Teaching Forgiveness In Second Life: Week 1, Drawing A Line In The Sand

This is a follow up post to what I wrote here, but you know, I should know by now never to write Part I on anything because invariably I go on to the next thing in life and never come back to write Part II. :-/

But yes! I've been holding a class once a week on Tuesday mornings at 10am for the month of May here at the Mystic Academy. Here's a bit of a summary of what that's been like starting with Week 1:

May 5th - I was nervous for the first part of the class trying to adjust to what it was like to be sitting in a room in a virtual world with all these avatars with all these wild names, flap my lips and not have the luxury of eye contact or facial expression to gauge whether what I was saying was at all registering or resonating with anyone in the room. No one except me had voice chat turned on, although most folks were listening on speakers or headphones as I talked. I had Spuds Barbosa there with me to help me pass out notecards and keep an eye on the text chat so I wouldn't have to multi-task as I talked. What was really nice that day was that someone was there behind the avatar of a handsome looking dog who took it upon him/herself to greet people as they came in and also to give them sort of a mini-update as to where we were.

Like, "Greetings Talya! The class just started and we're handing out notecards. Have a seat!"

My friend the dog also helped those who had technical questions during the class as well and his/her assistance helped with the flow of the class tremendously.

For the most part when I teach, I don't use notes or have an agenda walking in. I tend to get an idea of the class might be about, but my practice is to surrender the whole thing to Spirit. The luxury of this is that from a personality stand point I get to loll about in the bleachers and watch what happens instead of trying to make something happen. I speak from a place of intuition instead of agenda and what's beautiful about this is that while I'm speaking I'm willing to bet I'm the one who benefits most because usually I have a few "Aha!" moments of insight as I listen to what's coming out as well.

The class ended up being about awareness, bringing our attention to the things that we have yet to forgive ourselves for and recognizing that whatever we did in the past is just about that, the past. We did a brief process going back and looking at an incident we still have energy on and coming at it from many different angles, finally ending up embracing ourselves in that moment with compassion.

We talked about blockages to forgiveness, one of which is an old belief that if we forgive ourselves (or others) we are basically letting ourselves off the hook and the fear around that tends to be the idea that if we do that we only encourage ourselves to repeat the behavior. But forgiveness is not about condoning unkind acts or rude behavior, it's about releasing the energy around it that paralyzes us and keeps us rigidly enslaved to the feelings that keep us in lock step in our lives. Upleveling our emotional vibration to include self-love and self-compassion helps us break out of the block of ice that keeps us frozen and unable to take action in our lives.

Instead a positive first step in the journey of forgiveness is to accept responsibility for whatever our part is in the situation we are focusing on. This may not be as easy as it sounds especially if one has a lot of energy invested in the idea that someone or something outside of us has in some way wronged us. The challenge is to find a piece you can honestly take responsibility for, not from a place of victimhood, but from a place of strength. Start small if you have to, but START! Accept that you did what you did and work with that one piece until you can feel an emotional shift around it.

We also talked about incorporating the qualities of Integrity and Excellence in our lives. Realizing that forgiveness is a process, a tool to get us back to a place where we can stand in Integrity and make new choices, even in how we choose to view our old stories about ourselves! The situation that has passed we can not change. How much energy we give it and how we hold it in our minds eye today we CAN change. Right now. This very minute.

So this is where the line in the sand gets drawn. This is the choice we can make today. Do we choose to release the past and walk forward from this moment with Integrity, practicing Excellence in all that we say, think and do? Or do we choose to go back to the same old, same old... making the same mistakes and expecting different results?

The choice is ours! :-)