Club Speech Read the transcript of the Frederic Luskin Discussion. Club Q & A Read the Q & A from the Frederic Luskin event. Purchase Tape Buy the audio of this event on tape.

Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:

Q. What are the steps in your training?

A. It starts with accepting responsibility for how we feel and that the past is just information for our present. We are responsible for the story we tell ourselves, and we are responsible for whether or not we heal from things.

Q. Do you have plans to do this with other groups?

A. Autodesk, a big computer company here, is thinking of using their video conferencing experience to bring together some of the people from Columbine who've worked through some of this. I would moderate a discussion with them and some of the people from other schools where the murders have taken place. It's a delicate area, and I'm very judicious with forgiveness. It's a beautiful quality, but you can't push it on anybody, and my approach is that it belongs to each of us; it's not mine to just push.

Q. How do you define forgiveness?

A. It's an experience of personal peace that emerges because you take offenses less personally, you take responsibility for how you feel, and you change the story that you've been telling about how somebody did you wrong. It's the soil upon which hate emerges - the unforgiveness, the hardness - that's is so difficult. All these people from Ireland are really nice souls. They're lovely to their friends and relatives; they just hate Protestants or they hate Catholics. They don't realize that the experience in their hearts of hate is what's wrong with their country; it's not outside of them. If we can connect with a more loving motivation inside of ourselves, we can still take care of the poor and the sick and defend liberty and all those things. We just don't have to do it from hate. We can do it from care.

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