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My name is Jan Chozen Bays and I'm a Zen teacher and I live at a monastery in Oregon called Great Vows and Monastery and I teach at that monastery and I work as a pediatrician, specifically in the area of child abuse.
In my work with child abuse, I'm often talking with the perpetrator so, for example, I might see a child in the hospital in the intensive care unit who's been brain-injured and is going to be taken off life support because they're brain dead.
And in interviewing the family and reconstructing the details of how this happened, often I can tell who did it.
Because they're a timeline around brain injury. So there's the person right in front of me who killed this child. So how do I work with that?
And for many people, that makes them so furious. People in law enforcement often tell me, "I just want to strangle them." But that doesn't help.
So, we have to understand that most of those parents, most of those people who do that, are doing it out of their own suffering.
And either trying to discharge some of their suffering on this innocent child, or they're doing it out of ignorance.
They're totally ignorant about how to be a parent...nobody taught them how to be a parent and how to deal with a crying child.
Or they're perptuating their own abuse.
So many of them, when you talk to them, they are an abused child, grown up with no treatment.
So if my heart is open to the child, my heart should be open to the adult who has within them the abused child, crying out for help and just thrashing around, creating more suffering.
...Forgiveness in an Imperfect World...
Forgiveness has to be now. We have to work on it now.
Through the cleansing and purifying of our own mind, our own anger, our own distress. At the imperfectness of the world.
....Forgiveness as a Practice...
So forgiveness is an experience and it's an active practice.
So there'd be two situations that would be personal.
One would be that you've harmed someone or they tell you that they've been harmed by you.
So, let's say, "Yes, I did." And this person feels harmed. Then it's up to me to do something to take care of that if I can.
If they're alive and if they're willing to communicate with me.
So, then, apology would be the beginning of the practice and I think apology is a very difficult practice to admit that we're wrong and apologize.
...And if You Think You've Been Hurt...
So, let's say that you feel not only heart-sadness or heart-pain, but you feel anger. Or you feel the desire to get retribution against that person.
The mind keeps stirring it up, distressed.
It's from fear.
So, one of my basic experiences and teachings is underneath anger, there's always fear.
And if you can discover what the fear is, then the anger begins to dissolve.
So, let's say somebody spoke ill of me and it wasn't correct and I feel hurt and then I feel angry.
What I say is, "okay, well, what's my fear about this?"
Well, my hear is that this person will continue to say these things and people will be influenced by that and people will think I'm a bad person.
Or I'll lose my ability to teach.
You can take it to its logical conclusion, which is usually, I will die alone under a bridge. (laughs)
So, then you say, well, I die alone under a bridge. What's so bad about that? (laughs)
But, it's very funny because almost everything that people are afraid of, if you keep saying, well then what, well then what, it ends up, I'll die alone under a bridge. (laughs)
That's just what the mind says, the mind just goes from this to disaster, like that.
But, if you can go through that process, then the anger begins to dissolve.
Practice....Practice....Practice
I think until we've forgiven, which in my case would mean, until I've purified my heart of its anger or distress at this person or this situation, until I've done that, I can't love this other person.
I have to clean my heart of all the little knots and acid places in there. And then I can love.