Forgiveness 2026

I started a SUBSTACK! I hope you’ll check it out and subscribe. I’m planning on writing frequently. Life moves so fast and I don’t want to forget anything.

CHECK IT OUT!

Here’s my most recent post:

I know that mastering the act of forgiveness may be my work for a lifetime. My early life was framed by a happenstance, taoist contradiction: on one hand I learned a clear moral code and felt natural in determining right from wrong. However, so often the experience that the ones I looked to for guidance demonstrated absurdly in conflict with that moral code. I never thought what I was experiencing was right, I was clear in that, but my only recourse was to run away from it. I was just a kid for fuck’s sake. I feel the pull every single day to seek resolution from that because it wasn’t fair. It just, so plainly and by any common assessment, was the wrong thing.

And so now I feel the pull every single day to seek resolution for all of the times I was misunderstood, cheated, used, lied to throughout this lifetime. There is something in my core that has never given up on an ultimate balance in the world that I will finally feel when I understand it better, make my case more succinctly, and right the wrongs of my past. My anger is justified and that has formed it into a solid monolith in the core of my experience. My anger is righteous and that makes it very, very dangerous.

And now here I am decades later, with as deep an understanding as I can have of the dynamics of human relationships, the ways we lie to ourselves, the ways we injure each other as we try to feel safe…and yet, I still feel the same burden of desire, to end it, to feel free, to fix everything.

I can still get lost in the thorns of some transgression from elementary school. I can replay it on end, with my adult mind, and solve it, master it, speak up for myself in a way that a child isn’t able to. I’m still left with the feeling as if the moment had never left me.

It becomes clear that there is no possible resolution that someone will bring to me and I don’t know that I ever even had an idea of what that resolution would truly look like. If I were really clear on what I have been after, I may have had a clear or clearer path. I have finally come to the realization that pretty much all of this kind of resolution is impossible. There are at least an equal number of people out there who may still sting from injuries that I caused in my own quest to feel safe and my own misunderstandings, mistakes, lacks of knowing.

And so I am ready to let it go.

But who can simply make the choice to forgive? This feeling has held hands with the rumble of anxiety my entire life. When I meditate and focus on letting go, I hit a brick wall. I might as well try to meditate one of my limbs off. This is a part of me.

I was recently in a voice lesson and was working on having power and emotion in my upper range. Singing without any tension is key with this. My vocal coach was working with me on holding both a relaxed body and also an authentic and powerful emotion. How could I be both? I started thinking about all of the times I had worked with dancers and needing them to be exacting in the powerful muscular process for dancing, but getting them to do so without tension.

It started making sense in my body first. My body got the idea before my brain. This is the SAME as forgiveness. This IS forgiveness. Forgiveness is not a thing that you do specifically. It’s not a penance or sacrifice, nor is it a labor of duty. It is a way of being in this world.

In order to sing with full emotion, I had to release those emotions in the truest sense of the word as they left my body. I had to express them as things that mattered and be in the feeling of forgiveness in my body and spirit. Tensions come because I think something has to be done. I have to push the emotion out and show it. Earn it or tame it. The imagination that there is some bigger purpose beyond the experience of the moment that I have to hold in my hands.

When I see this kind of block in a dancer in the studio, it looks like shame. It looks like they don’t feel ok to freely express ALL THE WAY. To expose the fullness of human experience without controlling it and meteing it out as if there is something to be afraid of.

It came to me in waves that forgiveness is a way of living your life. Not being a perfect angel, blessing each person when I see them as flawed. It’s being in a continuous space of acceptance and always love in every interaction, knowing that we are all always trying to do the best thing, to feel the safest, to feel happy. Just letting everyone be and knowing it is a-ok for all of us to be eternally imperfect. I have come to understand that everyone desires to be good in this life. It’s just that all of us falter in big and small ways in how we seek to achieve that. ALL OF US. It is the nature of living. Holding onto, judging, fighting with our imperfectness is literally to stop the experience of life.

And even further, we are already in a state of forgiveness by our nature. It’s not something to achieve. The achievement is to let go of the judgment and shame we have let move into our homes…all of the things that block our most natural and delicious state. When I can really home in and have an understanding of this, I start to recognize myself.

And so I’m doing better. I’m spending less time letting go of the past and more time letting go of the present. I’m slowly beginning to feel whatever that state of forgiveness is as a way of being. Even with a small change in my mastery here, the repercussions have been large. In the dance studio, I’m not married to some ideal of how a person is supposed to be. It’s easier than ever to see each person as an individual and to feel creative about how to inspire them to be their best selves. And I feel less anger when they are not ready to be that yet.

The small disappointments of the day to day hold less and less power because I feel less entitled to outcomes. I’m starting to forgive the world for everything, inch by inch, as we all find our way through the ways that tempt with the dramas of conflict. I forgive the train for being late; I forgive a strangers rudeness; I forgive myself for falling short. And with that, every so often, I fall into the bliss of the unlimited perfection of a moment. Ever so briefly, I remember that everything is perfect, just as it is.