Forgiveness is an Expression of the Soul's Deep Desire to BE Forgiven

"When you judge, you have moved out of alignment with what is true.  You have decreed that the innocent are not innocent.  And if you would judge another as being without innocence, you have already declared that this is true about you!  Therefore, to practice forgiveness actually cultivates the quality of consciousness in which you finally come to forgive yourself.  And it is indeed the forgiven who remember their God."  --Way of Mastery  p. 26

It is only when we come to a point that we are able to understand that everyone is forgivable, and that we are indeed putting this universal forgiveness into practice, that we begin to believe that we ourselves are worthy of forgiveness.

After all, it's only good logic.  If every one of God's Children is innocent, then I myself, being also a Child of God, must be an innocent, too.

The problem is that down deep in our sub-consciousness, we struggle to believe this.  We have mountains of guilt.  We believe we're not worthy.  We believe we're unlovable.  We believe that we are "bad", that we have sinned and that we should be punished.  Removing the guilt from our sub-conscious minds can only be accomplished through our own acts of forgiveness toward others.

This is a process that takes some time.  We can begin by forgiving any trespasses we experience today. Once we create a habit of forgiving all of each day's hurts, we can begin to go into our pasts and release old grievances.  This stage requires much intense soul searching and quietude as we look deep into our minds to discover the wounds that lurk therein. Finally, in the third stage of forgiveness we can begin to forgive the conditions we see in the world around us.  We begin to forgive the war, famine, cruelty and selfishness that plays out on a world-wide scale.

As we move forward in our forgiveness, we will see a pattern emerging.  What we are most offended by in others is actually something that we find reflected in our own consciousness.  We fear the murderer, however, we come to know that there is so much anger deep within our own sub-consciousness that we are actually, ourselves, capable of murder.  We fear the dictator, but ultimately come to see the bossiness that resides within our own personality.  We fear the greedy ones, but we ourselves often take what we want.

"Therefore, in truth, understand well.  Forgiveness is essential.  What has not been forgiven in others, has not been forgiven in you.  But not by a God who sits outside of you, for He never judges.  What you have not forgiven in another or in the world is but a reflection of what you carry within as a burden that you cannot forgive of yourself."  --Way of Master p.26

As we forgive the world around us, our consciousness begins to purify.  Our own thoughts of fear, anger, greed, rejection and envy begin to release.  Our minds are cleansed.

This is where our happiness begins.  As we are freed of the tormenting thoughts and beliefs that our minds contain, we come to experience inner peace.

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The Dalai Lama Speaks on the Power of Forgiveness

My good friend, Patrick, forwarded this to me.

Who Are You Forgiving Today?

We are

                     all one.

We are simply only forgiving......

                                                                                      .....Ourselves

"How lovely does the world become in just that single instant when you see the truth about yourself reflected there.  Now you are sinless and behold your sinlessness.  Now you are holy and perceive it so.  And now the mind returns to its creator, the joining of the Father and the Son, the Unity of unities that stands behind all joining but beyond them all.  God is not seen but only understood.  His Son is not attacked but recognized."

A Course in Miracles, Manual for Teachers p 84 

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Forgiveness is the Release of all Judgment

"All suffering is a by-product of judgment".--Jennifer Hadley

Yes, dropping the habit of judging is very difficult.  I am struggling with it, too!  But I do realize acutely that the more I simply drop my judgments on every subject in my life, the happier I am.  When I just accept whatever is, I am happiest.

Why do we want to label everything?  Something comes into our awareness and we feel compelled to create an opinion about it.  We judge people (smart, skinny, tall, bossy, beautiful, etc).  We judge our physical world (The ocean is calming, cities are crowded, today's weather is too cold, her house is elegant.)  We judge situations (painful, uplifting, confusing, undesirable).  

What would life be like if we just watched it unfold and just accepted whatever it was?  How does creating an opinion about anything contribute to the quality of our lives?  

When I tell myself that my feelings are hurt, I feel bad.  When I tell myself that she is smarter than I am, I feel bad.  When I tell myself that I don't like his behavior, I feel bad.  When I tell myself that it is a sad thing that she is sick, I feel bad.  

Is it my goal to feel bad?  Of course not.  Then why do I indulge in behavior that makes me feel bad?  

Today I am renewing my intention to drop all judgments toward everyone, everything and every situation that is a part of my world.  When I meet my world with acceptance I am showing up with love and I know that the more love I give out, the more love comes to me.  This is the most important way I can create happiness in my life and in the lives of others around me. 

Radical Forgiveness

I love Colin Tipping!  His radical forgiveness forms have played a large role in my own personal forgiveness process.  When I first began to forgive my past I used them over and over again.  I kept an open forgiveness "to do" list and anything that would occur to me from my past that had hurt or upset me was on that list.  Each morning or so I would fill out one of his forms.  These forms helped me to clear through and release a lot of the most obvious hurts, disappointments, frustrations and upsets from my past in a matter of months.  I probably did about thirty or forty of them at first.

Then a few years later my father died and all sorts of more abstract hurts came up and I used the forms again, perhaps about sixty or seventy of them.  Now I use them on occasion whenever I need the kind of forgiveness work they provide.

I love these forms.  If you don't really know how to forgive, they will teach you how to flip your feelings from anger and fear to love.  And Colin Tipping is a wondeful, kind and intuitive teacher.

 This Thursday Colin Tipping is offering a free webinar training on how to use the Radical Forgiveness forms.  You can register here. 

Forgive Someone You Love

I really believe that our biggest "forgiveness opportunities", as we A Course in Miracles Students like to call them, come from the people we know best.  The people that we are in relationship with can be our greatest source of joy...and they can also be our greatest source of annoyance or outright hurt.  Spouses, significant others, children, siblings, best friends or anyone else that we spend a great deal of time with, are often the people we find ourselves needing to forgive over and over.

I am going to give some tips on forgiving the people that we "love" the most, but first, I think it's important that we all give a good hard look at the reasons why we need to forgive our loved ones so often.  Remember that when we find that we need to forgive someone, it is because we have first judged them in some way.  We all need to ask ourselves some hard questions:

Are we too critical of our families, friends and loved ones?
Do we look at these relationships in terms of what we can get from them versus what we can give?
Do we have expectations for these people?
Are we accepting who they truly are or do we want them to be something else?
Are we looking at these people to be the source of our good in this world? 

No person is responsible for our happiness.  True happiness is something that comes from inside ourselves.  It comes when we know that we are loved and cherished by Spirit and are therefore able to love and cherish ourselves.  If we go looking for happiness elsewhere, we will never really find it.  Yes, we may find something that looks and smells a little bit like happiness for awhile, but it will always be fleeting.

Only the happiness we get from inside is the permanent kind that grows and deepens and sustains.  Forgiveness is the process through which we earn that happiness.  As we forgive others by offering them love, we begin to realize that we are worthy of that love, too.  It's a universal law, "You get what you give."  Happiness never comes from others, rather it comes when we give love to others.  Forgiveness is one of the ways we do this.

So first, let's all give a long hard look at each of our most challenging personal relationships and be honest with ourselves about how much of the discomfort we feel from those relationships is of our own doing.  This is not something that we will spend a quick few minutes on, but something that we will be studying and watching for the next few months as we really observe our own feelings and behaviors.

In the meantime, when we do find that someone we love is annoying us or hurting our feelings in any way, let's practice a little forgiveness.  My favorite forgiveness process for this situation is available in an audio format that you can download for $2.99, Forgive Someone NOW.

This audio takes 13 minutes to listen to, but it will teach you a process that takes less than a minute to complete once you get a little practice with it.  This is also forgiveness process #1, Seeing the Higher Truth, as outlined in my book, "Forgiveness is the Key to Happiness".  This is by far the process that I use the most frequently.  In fact, I use it almost every day for just about every thing that hurts or annoys me in my present

And here's a little advanced forgiveness experiment I recommend.  The next time someone that you "love" is upsetting you try "flipping the switch" right then and there.  

Go right from fear to love.  See if you can just stop the ego rampage in your mind.  Just let go of all those critical thoughts, those needy thoughts, those "I have to be right" thoughts, those "I need you to complete me" thoughts.  Just drop them.  Just do it.  And then turn up the love.  Direct feelings of deep love toward your loved one.  Let them amplify until they engulf the two of you.  Just keep intensifying the love.

One fascinating by-product of forgiveness is that it actually changes the world around us.  If you practice forgiving the people you love every time they press your buttons, you will find that over time your buttons get pressed less frequently, until eventually, almost never.  Do the people we love actually become less annoying with forgiveness or are we less likely to be annoyed?  Who knows?  I believe that both actually happen, but try it and see for yourself.  One thing I know for sure is that your world will change.    

This morning I was listening to a lecture with Louise Hay and Cheryl Richardson.  Cheryl Richardson mentioned that a former therapist had asked her an important question during couples' counselling.  The question was, "Do you want to keep redecorating hell or do you want to fix this?"  This is exactly the issue we face when we allow ourselves to stay in a state of annoyance, hurt or victim-hood with the people in our lives.  We can allow our egos to take over, amplifying fear and keeping us in hell, or we can connect to Spirit and switch to love.  One of those choices leads to happiness!

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Sometimes We Dread Forgiving Certain People

Forgiveness is actually very easy, once you get the hang of it.  However, forgiveness does take getting past one hurdle and that is letting go of the pleasure we feel in our victim-hood.  Does that idea surprise you?  Well, it's true that we enjoy being victims and the evidence of that is simply that we choose to be victims.  We stubbornly hang on to our victim-hood.  We love to savor our anger and outrage.  We love to get into our pain and we love to feel put upon and abused.  Our hurt feeds the fire of our indignation.

It can sometimes be a big step to let all that go.

But like any big step, if you want to make progress, you just have to do it.

Remember what it was like, learning to put your head underwater for the first time?  You just held your nose and dunked.  You just did it, even though you may not have known what it would be like.  You just trusted that it would be good.

Sometimes, when we are thinking about forgiving someone that we believe is particularly heinous, the idea of forgiving feels very distasteful.  Now that I am in the habit of forgiving everything, I don't feel that way anymore, but I do clearly remember how unpleasant it once was to offer forgiveness to the few people in my life that I believed were villainous.  I don't know why we sometimes resist forgiving so strongly.  Maybe we just want to hang onto our feelings of superiority.  "He's a horrible person and that makes me a good person."  Perhaps that kind of thinking just makes us feel better.  It's hard to give it up.

My best advice, if you're feeling that way, is to just do it.  Just hold your nose and dive into the forgiveness.  It will be over before you know it and you'll feel totally different about it afterward. You just will.  Forgiveness makes everything better.

In my meditation class today, we did a simple meditation from the book "Aging as a Spiritual Practice" by Lewis Richmond.  I'd like to share it with you, because I think it might be a good little exercise to ease into forgiveness, especially if you have some unpleasant people that you're feeling reluctant to forgive.  Here it is:

Find a quiet place and spend a few minutes calming your mind and listening to your breath.  When you are ready, imagine a small intense orb of white light in your heart center.  "On each in-breath feel the breath coming in from the world and refreshing the sphere of light.  On each out-breath, feel the breath going back out into the world with that light's generous energy."  Continue with this for a minute or two, feeling the flow of white light out into the world around you, healing, cleansing, offering love. 

Now, imagine that there is a mirror image of yourself sitting opposite you.  Let the cleansed out-breaths of white light surround and permeate the image of yourself.  Then as you breathe in, imagine that all the troubles, problems, pains and emotional hurts float out from the image of yourself and into your real self, down into the white light in your heart center where they can be cleansed and consumed in the light.  You are purifying and healing all the troubles away. Then breath pure white loving light out and into the image of yourself.  Let your breath circle generosity to and from yourself.  Continue on with this for a short time until you feel that all the problems and pains have been transformed. 

Next, imagine that there is someone you love sitting opposite you and continue the healing and loving breathing with them until they are cleansed (this should happen in five or six breaths or so).  Then switch to another person you love. Do this for three or four people. 

Now...here comes the good part, and it should be fairly easy to do because you are now in a very loving place.  Switch the person sitting opposite you into someone you need to forgive.  Continue to breathe out the loving white light, flooding their image with kindness and healing.  Then breathe in all their pain and difficulties to your heart center where the white light can transform them into pure loving energy.  Do this until you feel you have cleansed and healed them.   

This is another good example of the action of "flipping the switch" in our minds from fear to love.  At first it can seems almost inconceivable that we could look on someone that we loathe with love.  However, once we teach our minds how to do it, it becomes very easy.  In some ways the mind is very trainable.

So if you're feeling fear, reluctance or righteousness about forgiving someone unpleasant in your life, take the plunge.  Have a forgiveness baptism.  The water's fine!

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