What is Unforgiven is Reposited in Our Bodies

"Holding on to anger, resentment and hurt only gives you tense muscles, a headache, and a sore jaw from clenching your teeth. Forgiveness gives you back the laughter and the lightness in your life."

  - Joan Lunden

It's true.  The more we forgive, the more peaceful we feel.  And the more we forgive (which heals our minds), the more we actually heal our physical bodies, too. 

Our bodies are repositories for past pain and hurt.  Unfortunately, if we hang onto these old harmful memories, we are also holding onto the pain and, over time, that pain is likely to transform into disease.  

Using forgiveness, we can clear our bodies of the physical symptoms that are left over from old emotional hurts.

There are several ways to remove old deposited pain from our bodies. For serious past wounds, I find it helpful to use several forgiveness processes. 

First, if I can pinpoint an event in my life that caused the wound, I'll forgive all the people involved.  It only takes me a few minutes to do this and I always use the same words and thoughts.  They are simple to learn.  Most importantly, time and time again, they have helped me to switch my mind over from fear (hurt and anger) to love.  If you're not sure how to forgive people that have caused you injury, you might want to download an audio recording I've made to guide you though this process. Once you listen to it a few times, you'll be able to forgive anyone easily, too. This process helps you forgive individual people on a mental level. 

Download and transfer to your iphone.  Cost: $2.99

Next, I'll tackle the physical component of forgiveness.  I'll go to work on the places in my body those old painful memories are stored.  I do this by remembering carefully all the details of the past event.  I try to put myself back in that moment of hurt and anger and I try to jack up my memories and corresponding emotions as much as possible.  

As I re-experience this old wound, I observe my body, noticing any stress symptoms that might show up. Sometimes this is a racing heartbeat, a tightening of the chest, a feeling of warmth rising in my head or a stabbing pain in my stomach.  The physical symptoms are different for different past hurts.  

Now I just sit and observe, amplifying the emotions and memories as much as I can.  Sometimes the pain moves around and changes.  Other times, memories from similar events that occurred in other times and places come to mind.  I allow this all to flow through my mind and my body, simply observing and feeling whatever feelings come up.  It's important to let this process run its course thoroughly so that the memories will dissipate and lift from the body.  

There is a more detailed description of this in my book, "Forgiveness is the Key to Happiness".  I've also created another guided audio meditation for this process.  It's easy to download to your computer.  You can then upload it to your phone so you can use it with your headphones whenever you have a quiet moment to yourself.  I like to do a lot of my forgiveness work in bed at night before sleep but you can do this anywhere you can find the quiet you need to concentrate. 

Easy to use, guided meditation to forgive and release physical symptoms from past hurts. $2.99

EFT, or emotional freedom technique is a process where you speak words that describe painful memories and feelings while tapping on acupressure points.  This tapping somehow disconnects and clears through the pain stored in the body from the memory.  It seems odd, but surprisingly, it works.  EFT has become a widely respected technique used by therapists around the world.  To learn more, watch this quickie video with Jessica Ortner.  

EFT is an effective technique for clearing stored and painful memories from the body and I do feel that this is a form of forgiveness.  However, the most healing work is mental.  It is important to combine EFT with some prior deep mental work such as the two guided processes above.  In this way, we are forgiving and clearing first in the mind and then following up with a clearance and healing in physical form.  

Of course, if we heal the mental, eventually the body will follow.  With EFT, we are just speeding up the process. 

Releasing Mental Blocks and False Beliefs

The past wreaks its havoc on our present.  We all live our lives through the filter of our pasts.  We can't avoid it altogether, of course, because our pasts have created who we are today.  However, each of us have experienced certain events in our pasts that effect us negatively today.

Memories of painful events (sometimes these memories are subconscious) define our thinking today.  Often these painful memories create "mental blocks" that cause us to think and act from fear or lack which, in turn, can create significant limitations in our current lives.  Forgiving and releasing these "mental blocks" frees us up to discover the magnificent potential we all have to live beautiful lives.

I don't really love telling personal stories about myself, but I have decided that I will do so here today in order to help you understand how these mental blocks are created and how we can let them go through forgiveness.

Although I am generally very healthy, for my entire life I have had issues with food.  As a tiny baby I had colic and continued to have stomach pain through my teen years.  Then I developed food allergies and sensitivities.  In my early 20's I was diagnosed as pre-diabetic.  Later it was discovered that I had a candida imbalance which means that the bacteria and yeasts in my gut were not in a healthy ratio.  All this eventually led to a very limited diet.  No dairy, wheat or grains, no sugar, no soy, no alcohol and so forth.

In the last year or two I have been working to heal this aspect of my life and I have lately begun to have some significant success with this healing.    Here's how it happened.

I have been working with a mentor, Reverend Penny Macek for some years now.  (She is sensational and if you would like to contact her, email me for her particulars.)  Reverend Penny knows how to dig in deep and she asks pointed questions to get at the root of things.  She also sometimes asks me to close my eyes for a brief moment and drop into my past.  She often asks the question, "When was the very first time that you remember feeling this way?"

One day, with my eyes closed in this manner, I felt myself drifting back to a moment when I was a toddler.  I was sitting in the kitchen in my high chair with my mother.  My father walked into the room all dressed in his business suit looking big, tall, authoritative and just a little scary.  He asked my mother if I had eaten my breakfast and when she told him that I was only playing with my food, he became visibly distressed.  I knew I had greatly disappointed him.

This was very upsetting for me.  I wanted to please my parents and I was well aware that my lack of appetite was concerning them.  However, my stomach hurt a lot whenever I ate and so I tried to avoid eating.  I was in one of those classic situations the ego loves to put us in.  I call it "The You Can't Win" scenario.  If I ate food I felt pain, if I didn't eat food, I was in trouble with my parents and they withheld love from me.

As it turns out, my father had been a very sickly child and was not expected to live.  His own parents went to great lengths to keep him healthy and to build up his strength.  I know now that his upset at my lack of interest in food was tying into his own fears and "mental blocks".  In addition, my mother was extremely slim, less than 100 pounds in those days and at the time was pregnant with my sister.  She ultimately only gained 20 pounds during that pregnancy so he was actually worrying a great deal about all three of us, my mother the unborn baby and me.  Each of us was "undernourished"  and even "sickly" in his mentlally blocked mind.

Anyway, this same scenario played out for a number of years as my father tried to get me to eat and I was mostly only able to pick at food.  I gradually came to believe all kinds of crazy things about food.  Here are some of them.

I am only loved if I eat.
I am punished when I eat.
I am punished when I don't eat.
I can't win. Life is not fair.
My parents approval is conditional.
Love can be taken away.
My good can be taken away.
I am not good enough.
I am abandoned.
I am rejected.

These are all "mental block" themes and we all have these or similar themes creating problems in our lives, usually on a subconscious level.  Once we know what these mental blocks are, we can forgive and release them.  This frees us up to live in greater peace and become more of our true potential.  After all, to use Byron Katie's famous question from "The Work", "What would I be without that thought?"

What would I be without the thought that I am punished when I eat?  Well, I probably wouldn't have food allergies and sensitivities, I probably wouldn't be diabetic, I probably wouldn't have Candida.  As I begin to release my false beliefs, these conditions and their symptoms are leaving my body and I am healing.

Then there are the bigger false beliefs to be dealt with such as "love is conditional" and "can be taken away" or "I am not good enough".  These must each be dealt with too.  I have been using a variety of methods to clear these beliefs from my mind.  The one I like the best is the "Feel the Feelings" technique which is Process # 3 in my book, "Forgiveness is the Key to Happiness".  (This process is also presented in my guided meditation, Forgive Your Past NOW for $2.99. )  I have also used a series of releasing prayers which Reverend Penny has given me, conducted some EFT and filled out numerous Radical Forgiveness forms, forgiven both my father and mother as well as food extensively and just taken the time to do some deep thinking and inquiry about this whole issue.

It may sound like a lot of work and bother for all this, but the payoff is my happiness.  Of course, I am much happier, now that I am able to eat more foods comfortably.  However, it's much bigger than that.  My overall happiness comes from the forgiveness work I have done on this subject.  As I forgive, I feel safer and more protected in the world. I am learning that the love that I experience in this life comes from inside me and not from outside sources.  As I begin to live with more love for myself, I find myself increasingly more and more capable of giving more love to the world around me.  This love comes back to me tenfold.  My happiness increases!

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