Sai Baba Teaches Forgiveness

By: Seetha Vijayakumar

When an Advocate from Pandharpur came to meet Sai Maharaj, he made a crypt remark – ‘These people bow down to me but abuse me elsewhere’. This advocate criticized Justice Noolkar when he sought the refuge of Sai Baba instead of going to a Doctor when he suffered from diabetes.

Once Nana Saheb Chandorkar came to meet Sai Baba along with his brother-in-law Binnywalla.  At that time Nana Saheb had avoided going to the Datta Temple in Kopergaon as it could delay coming to Shirdi.  However, he sustained a thorn prick.  Sai Baba referred to this as a punishment and asked him to seek Datta’s forgiveness.

Prof. R.A. Phani Shayi, a renowned Psychologist of Bengaluru in the seventies and eighties and whose students are all over the globe used to quote Sai Baba as a role model in forgiving. As a great devotee of Sai Maharaj, the Professor came up with a five-step forgiveness intervention plan that he and his students worked on for long years. They call it REACH, an acronym for the following: Recall the hurt, because to heal, you need to acknowledge the fact that you’ve been hurt; Empathize with your offender and replace negative emotions like hatred with positive emotions like love and compassion; Altruistic giving enables you to overcome the hesitation to forgive and will inspire you to wish well of the other person; Commit to the forgiveness experience and finally, Hold on to it.

Incidentally, his father Sri Rallapalli Ananthakrishna Sharma was a Telugu Pandit with the Mysore University and has translated Sri Narasimha swamiji s books on Sai Baba into Telugu.

REACH is a therapeutic model that promotes good health and wellbeing. To be unforgiving is stressful; nursing grudges and negative feelings towards an offender can seriously impact your physical and mental health and leaves little room for joy. To be forgiving lightens your burden; you feel free and loving, and you are rid of a lot of baggage that was weighing you down.

Prof. R.A. Phani Shayi says his life mission is: “To do all I can to promote forgiveness in every willing heart, home, and homeland keeping Sai Baba close behind his thoughts.”

Most of us struggle to be forgiving, as it requires a great deal of reflection, expansiveness, reasoning, and compassion. And the ego has to be kept in check. Difficult to action, but once efforts are made in this direction, the benefits are too many to ignore; it is worth taking the trouble to overcome conflicting emotions before one finally is able to forgive.

Now flip the coin. The obverse of forgiveness is the ability to accept your mistake and say that you are sorry – not just say so but feel truly sorry. Expressing remorse at having done something offensive requires a great deal of humility and courage, qualities very hard to come by, especially for one who fears a loss of face and perhaps even punishment if the wrongdoing is grave. The first step is acknowledgment, as in the case of one who is the hurt party, to accept the fact that one has been at the receiving end of hurt or that one has done wrong. That’s the very first step to engendering peace and wellbeing.

This is not just about personal incidents, enmities, and misunderstandings on the human plane; it is also about viewing our actions from a wide-angle.