Blessing opens us up to greater healing

"Blessing may be defined as a quality of thought/feeling/emotion that allows us to redefine our feelings about something that's hurting us now or has hurt us in the past. Stated another way, blessing something is the 'lubricant' that frees our hurtful emotions, opening us up to greater healing, rather than keeping our emotions stuck and unresolved within the body. To lubricate our emotions, we must acknowledge

(bless) all aspects of those hurtful things: such as those who suffer, the cause of the suffering, and those who witness the outcome.

"I often find at this point in any discussion of what blessing is that it's important to be very clear about what it is not. When we bless someone who's hurt us, clearly we aren't suggesting that what has happened is okay or that we'd like it to happen again. Blessing doesn't condone or make excuses for any atrocity or act of suffering. It doesn't put a stamp of approval on a hurtful event, or suggest that we would ever choose to re-experience it.

"What blessing does do is free us from our painful experiences. It acknowledges that those events, whatever they were, have occurred. When we do so, our feelings about those experiences move through out bodies instead of getting stuck inside them. In this way, blessings is the key to reaching Rumi's field beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing. Blessing is the key to accessing the space between. It temporarily suspends our hurt long enough so that we can replace it with another feeling."

Secrets of the Lost Mode of Prayer, pages 100-101, Gregg Braden

I think it is a sensitive and balanced description about how blessing and acknowledging all aspects of hurt and suffering enables us to be free from the hurtful emotions and experience greater healing. It allows us to feel the emotions and not suppress them, and at the same time, it moves us beyond Rumi's field of right doing and wrong doing, as aptly described by Gregg Braden, and see things for what they are. While we are in no way condoning the hurtful things some people have done to us nor do we want to re-experience them, we begin to see a bigger picture that those who hurt us are hurting themselves and many a times they know not what they were doing. I think this is how Jesus was able to bless those who hurt him.