Thank you for suggesting  a "best pratices section". I have found the commments of my classmates both inspirational and moving. I welcome learning additonal techniques to "change the tune " for those times I get stuck. 

Let me share one technique that helped me move beyond a longstanding parent /child conflict that was characterized by blame and a need, on my part  to prove who was right (Me. Of course!!). This was made more difficult because I am the product of an emotionally abusive father and deep down I always felt  that I was responsible for his behaviour.

As I struggled with this during a yoga intenisve weekend, my teached invited me to reframe it  in a different way. Rather than viewing the conflict on a linear dimension of degrees of right or wrong, I was invited to do the following. Given who I was and who he was, and the circumsatnces surrounding us at the time, perhaps, just perhaps, we BOTH did the best we could at that time and under those circumstances. For the first time I had an opportunity to reframe our relationship and begin to forget. The beauty was-- I wasn't wrong... and neither was he.



Beyond Rightness and Wrongness of Persons

In my own experience, Ann, the ultimate beauty of forgiveness is that it goes beyond rightness and wrongness. It allows for acts to be as right or wrong as they very well may be, without my making persons right or wrong. It honors rightness and wrongness as ways of doing rather than as states of being, and thereby empowers me to hold others accountable for their wrong-doing without blaming them for wrong-being. 

From the perspective of forgiving personhood, there are neither rewards nor punishments, only consequences. Accordingly, as one of my spiritual mentors (Ernest Holmes) concluded, “There is no sin but a mistake, and no punishment but its consequence. . . . We are not punished for our sins, but by them. Sin is its own punishment and righteousness its own reward.”



On being philosophical

I encourage you not to feel apologetic for being philosophical. I am, for instance (you may have noticed), philosophical much of the time. One's so-called "philosophy of life" is nothing if not personal.

Please know that I do not consider your question concerning Hannibal Lector to be an example of what I am going to to ask: Have you ever noticed how some people tend to cite exceptional, worst-case scenarios (such as genocide and psychopaths) as examples of how difficult, impossible, or inappropriate it is to do something (such as to be forgiving)? This is their way of distancing themselves from dealing with their immediate situation by citing extreme examples elsewhere in justification of their local default. (I first became aware of this process when, as an environmentalist, I discovered how readily people would take up the cause of "saving the environment" elsewhere, while being reluctant to deal with environmental challenges in their own immediate vicinity. I encountered it again when I was involved in the Hunger Project, and discovered that people were far more ready to support the cause of hunger relief in other countries than to grapple with the immediate issue of hungry families in their own community.)

How does one forgive psychopaths and genocide? The only thing I feel certain of in this regard is how one begins to do so. All forgiveness, whether of petty or gross wrong-doing, begins with willingness to be forgiving. Once I am willing to forgive someone/thing, my next step is to consciously intend to be forgiving, both emotionally and mentally. (Purely mental intentions are those that end of being the so-called "good" intentions that are never realized.)

Beginning with my willingness to forgive, subsequently developing a heart-felt intention to forgive, and thereafter continuing to remain mindful of both my willingness and heart-felt intention is the only way I can imagine myself being able to forgive a psychopathic person or a sociopathic political regime. And both willingness and intention are philosopical in nature as well as psychological.

I am actually doing ongoing current homework in the latter regard, on behalf of forgiving what I perceive to be the increasingly sociopathic consciousness of U.S. international as well as domestic political policies. It is only as I forgive it that I feel empowered to do something constructive about it.


Circles of Influence

I am basically with you, Wendie, on keeping my circle of concern as close as possible to my circle of influence. Yet here is the challenge I face in doing so: The unswept street in front of my neighbor's house may have no appreciable influence on my experience. But what about the unswept air around me due to my neighbor's pollution, in a neighborhood that is planetary in scope?

The "pollution" of governing forces is also part of my circle of influence. As Protestant theologian Martin Niemoeller confessed of his compliance with Nazisim: "In Germany they first came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.  Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me – and by that time no one was left to speak up for me."

I am presently a full-time participant in forgiveness education for the same reason I was from 1966-1977 a full-time participant in the environmental education movement - because the circle of influence of unforgiveness is now global. The pandemic emotional degradation of the human psyche consequent to unforgiveness is now apparent as a global force just as, four decades ago, the pandemic environmental degradation of the planet's biosphere consequent to pollution became apparent. Now that biosphereic degradation is being resumed and further globalized with a vengeance, in total disregard of its hastening of global waming and total disruption of the planet;s climatology, I am choosing now to address the root of that vengeance - the pollution of the human psyche with unforgiveness - rather than its environmental symptoms.

I am still, however, addressing a question that I first raised three decades ago:

Earth is a single household.
The planet's winds and waters see to that, 
so interlinked are they
that each square mile of earthly surface
contains some stuff from every other mile.
Some say the winds alone
carried topsoil from the 1930's Dust Bowl
three times around the Earth
before the atmosphere was cleansed of it.
  
Today, Earth's soiled air disseminates
exhaust of billions of tailpipes and chimneys, 
while the global network of her waterways
spreads other human waste around the planet.
As we alter thus the content of Earth's atmosphere,
and tamper with the chemistry of her waters,
we take her life into our hands 
along with all lifekind that's yet to come.

Earth is a single household,
but the homestead is not ours;
we are only visitors
in the living room of those about to follow,
caretakers of the hospitality
and shelter that our children's home affords.
Our children,
not ourselves,
are the earthly homestead's host,
and we are but their household's privileged guests.      

Why then do we abuse their mansion so,
as if we had the right to wreck their residence?
What have they and their children done
to earn a life of struggling
to restore what we've undone?
Of what crimes do we hold Earth's children guilty,
that we sentence them to life at such hard labor? 
And what are we doing to our children's living room,
as we trample, scrape and pave its carpet bare?
     
Our children ask the Earth for bread.
Are we giving them a stone?

As I see it, in an age where more and more circles of influence are now global in their circumference, the rubble of 9/11 is a precursor of the overall state to which pandemic unforgiveness is reducing our planet as a whole. In this context, forgiveness must take account of two incontrovertible facts:  that nature bats last, and that the game we are playing is in the arena of nature's home field, which is no no more forgiving of us than are we of it.