Walking on river rocks, I feel sturdy support under my feet. In late May these waters are flowing strong and clearly around boulders in the river’s middle. On a mountain path, our hike alongside the water has steep narrowness through trees growing close to the active river. This climb is adjacent to Big Sur coastline near Pfeiffer campground in California, where a high-enough-to-parachute-from mountain carves a cascade of soil and rock growing craggly trees, acrobatic plants and every sunshine crevice imaginable. Driving Highway 1 South this is the vista.

On this afternoon I am 17 years old and another high school year recedes far behind in our teenage rearview mirror. A group of my close girlfriends and I decide to go swimming in the gorge, a familiar location to locals and a river ascent higher up the mountain where major boulders have carved an indigenous swimming pool. Giddy from fatigue and freedom, I intuitively spot a flat rock that gives space to jump right in. The water looks clear glossy a few feet deep and dark mossy green swirling beyond this visibility. I have never been here before yet have heard often from peers the depth is 30 feet at least. A spontaneous leap won’t land me on a rock, I am sure. What I didn’t know is what I learned in the next few seconds.

My friends are Carrie, Suzy, Shauna, Barbara, and Karolina makes five. A late spring afternoon beats intensive sunshine, a dry heat crackling amongst medium and tall trees nestling this river ravine also covered in low plant shrubs. Friends standing behind me, I leap impulsively into the river gorge just a ten-foot splash away. Sweating warm before I hit the water, once I’m submerged my breathing paralyzes instantly. Icy cold water shocks my senses to a halt. Such an intense contrast from expecting summer temps to feeling freezing cold has me go numb.

While I continue sinking further my choice is to simply drift far below and see what happens. Not a giving up and more like acceptance that in such extreme cold, I have doubts. Can I return to action and resurface?

While I continue sinking with my arms and legs frozen at my side, feeling heavier in the deepening water, a pause happens. Only river water all around me yet a buoy counter-weight of a sort—what I count now as spirit uplift—and a nanosecond reprieve appears when I look up. Distantly I see shards of sunlight way above and I self-talk my way into a return.

Even a simple flap of arms and legs will influence a success to return after a surprise disaster. Gradually and still freezing throughout my body as if immersive in ice cubes, I climb through vertical river water to the surface, lamely hauling myself up and on a wide boulder. The rock is scorchey warm and I’m beyond relieved before I flip into discounting my emotional experience.

“How is the water?” a friend shouts to me where I rest across the river, on the other side, having reached for the nearest rock respite.

“Very, very cold,” I reply shivering. Each friend now takes her time to inch into the river depths and swim across gradually. Soon we are gathered together complaining about winter river temps during early summer.

Today I am 61 years old and I sit writing this reflection from a comfortable chair in a house where I grew up, which includes a few travel years away, and what I recognize is how to forgive. As a conscious action, lately my strategy to forgive has gentle tenacity. I keep saying in self-talk that so much goodness energy courses through each day’s energy lines. My life work is simply to allow myself to absorb all the revitalizing vibes.

Returning to the Monterey Peninsula for a month-long stay, what at first surprised me to recall this afternoon so many years later, now makes sense for a purposeful river adventure memory. How I see changing my life today is through continual forgiving my past. So, I claim this memory as method to forgive my teenager Karolina early lesbian-female self. Impulsive, fatalistic, and inhibited are interferences between myself and sourcing life’s spiritual goodness all around.

What I experience for real in a tangible felt-sense throughout any day is a spiritual goodness with me supportively. Yet that river afternoon was one when even with good friends I still often felt like an outsider, which made me impulsive or acting out as in can you see me now? Today I feel seen in the eyes of faith in the good. But without being connected to an easygoing goodness spirituality at that time, I often gave up easily. The afternoon in the river gorge as one example. A fatalistic sense that life has dire, random circumstances I won’t counteract. Today all during the day I simply ask for help from a spiritual source I don’t quite understand yet believe in 100 percent. And to forgive my earlier living years for doubting goodness in the world, I cultivate my faith daily now one day at a time.

The kind of atonement I describe conveys into a depth humility. But that afternoon I pretended I wasn’t hurting and dismayed from experiencing the river shock. I chose being inhibited around friends who truly cared about me. A way of disconnecting from the free-floating goodness always swirling around each and every one of us. In denying my feeling reaction, I denied allowing my friends to help, and this meant I refused help from a spiritual source. Shutting out spiritual goodness is humility’s opposite. Humility always grants enough power to share emotions and doing so is seeing goodness in others.

A few days ago, I stood along ocean waters at a North Kohala coastline on Hawai’i Island. A friend stood next to me at the shoreline listening while I explained how my relationship to water has changed radically. Rather than leap impulsively today, I learn from others initially. I don’t have to be seen as the first to jump right in because my spiritual source already sees and supports me continually. Instead, I observe carefully how others interact with ocean water. Since I surrender to goodness in life, I am no longer impulsive. Trusting my next right action is what works, instead.

And fatalism doesn’t play a role because I’m no longer victim to circumstance. Now I am taking time to prepare for swimming incrementally and joyfully, a way for owning my power. Sure, surprise difficulty happens throughout any goodness day. Yet I don’t see the difficulty as overwhelming and rather as a pause in my goodness flow. Intentional cruelty having been brought for quite a few years now can be met with equanimity still. Prayer and meditation can resituate any situate. Trust in my own self-care guaranteed to rebalance any imbalance.

Finally, being healthily in my emotions cultivates emotional sobriety, a balanced energy way to say what I mean and mean what I say easygoing style. This conscious openness teaches me how to ask for help where I don’t over demand or over depend. Back again in a familiar geography, what I realize is that I carry my energetic home with me each and every day wherever I travel. How I forgive myself is to acknowledge times in my life when I couldn’t see a way to faith in our universe’s goodness.

Now I do. Gullible and naïve I am not. Expectations I do not have. Simply that I recognize my living-work is seeing goodness in each moment and bringing behavior to support harmony for this moment. And I forgive myself when I miss the mark, yet I continue again. I went for a sunset walk yesterday along a familiar Monterey salty shoreline where I have been walking many times during my life decades and the ocean’s ferocious elegance had me in awe. I simply had to observe.

Even in this recent day my tendencies to be angelic (yeah, right) wore thin so traces of impulsive, fatalistic, and closed I saw in my behaviors. And guess what? I simply asked for spiritual goodness to shift my energetic states. Basic atoning in this way via asking to be forgiven for my understandably vulnerable inability to see shards of sunshine glimmering goodness at the water’s edge is a way to work my day. Miraculously all was forgiven, especially myself.