearly that we are all moving through different levels of awareness, shaped by different experiences, but not fundamentally separate, something opened that I didn’t expect.

And then something even deeper followed. Gratitude. Not gratitude for what happened in a literal sense, but gratitude for what it led me toward. For the depth it required. For the path it opened. For the way it brought me, step by step, into truth, into healing, and into something real. Because the truth is, I don’t know that I would have searched the way I did without it. I don’t know that I would have stayed committed to meditation for thirty years. I don’t know that I would have gone as far as I have internally if things had been easier on the surface.

There is a passage in The Book of Mirdad that speaks to how we hold onto fragments and mistake them for the whole, how we interpret everything from the level we’ve reached and assume that’s all there is. That has stayed with me, because it mirrors this experience so closely. Until we move beyond a certain point, everything we hear gets translated back into what we already know.

The 12-step work says acceptance is the answer to all our problems today, and I understand that in a very different way now. Acceptance isn’t resignation, and it isn’t agreement. It’s the willingness to let reality be what it is without continuing to fight it internally. From that place, something opens that doesn’t open any other way. Therapy gave me understanding. Group work gave me connection. Recovery gave me structure. Meditation gave me direct experience. And love, especially the kind that was reflected back to me when I couldn’t yet access it myself, gave me a way forward.

If you had told me years ago that I would feel compassion for the people who hurt me, I wouldn’t have believed you. If you had told me I would feel gratitude, I would have said that was impossible. But healing doesn’t stop where we think it will. It continues as we’re able to hold more truth, more complexity, and more reality without collapsing back into the past.

At some point, the past loosens its grip. Not because it disappears, but because it no longer defines who we are. There is a kind of freedom that exists beyond forgiveness. It’s quiet and grounded. It isn’t something that can really be explained in a way that makes sense until it’s experienced. It’s something you come to know, and once you do, everything that came before it begins to make sense in a completely different way. It creates space for Love to grow.