The following meditation is led by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist and author.

One of the great wisdom teachings of the poet Rumi is to not so much seek after love,

but to discover the blocks that we have against it.

In that spirit, in the Buddhist tradition, the precursor, in a sense, to the loving kindness meditation,

is the practice of forgiveness. To sense where we've created a defendedness and armoring, a distance,

often our armoring is in the form of judging and making another wrong,

to sensing where that's happening in our lives, and to forgive means to let go of that armoring.

Now there's a lot of misunderstandings about forgiveness. There's a fear that if we forgive,

it's like condoning or giving a green light or saying, oh, then I'm not supposed to have any

boundaries and just let people injure me or injure others, and it's not that at all.

Forgiving is a movement of the heart to soften and open, but we still need that

wise discernment to know how to take care of ourselves in each other. We can forgive someone

and decide never to see them again, or not to vote for them, or not to be married to them,

or whatever it is, but it's a freeing up of our own hearts. It's said that,

forgiving, most people think forgiveness is a great idea until they really have something to forgive.

It's really hard because when we're injured and every one of us has been wounded,

it's our natural reflex to create that armoring. One of the most important things I found

and I've worked a lot with forgiveness for myself and with many, many people over the years

is that our attitude towards the process is what really nourishes it or gets in the way. If we have

an idea that we should forgive, or if we have a timing on it, then we're in trouble.

There's a real tendency to judge ourselves or not forgiving right.

And what seems really, really true to me is that we can't will it. We can be willing.

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