Via The Knowledge Project Podcast

She said, ‘I’ve come to a revelation. I will not bequeath a legacy of bitterness to my children about their father. I will not say a bad word about him no matter what he does.’ When she said that, I was so moved. […] She was saying, ‘I’m not going to play this game. It stops with me.‘ The long-term benefit for us as humanity is not to carry the suffering from the past.

— A Practical Guide on Finding Inner Peace | Jack Kornfield | Knowledge Project Podcast 156 at 48:58

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Author and Buddhist practitioner Jack Kornfield shared about a woman going through a devastating divorce with a manipulative ex-husband. She told Jack, “I will not bequeath a legacy of bitterness to my children about their father.”

This wasn’t passivity — she still got a strong lawyer and protected her family. But she refused to perpetuate the cycle of suffering.

• Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting or condoning — you see what happened clearly and make a conscious choice to stop the suffering
• It’s about what you carry inside — like two ex-prisoners of war meeting decades later, and one asks the other: “Have you forgiven our captors yet?” “No, never,” the other answers. The first responds, “Well, then they still have you in prison, don’t they?”
• It can be a long process — you can’t paper over genuine pain

The question is not whether or not the other person deserves forgiveness. The question is: do we want to carry that bitterness in our hearts, or would we rather choose a larger way to live by forgiving others and even ourselves?