Stainless Heart: The Wisdom of Remorse

By Clelia Vahni

The guilty will find comfort and direction in this clear and compassionate book. Guilt is different from genuine remorse because it is based in fear and destroys us; true remorse is the entry into truth, and to a transformed relationship to ourselves and others. The guilty want only to avoid the pain of recognition of their acts. That's why guilt leades to shame and shame builds walls around the heart. We can shift rigid patterns of guilt and learn to trust the language of heart to build a mature conscience. Then, out of our genuine remorse, true compassion is born.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hohm Press
• Release date: Mar 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9781935387992

Book preview

Labyrinth

Introduction

Human beings are designed to learn, and learning happens through experience, through trial and error. We learn not just with the mind but with the whole of ourselves, our bodies and hearts as well. Considering the complexity and precision with which we have been made and have evolved, it stands to reason that our unique capacity to learn through this process of trial and error has an important function. Being able to see and admit our mistakes is fundamental to being human, and is a characteristic that allows us to grow far beyond the confines of mere biological survival. Remorse—not just a little regret or disappointment, but riveting and painful remorse—is a response from the depths of our human possibility, calling out for us to respond.

Several years ago, when I first began to engage my spiritual teacher, I heard him make a distinction between remorse and guilt. The essence of what I heard was that when you feel guilty it is painful but nothing changes, whereas when you feel true remorse you will never do the same thing again. You will not be the same. This seemed very important to me, and I knew I had experienced both of the things he was describing. But it has taken me a long time to untangle the two from one another, to disengage the automatic functioning of guilt just enough to taste the subtler and yet more powerful flavor of remorse.

The term remorse comes from the Latin remorsus, which means to bite again. Remorse bites, chews at us until it is answered. It is a reminder, a recognition of something we already know. It demands that we bring our attention to that. We have made a mistake. Perhaps we could not have personally known the outcome of a certain action, and yet remorse implies a personal culpability even so. It insists on us.

And that is where the power to change comes from: that frightening glimpse into the devastating reality that there is nowhere to run, that the truth of our own responsibility for our actions will not go away no matter how long we hide it from ourselves. The transformation we seek, the joy, the redemption, is not outside of us. But there is a giant chasm between that intellectual knowledge and the willingness to accept it as actually true: that no one and nothing is holding us back from that transformation, joy, or redemption but ourselves. The gate to paradise is standing in the present moment of experience, the experience of life here and now.

Remorse is a concept that is intimately associated with ideas of morality vs. sin, right vs. wrong, success vs. failure, good vs. bad, this vs. that. I would like to consider remorse from another point of view. I would like to examine it with the possibility that it could in fact be a tangent point between this view of ourselves and our world as divided, and a larger view in which change instead proceeds from an undivided ground. Ordinarily, remorse—or more accurately, guilt or shame—perpetuates a sense of division or separation, which in turn creates rigidity. In an environment of rigidity, change is limited, if possible at all. True remorse, however, provides a shock to the structure of separation, thereby creating an opening, and an opportunity for something completely new to happen.

Authentic spiritual life, whatever the path, always involves self-observation and ruthless self-honesty. If we genuinely engage this kind of enquiry, and if we are willing to keep our eyes open to whatever we see, we are going to come face to face with our own culpability. Jesus Christ said, He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone. No one in the crowd could do so. But what is the nature of this sin? If we discard the notion of sin as something that defines us as bad as opposed to good, or as a kind of tragic flaw that defines who we are, and around which all our psychological motivations and defenses constellate, can we then find a sense of something, a culpability, that is not a product of some artificial set of ideas, standards, opinions, morals, theories, or judgments? If we are willing to really see our culpability, to really feel the impact of it, what will we see?

If we are willing to really see ourselves, we will encounter remorse. If we are going to use that opportunity, it is crucial that we learn how to distinguish between remorse, which is of inestimable value, and various forms of guilt, self-hatred, and denial, all of which deaden the possibility for the heat of remorse to create true change and, ultimately, transformation. This book is an exploration of those distinctions. It is a study of the quality of remorse and how it can and must be used in our lives and in the spiritual process. This book will not be of interest to those who find satisfaction in mundane routines that keep one safe and comfortable, tossed always just bearably between pleasure and pain, happiness and suffering, gain and loss. And yet, it is not a dark and joyless consideration either. In order to explore remorse in any useful way, we must first unearth a foundation of basic goodness and trust in who we essentially are. Only from that place can we know that what we are looking for is not more suffering but a transformation of suffering into something of great value, something we long for and can never find if we hold tightly to old points of view. Letting these old points of view go becomes an engagement that brings a joy of another kind. We are looking for a kind of magic, like the alchemists of old. Alchemy happens with the elements of our very lives, the ordinary becoming transformed into the extraordinary within a crucible of great discipline, skill, and heat.

One sunny day a few years ago my parents came to see me sing and play in the rock band I was performing in at the time. They had never seen us before. When I was a child I was excruciatingly shy, and as a young adult I had gone through some dark and difficult times, unsure of myself, afraid of life. I had done some hard work since then, and faced some things about myself, and with the help of loving and wise friends at various times I had shed a lot of baggage. The rock and roll band was a venue in which I was able to come out of that old protective shell, revealing a vitality that certainly needed training and refinement, but it was alive and bright with possibility at the same time. So, what my parents saw that day was quite a surprise.

A week or so later I received an email from my father. It was short and to the point. He referred to all the mistakes he felt he had made, and the suffering I had gone through in my young adult life, which he felt was due to those mistakes. Now he had turned a corner, he could die happy because he could see in this woman on stage, his daughter, that she had overcome those obstacles. He wanted nothing more than to see me happy, and he could see that, in a deep and radiant way, this wish had come true.

As I read my father’s words I was overcome by a flood of tears. In that moment my whole being knew this to be the bottom line: that the happiness of the other is what fulfills the deepest need in our heart. To know this about ourselves would not necessarily mean that we would cease making mistakes, it would only mean that this truth would become the guiding force in our lives. When we have failed to meet the imperative of that truth, we experience remorse. The answer to that is not to wallow in self-recrimination, or to turn our backs in despair, but to uncover in ourselves the radiance that others wish to see. When we have uncovered that, we become able to serve. That radiance is what parents wish for their children, children wish for their parents, lovers for their beloved, and God for all of creation.

I knew, even as these thoughts coursed through my mind, that I was no perfect example of integrity with that radiance. Neither were my parents. Yet, beneath our flaws, beneath the difficulties of our given humanity, shines the radiant light of our true nature. And no matter who we are or what our circumstances, this light only asks that we turn toward it, remember it, and begin drawing ourselves into accord with it through the humble action of our lives as they are.

To live with remorse is to begin to examine our lives in the context of that noble light, which calls to us from inside ourselves. It is God knocking at the door of our being. No one—not our parents, our children, our friends, our lovers, our therapist, our government, our religion, our science, our guru (no matter how much reason or love or force is used)—no one can open that door but you.

Section One

A Necessary Struggle

I sometimes think that every new situation, good or bad, can enrich us with new insights. But if we abandon the hard facts that we are forced to face, if we give them no shelter in our heads and hearts, do not allow them to settle and change into impulses through which we can grow and from which we can draw meaning—then we are not a viable generation.

—Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life

1

The Real War

Regardless of the philosophy or religion we subscribe to, what is real beneath them all cries out to be acknowledged and lived. We must find the heart of honor and dignity in our lives and in our world. This is the domain out of which remorse arises.

But where is this heart to be found? Where is the magic, the beauty of fighting for a greater cause than our own survival and security? A close friend of mine recently lamented the seemingly empty nature of the struggle of life. Watching her new DVD boxset of The Lord of the Rings movie, she found herself unable to reconcile the distance between the ideals depicted in the movie and the bleak nature of what seemed to her to be purely abstract efforts to win integrity in her own life. Indeed, there is a very real emptiness to life when the ordinary romance of illusion falls away and we are left with the reality of who we are, what drives us, what we do and have done. No wonder we are so attracted by the idea of magic, or science fiction, or the new age, or fundamentalist religion. We feel a genuine, inspired recognition in reading or watching stories of epic adventure and battles between forces of good and evil, and yet our own lives often constellate around such petty struggles that we find ourselves faced with an apparently uncrossable chasm. We might ignore the discomfort of standing at this chasm, or we might ask ourselves: how do we translate our inspired moments and insights into manifest life?

Maybe that chasm seems uncrossable because we recognize the cost of the real fight. And remorse resides in that territory between inspiration and action in real life. Yet, the impact of remorse can be devastating, taking apart our illusions about our world and ourselves. At the same time, it can wake us up to the precious nature of the fleeting gift of being alive. No matter who we are or what we have done or failed to do, every moment is a new opportunity to do the right thing, to engage the real fight.

There is definitely something to fight for. All human beings know this or intuit this. There are forces and energies at play in the world that must be engaged, whether consciously or unconsciously. Whether we know it or not, we either become food for such forces to consume, or we learn how to navigate through them without needlessly giving our life-force away. Only then do we have a chance to transmute that life-force—in the form of energy and consciousness and attention—for a larger purpose,