Some years ago I watched an interview with an elderly Jewish woman who, as a young girl had been in one of the Nazi concentration camps, Auschwitz, I believe. She described the conditions that existed immediately after the captives had been liberated. Many of these people had no place to go so they tended to remain in and around the local village.
Given what they'd endured at the hands of their torturers it's no surprise that some of them felt the need to retaliate in whatever ways they might find when such an opportunity presented itself. This woman related that one day she saw a young German mother pushing a baby in a carriage along the street when a mob of angry, former prisoners acosted her. They were yelling at her, threatening her and her infant, pushing her and so forth, clearly intent on exacting a little revenge on the German girl for the treatment they'd received in the death camp.
The young Jewish woman pushed her way through the crowd to reach this young mother, pleading with the mob that they stop what they were doing. "How do you know this girl had anything to do with the Nazis?" she asked them. "How do you know that if you harm her you won't be just as wrong as those who inflicted suffering on us?" But the mob was having none of it and continued to threaten.
At that moment a US Army chaplain pulled up in a jeep. He'd observed what was going on and heard the efforts of the young Jewish girl to protect the German woman and her baby. He quickly ordered the mob to disperse which they did.
When they'd gone he turned to this Jewish girl with tears in his eyes and asked her, "Sister, with the horrible things that you have suffered in the camp, how is it that you've preserved such love in your heart?"
"Oh, no, sir," she replied, "you have it all wrong. It is not I that preserved love. It was love that preserved me."
This gal wasn't referring to love "of" anything. The love that shielded her from the despair and death so many others had succumbed to in the camps was simply an all-pervasive love that extended to and through everyone and everything. If there is one thing that comes closest to being a magic potion for healing I think it would have to be this kind of unconditional love.
Closely related to love is forgiveness. As I read your words, Uly, if I could offer you one piece of practical advice it would be this: Forgive yourself. Forgive yourself for not being perfect in all your desires to help your mother and your dog, and anyone else you may have sought to heal and come up short on.
Forgive yourself for whatever you may have done wrong, and for things you believe you should have done but didn't. Forgive yourself where you are genuinely responsible for misactions, and forgive yourself in all those areas for which you weren't responsible, but for which you seem insistent on taking blame. Forgivness is not excusing or justifying. It's releasing. It's refusing to carry around burdens that serve no purpose but to poison the soul. Forgive yourself, unconditionally. Just forgive yourself.
Then forgive everyone and everything else. Forgive God if you feel God has let you down. Forgive Master Lin if you feel his teachings have not lived up to expectation. Forgive your mother for leaving you as she did. Forgive your pet for not responding to your treatments. Forgive everyone and everything you can recall that have ever given you pain and grief. Don't exonnerate them. Don't excuse them. Just forgive them, and that will be sufficient.
It's been my experience in life that when we forgive, universally, completely, and without condition, it creates a sort of vacuum where we were holding all that pain, and the thing that sweeps in to fill that vacuum is pure, unconditional love. It's the kind of love that preserved that young Jewish woman in the death camp 70 or so years ago. I have absolute confidence it will preserve and heal you as well.
