Part of the wisdom of spiritual soulful self-presence is to be able to let certain aspects of your life alone. This is the art of spiritual noninterference. Yet other aspects of your life call urgently for your attention; they call to you as their shelterer to come and harvest them. You can discern where these wounds are in the temple of memory, then visit them in a gentle and mindful way. The one kind of creative presence you could bring to these areas is compassion. Some people can be very compassionate to others but are exceptionally harsh with themselves. One of the qualities that you can develop, particularly in your older years, is a sense of great compassion for yourself. When you visit the wounds within the temple of memory, you should not blame yourself for making bad mistakes that you greatly regret. Sometimes you have grown unexpectedly through these mistakes. Frequently, in a journey of the soul, the most precious moments are the mistakes. They have brought you to a place that you would otherwise have always avoided. You should bring a compassionate mindfulness to your mistakes and wounds. Endeavor to inhabit again the rhythm you were in at that time. If you visit this configuration of your soul with forgiveness in your heart, it will fall into place itself. When you forgive yourself, the inner wounds begin to heal. You come in out of the exile of hurt into the joy of inner belonging. This art of integration is very precious. You have to trust your deeper, inner voice to know which places you need to visit. This is not to be viewed in a quantitative way, but rather in a gentle, spiritual way. If you bring that kind light to your soul and to its wounded places, you can effect incredible inner healing.

John O’ Donohue, Anam Cara (with thanks to What’s here now?)

I have found recently that this process of discovery and forgiveness is something that has been happening, unbidden, in my own practice. Memories arise, and arise again, despite the usual recourse to the breath. Something like O’Donohue’s “inhabit[ing] again the rhythm you were in at the time” seems to take place of itself, and somehow through this sequence of arising and returning a healing appears to take place. For me, certainly, this is not a willed thing, by the way; it happens (I use the word advisedly) within the flow of practice, not in place of it.

I am aware of the tentative nature of my own words here. (Interestingly, I only stumbled across the passage from Anam Cara on the ‘What’s here now’ blog some time after the process had established itself, and found John O’Donohue’s description uncannily close to my own experience.) This is a delicate process, and not a thing I could ever have envisaged, still less willed, consciously for myself. (Initially, it appeared no more than a distraction.) The normal turning back to the breath, despite the sometimes overwhelming emotional energy of these memories, seems to accomplish something very like O’Donohue’s sense that “[i]f you visit this configuration of your soul with forgiveness in your heart, it will fall into place itself.”

The mistakes and their wounds of the past are unavoidable anyway. They happened: no amount of regret will change that. In any case, they were part of the sequence of cause and effect we have come to inhabit merely by the accidents of our birth and our place in history. The love that is inherent in the mindfulness of our practice was always waiting for just this chance; now at last it can do its own work of bringing us to rest.