Non Violence

People often think of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi when they hear the phrase ‘non-violence’. They think of movements, politics and nations. But they don’t think of themselves.

People often feel that non-violence is a selfless act waged to help those that harmed them or others. In this understanding, people fail to be non-violent because they don’t want to exonerate the wrong. But is wrong ever exonerated? What is wrong is wrong and will always remain wrong.

How will us carrying the weight of that load affect the intensity of that wrong in the most fundamental way? Why do we become a part of the wrong by filling ourselves with hatred? The destruction caused by these factors can be phenomenal, to ourselves and others that love us.

Non violence can reverse the anger and pain suffered after a traumatic event.

Non-violence is not a selfless phenomenon. It is a selfish act carried out to better our own state of being which then extends itself to those that we love.

A hurt person may feel that by harming the one that hurt them, they are equating the harm done in some way. But really, is the harm every equated?

We have to ask ourselves a very important question – what is the agenda? Is it to keep hating or is to FEEL again?

If it is to feel again, then - Forgiveness is fearlessness. Fearlessness is feeling.

Most of all, we have to forgive ourselves.

I have a mother who not only never loved me but also traumatized me. I was sexually abused. I lived in the throws of brutal domestic violence for years. I tragically lost dear young ones. I was also my own abuser for many years. I am still very young! My whole life has been a tragedy.

Yet, I can’t tell you how much love there is in my heart and how unafraid I am to feel and share it. I can’t tell you how alive I really am today.

The worst years of my life though, were when I was looking for external love, reparation and acceptance. At times, I got an abundance of all these. But they didn’t calm my pain. They worsened it. Consequently, I started feeling that people will never give me what I desire. But how could they, when I had lost the ability to feel? The pain ate at me slowly from the inside.

But the renaissance came. I allowed it to come by never getting comfortable in my discomfort, even though discomfort was all I knew.

The renaissance does not come from the outside. It comes from the inside. It comes from a deep knowing that love exists inside us. We just have to find it. It also comes from the awarness that violence towards the self or the other will not get us closer to the love, warmth and comfort that love brings.

Healing is possible and it is easier to heal than it is to suffer in pain. Healing comes when we say ‘I won’t fight myself anymore. I want peace’. Once we say this, color comes back in and around us.

Love is our innate nature. Let’s feel it and allow it to rise from within us, despite it all.