DR. Fred Luskin is the director and co-founder of the Stanford University Forgiveness Project, which began as his doctoral dissertation.

Although a deeply spiritual person himself, Luskin says that his goal is to make forgiveness practical to anyone, whether spiritually inclined or not. He has found that by helping people quiet their thoughts and bodies so they can listen for—and hear—that "still, small voice" within each of us, he can help people free themselves from the binding entrapment of bitterness that "unforgiveness" engenders.

Among the many people Luskin has trained, the most compelling group has been the Catholic and Protestant mothers who have lost children in the violence of Northern Ireland's "troubles." The results have been inspiring and encouraging to all those interested in healing hatred and emotional pain.

Recently, Luskin talked with the Sentinel's Marilyn Jones about his nine-step strategy to help people learn to forgive.

One of the things you mention in your book, Forgive for Good, is that when someone commits a transgression against us, usually forgiveness doesn't pop up as a way to respond.

We live in a culture dominated by the socially accepted expression of outrage. We've been trained to believe that what we feel is paramount. There's something almost religious about it, as if they're a divine gift, these feelings. Psychotherapy has been a part of that process of training people that their feelings are the most important source of information.

I think what psychotherapy emerged to promote was the concept, "Don't stop your feelings," and I must assert it's very important to be able to articulate your feelings. But we have made those ideas into a kind of pop psychology. We've said that feelings are sometimes even more important than thinking through the consequences of our actions or working hard to move on with your life. So while the idea of getting out your feelings and expressing your hurt and outrage is important, without other aspects of emotional well-being, it creates unbalanced experiences.

What I believe is missing, to some degree, is the seeding of this inquiry into our feelings with the spiritual. That makes a huge difference. One of the concepts that I'm working with now is that, say a hundred years ago, there wasn't much of a language for personal hurt in our culture. We were locked into social roles and religious expectations, and the individual's personal sense of experience was of a secondary or tertiary nature.

The inability to express experience caused a lot of difficulty, which the 1960s and '70s pointed out. It became clear that there was an enormous amount of suppression, an enormous amount of repression, an enormous number of horrible things going on that nobody was talking about. There was racism and sexism and child abuse and alcoholism, and they were everywhere. And yet these things were not being expressed, because the individual did not have a language of pain with which to clearly express them.

Starting in the '50s in America, all this stuff came out of the closet. So now people are suddenly free to talk about their wounds and their pain—and they've become victims. What happened to them is all true, but it's just so limited because it ignores what I think is the next necessary step: the spiritual underpinning of all of our experience. Every single one of us has the inherent capacity to be more than our pain.

Right underneath or right alongside the painful part of ourselves is a quiet, centered voice that is the gift of Spirit. But that part is undernourished in this culture—that voice. And it's the voice of forgiveness. It's not a unique voice, and it's not a particularly difficult voice to find, once you look it for it.

Fred, when I examine any unwanted feelings through a spiritual lens, I begin to see that these feelings are really an external overlay, and that they really aren't coming from that sacred place, or that spiritual well, and therefore they don't have power. They can't direct and control me.

If you choose to look at that spiritual place . . . all to the good. But if you don't choose that, then those unwanted feelings can direct and control you. All I'm trying to do is teach that concept without calling it spiritual.

Is that because from a scientific standpoint, it would be disregarded or trivialized?

I think it would have much less applicability. My goal is to make forgiveness available to anybody. I want to be able to walk into a medical school and talk about it. Or, for example, I've trained hundreds of lawyers to think about forgiveness when they're doing mediation practice. So the language that reaches everybody has to be there, not just people who have a known religious orientation, the language that says there's a place of peace in you, or there's another voice in you.

So if you're talking to a person who doesn't have a spiritual path, and you say, "You're accessing the sacred or the spiritual," then that person feels that listening to that quiet voice is not an option?

They don't even resonate to the language. I've even gone into Christian churches where they don't resonate to the language of the sacred because they're so lost in their own pain. So I say to people: "I will make it scientific then. If you take a deep breath and you breathe a few times, then what you're doing is finding the place in your physiology that isn't so reactive." But I personally happen to believe that's the Spirit. It doesn't matter what you call it. But if you calm down and think of someone you love, then that gives you access to the voice that is beyond just a little whiney person complaining. And anybody can access that. It cuts through so much resistance.

I have found that in the churches, for example, people have heard so much jargon that it's hard for them to hear from their own religion the core teaching of it. They have ministers telling them to forgive and quoting the Scriptures, but that doesn't talk to their experience, necessarily, as a hurt human being who needs some validation for the hurt, and then some techniques for transcending that hurt. They're just told that if they really believe in Jesus, they'll let this go. And I'm not sure that that directive alone gives them enough support to do that.

Do you find that religious people, or spiritual people, have more receptivity to the idea of forgiveness?

Yes and no. I have found a number of people repelled by forgiveness because of how it was presented to them through their religion. So it's not just that forgiveness serves as a facilitator—sometimes it serves as an antagonist because of the finger-wagging kind of admonition that comes without the compassion of saying, "It's just hard to be a human being, folks, you know?"

Yes, Jesus forgave, but you're not Jesus. And there are a lot of tiny steps between you and Jesus, and if you take just one of them, that's good. Jesus is there as a reminder that everything sacred is possible within each human being. But that's different from being told, "You can accomplish this by tomorrow."

I have had a good number of ministers take my class because they want to know how to talk to their parishioners without being so dogmatic.

And they don't have the psychological savvy to say, "OK, I hear that hurt, now let's talk about it for a half hour. Then let's take a deep breath, and then let's try changing the story," which is what we suggest. But it takes that kind of practical effort, not just a finger-wagging admonition, to do it.

On the other hand, I have met a good number of people of all sorts of faiths and practices, and when I talk about forgiveness, they come up to me and say, "This makes practical something I've known. I kind of do it anyway, but this just gives me permission. Maybe it will intensify my interest in it a little bit." So, they're primed because of their spiritual practice. That's different from having a dogmatic kind of religious orientation.

What I see as a facilitator to forgiveness is daily spiritual practice such as Bible reading, or trying to dedicate one's life to being more like one's teacher, or daily meditation practice, or getting together in a group to talk about one's shortcomings. I think those are all facilitators to forgiveness, because those are daily practices of spiritual experience. But that's very different from the "I should," or "My religion tells me to do it."

Let's talk about your Northern Ireland projects. You—the Stanford Forgiveness Project—brought these people over from Northern Ireland—both Protestants and Catholics. The first group consisted of mothers who had lost sons to the violence. The second group was composed of a wider range of family members who had lost a loved one. Did their religious backgrounds have an impact on their being able to forgive?

For some of them it made it much easier. In particular, the first group that we brought, the women. They actually said that some part of them knew that this was like Jesus talking, even though they weren't confusing me with Jesus. It was just because they were Catholic and Protestant—they shared the Christian underpinnings. They knew that Jesus wanted them to forgive.

So they were actually hearing Jesus' teaching, maybe in a new way. They were opening up to it?

They were hearing his teaching on some level. But they were hearing it from such a practical, secular sense that it was almost making Jesus' teachings more easily digestible. Because even as Jesus was being crucified, he was saying, "Forgive them." And that level of forgiveness is a stretch for most people. But what I was telling them was, "At least in the morning when you wake up, wake up with an open heart, go open your window, put your hand out, look outside, and say, "Thank you, God, for keeping me alive.' And then with that open heart, try to live your day and offer some forgiveness, minute-to-minute." That's just simpler than the bigger task of saying, "I forgive someone who murdered my child."

What are the possibilities for whole groups to forgive one another? Collective forgiveness, for example?

I wouldn't know how to do that without working with individuals. The further away you get from individuals, the harder it gets. Let me give you one example. At the forgiveness training session with the people from Northern Ireland, Brian Bland, a Presbyterian minister who is my research partner, drew a picture of the murder of a child from Northern Ireland. And in the picture he drew two arrows, one going to the left and one going to the right. The arrow on the right was pointing to the family of the murder victim, the arrow on the left to the Protestant community that lost the child. Both people feel they "own" the murder.

The Protestants own it because they use it to defend why they hate and don't trust Catholics. The family owns the murder because they're devastated. The Protestants and the family are not in the same place, because the Protestants need the murder to defend their animosity. The family, on the other hand, needs to heal. If they heal from the murder, they are seen as somewhat traitorous to their own group. It is a brutal experience. It is one reason that these conflicts maintain themselves forever, because the individuals do not get support and healing from their own tribe. And just picture what that must be like for the affected individuals.

I guess that's why it's so remarkable that when you do the follow-up six months later, they are still maintaining higher levels of optimism?

None of them have been able to find a language to go out to their communities at large and explain forgiveness. People will look at them and say, "But you had your son murdered." Reverend Bland says it's almost that the definition of peace for these communities is the elimination of the other community. Peace means "when we wipe the other people away." And what a devastating environment in which to try to seed kindness. They're working at cross purposes.

I don't know if anybody has figured out how to do group forgiveness. Our hope is that we can seed enough individual forgiveness that it will at least a little bit change the language of the discussion within the communities. It's a very complex, heart-wrenching question. It's deep and it's tribal. For individuals to extract themselves from that raging current is a real challenge.

What about day-to-day, practical forgiveness, say, for example, in the business world? Is that a real possibility?

My two partners and I did a one-year pilot project where we took financial advisors from American Express in an upstate New York branch. And we taught them emotional competence training, highlighting forgiveness as the prime example of emotional competence, but not the only one. We had a morning session on aligning goals and feelings and thoughts, and expressing your feelings appropriately, and an afternoon session on practical forgiveness, which is this: Forgiveness means not that you worry about if your mother beat you, but that if somebody you're trying to sell doesn't return your phone call, here's an opportunity for forgiveness. If the person in the office next to you steals your business, here's an opportunity for forgiveness. This is the practical necessity of forgiveness in day-to-day living, so you don't get bogged down.

Then, we developed individual plans for each of these 15 people on how to practice over the year what they were weak at. And we had four follow-up conference calls with them over the year, to support them, assess their progress, and give them guidance.

We raised their sales productivity by 18 percent over that year. And we reduced their stress by 25 percent. That is where my passion is—in trying to make forgiveness simple and practical. You don't have to worry about your past. You have opportunities in your present.

So it is ongoing—it's day-to-day?

It's day-to-day, it's hour-to-hour, it's minute-to-minute. It's just about how you go through your life. Do you get upset because people cut you off in traffic? Well, you might, but get as little upset as possible so when you show up at your next appointment, you're as fresh as you can be.

It's just absolutely simple and practical. You use the same techniques, and then you just become a more forgiving person. Forgiveness becomes as natural as it can be, because you're going to get constantly tested, and you're going to get upset. So can you get into the habit of limiting the amount of antagonism you put out because the world didn't conform to what you needed? And can you make yourself as productive as possible? That's the ultimate goal of forgiveness—to be productive in life. Not to get lost in the difficulties.

In the hardball realities of the business world, there are a lot of people, even religiously oriented, who don't think that forgiveness is advisable. From my theological perspective, I realize that part of the reason that I'm fairly easygoing with the kind of normal forgiveness things, such as being cut off in traffic or someone taking my place in line, or taking my opportunity, is that I really believe that God is giving good things to everybody equally, and not cheating anybody. So we can have the confidence not to worry—God's got something else good in store for me and for everyone. And I can spring from that realization to say that this transgression is not the defining event of the day.

Exactly. And I have found that I can say that same thing without the "God" part to people whose children were murdered or to people whose husband or wife was raped. That, unfortunately, even if you don't believe in God, your health is impaired dramatically by holding on to this stuff. And your capacity for happiness is diminished, and the thing that almost nobody acknowledges, that nobody wants to do, is you become an agent of pain to other people. And that becomes a significant wake-up call to them. I say, "You know, if you're walking around complaining about Mom, or you come home and you grouse about your boss, then who's going to have to listen to you but people who care about you? And you will become an agent of suffering for them, and I'm not sure you want that."

There's what I would call a "justice principle." It's operating in my life always, helping me forgive these simple things.

Well, they're not simple, if you walk around and see how few people actually forgive. Don't minimize your willingness to forgive even small things. It isn't trivial.

Well, it's not the murder of a child, but it is forgiveness.

Doesn't Spirit just expect us to forgive what we can—and that we don't have to compare ourselves to people who have more to forgive?

Well, I think those are the tools you get from having a daily spiritual practice.

I believe that as well. And that's what I do, too.