The Power of the Heart: Finding Your True Purpose in Life (33 page)

During my interview with Isabel Allende, at her home, la Casa de Los Espiritus, in San Rafael, Marin County, outside San Francisco, she told me that she had been raised by her grandparents, as I had. Her grandmother was very spiritual and used to communicate with the souls of the deceased. It was her grandmother who had made her realize that we live in a magical world that consists of much more than what we can perceive with our five senses.

We met in her study, where she keeps a manual typewriter and where she has brought to life so many of her beautifully written books. Allende speaks passionately. Every word has impact.

When I brought up the importance of forgiveness, Allende became quiet for several minutes. Clearly this was a power that was close to her heart. She told me about the death of her daughter, Paula, in 1992,
which occurred because of medical malpractice in a hospital in Madrid. Paula had porphyria, a hereditary disease but one that someone can grow old with. But the doctors did not treat her properly and she lapsed into a coma and was put on a ventilator. After the hospital took her off the ventilator, Allende took Paula home and tended to her for a year; she hoped, prayed, and begged that Paula would come out of the coma.

When Paula was clearly dying, in the hours just before her death, Allende, with her mother and daughter-in-law, washed Paula with a sponge, dressed her nicely, and combed her hair. Allende placed talismans on Paula’s chest: an orange flower her grandmother had worn when she got married, a silver mirror, pictures of her niece and nephew, and a silver teaspoon. Allende saw Paula’s death as a liberation for her daughter, but nonetheless felt an intense sadness and grief. She later wrote, “Silence before being born, silence after death.”

After Paula’s death, Allende “experienced out of necessity what it means to forgive.” She was angry, but had to forgive the doctors in order to move on. She recognized that the doctors, although they were responsible for Paula’s death, had not intended to harm her.

 ISABEL ALLENDE

I went through the experience of losing my daughter, because there was malpractice and negligence in a hospital. I could carry for the rest of my life the burden of anger and resentment of what happened. I could blame and sue the hospital, but I chose to write a book instead. In that book I sort of cleansed the whole thing. I understood what had happened and realized that there was no bad intention. There was ignorance, negligence, but not the purpose of harming her. I
forgave and I have been able to live for nineteen years with the spirit of my daughter happily. I don’t carry that burden with me.

Forgiving does not mean understanding, defending, or approving of another person’s behavior or trying to artificially suppress the feelings caused by that behavior. Nor does forgiving mean wiping the other person’s behavior from your memory, pretending that the hurt, the humiliation, or the injury never happened. Forgiving means simply opening the door to your heart again and being prepared to abandon the hope, once and for all, that the past could have been different, and abandon the hope of a past without injustice.

 MARCI SHIMOFF

Forgiveness doesn’t mean that you’re condoning someone else’s behavior. This is a really important point. Forgiveness merely means that you are freeing yourself up from the energy blocks that you are holding, those resentments that you are carrying.

 HOWARD MARTIN

Forgiveness is one of the most powerful things anybody can do. It’s hard to do, it’s one of the toughest things, to forgive, especially when we feel justified that we had been wronged.

Harboring feelings of resentment not only affects your relationship with the person you could forgive but also enters into all your other relationships. You run the risk of becoming isolated from your own
heart. Feelings of rancor block the free flow of love and wisdom in your heart. Connect with the inexhaustible source of love inside yourself so that you can forgive and dismantle the blockages and can start living freely in love and compassion again.

 ISABEL ALLENDE

It is out of forgiving that one shakes that burden that we carry along.

Forgiving means accepting that you have been wronged, but also that you simply cannot turn back the clock. While you do remember the other person’s behavior, the hope that things might be different makes way for a future-oriented hope, so that you are no longer a prisoner of the past. Forgiving is not about looking back but about looking ahead. It is about realizing that there is a reason why a car’s windshield is a lot bigger than the rearview mirror.

In other words: forgiving is about abandoning the notion that you have to harbor a lifelong grudge against someone. If you do, you can never really be happy. That is why forgiveness is so important. And it calls for a fundamental change in the way you view a person you could forgive. Rather than viewing that person as one who victimized you, you must view him or her as one who will help you get closer to your heart.

 HOWARD MARTIN

When we don’t forgive, we have judgments, resignation, things like that, that just don’t benefit us. They just hurt us, they just take us down. They debilitate us and they rob us of the quality of life and even of our health.

When you do not forgive, you chafe under the yoke of grudges. Rancor hits you even harder than the memory of that irreversible event from the past. Resentment is like a cup of poison you pour down your throat in the hope it will kill the other person. And while the other remains unharmed, you wind up destroying yourself.

At different times in our lives, we all have been deeply hurt, excluded, betrayed, or wronged. Even when someone specifically asks for forgiveness, it is often incredibly difficult to bring yourself to forgive that person.

Howard Martin

 MARIANNE WILLIAMSON

Forgiveness is an act of self-interest. You say, “I don’t want to be stuck there, I want to be able to go on with my life without this burden of the past. I forgive for myself.”

 MICHAEL BECKWITH

Forgiveness is essential in our spiritual growth development and unfolding.

Forgiveness is first and foremost an act of liberation. You free yourself from the bitterness within yourself, from the embitterment generated by the other person’s behavior.