The terrible jaws of regret

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Don’t you hate it when, just as you least expect it, the untamed past escapes its cage?

With silent stealth, it attacks without warning, devouring any present peace in one fell swoop.

Before you even know what’s happened, it pounces and you find yourself captive, dangling powerless from the terrible jaws of regret.

The pain is so immediate and piercing, it takes your breath away.

At times, you are ashamed to admit, you have yearned for a swift end to what feels like interminable suffering.

You long to turn away, to blind the eyes that cannot close to things you said and the things you did and far worse still, that which went undone and unspoken.

Oh, the cruelty of hindsight, how it taunts us with impossible possibilities of how we could have been.

The shoulds, the coulds, the questions without answer.   The answers you wish you could change.

The quality of mercy may fall unstrained like rain from heaven but,

Hidden in the dungeon  of our  lack of self-forgiveness,

There is no absolution.

‘ I’m Sorry, Forgive me, I Love you and Thank you.’ A Prayer to my family – Guest Blog by Benedicte Vansina

A few months ago, I receIved a simple prayer from my friend, Allison. It comes from the book ‘Zero Limits’ by Joe Vitale.   It is very simple and consists out of 4 sentences: ‘ I’m Sorry, Forgive me, I Love you and Thank you.’    She told me “If you open your heart and sincerely send these words to the universe (God, or whatever you call him), then miracles can happen.”

I love singing so I invented a song for these words.  In one of my daily meditations, I visualized our children, my husband and finally myself on one line. I sang each of the sentences concentrating on every one of them. Gosh this was difficult! The hardest one to sing it for was to myself. Even crying, I managed to finish the prayer. It was such a powerful experience that I needed some time to recover and so I went out for a walk.  As I walked, I thought: ‘I should try this out live’.

My husband Hugo and I started a family tradition of ‘talking circles’ with our 6 children. We try to do this every Sunday. We stand in a circle and start with a little concentration exercise.  If anyone needs to clear something out with another, it happens then. Usually it is Hugo or me that have ‘something to say’. At the end, we do the ‘sufi dance’ together, a blessing we give to each other.

So one day, I decided to share the special prayer with my family. I didn’t think about this or how it would feel in advance, it was just a impulsive wish to teach them another way of praying.

After the start of the circle that day, I put myself in the middle of the circle and faced our youngest son. Then I start singing. While I looked him straight into the eyes, I sang ‘I’m sory’- then I turned a little untill I looked our next son into the eyes and continued my song ‘I’m sorry’. I sang this sentence 8 times while looking every time into the eyes of every child, my husband and finally looking up. I didn’t reach very far because singing it with my open heart and with full intention, hundreds of memories came up, of all hundreds of mistakes I had made with each of them.

After  2 or 3 measures, tears welled up and it became difficult to continue my prayer/song. After this first round, I took a moment to breathe, concentrate and start the second round, singing ‘Forgive me’ to every one of them. That too, was far more difficult than I had imagined. How on earth could they forgive such a huge mistakes? My song transformed into a whispering prayer because I couldn’t get the notes out anymore.

I took the same time to pronounce clearly to everyone one of them the third sentence, namely: ‘I love you’. If there weren’t any tears in their eyes by then, this was when they appeared. I focussed to keep all my attention with every sentence I whispered.

Finally the fourth sentence-tour started: ‘Thank you’ were the words I offered to every one of them, thinking of how much I have already learned from them and how lucky I am to have them in my life.

I guess everyone was impressed, most of all me. I never imagined it would be so difficult to do, how emotional it would get and how many things can be said in these few simple sentences.

I’m happy I did it. I don’t want to wait until the day they die to tell them what I told them that day.