Radical Forgiveness

by Colin Tipping

  At the end of the thirty-day period, the surgery was performed. Afterward, her doctor wanted to know what she had done, for the cancer had all but disappeared and, instead of the radical surgery they had said would be necessary, removal of the cancer required only minor intervention.

  In cases where the disease is so advanced or aggressive as to require immediate medical intervention, surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation buy time. But time for what?

  Remember: there is no cure for cancer. Consequently, no matter what the medical treatment, doctors have an unspoken expectation that a recurrence is almost a foregone conclusion and just a question of time. I prefer to look at the treatment, assuming the patient survives it, as a way to buy the time to do the Radical Forgiveness work that could actually prevent any recurrence.

  Radical Forgiveness provides one of the best preventive measures available. It clears the energy in the subtle bodies long before it becomes a block in the physical body. When I help people resolve forgiveness issues by using Radical Forgiveness Therapy, as I did with my sister, Jill, I believe I am not only helping them heal a wound in their subtle body but also helping them prevent disease occurring in the physical body. I am convinced that if we keep the energy flowing in our bodies as it was designed to do, we will never get sick. Though I no longer do the five-day cancer retreats I used to, I nevertheless regard the Radical Forgiveness workshops that I now present all around the world as cancer prevention workshops.

  Of course, adequate exercise, good diet, and other such common-sense practices help in this regard as well. But keeping our energy bodies clear of emotional dross and toxicity is of primary importance to good health and healing. Unfortunately, this aspect of healing gets the least media attention, despite the fact that, in America alone, one out of every five people takes an antidepressant drug such as Prozac. Bearing in mind that depression always precedes cancer, we have to wonder whether it is mere coincidence that one out of five Americans also dies of cancer.

  I am often asked why I work with people who have cancer. I have had no personal experience with it, and I knew little about it from a medical standpoint when I began offering five-day cancer retreats for emotional and spiritual healing in the early 1990s.

  It was only after doing this work for some time that I realized why I was attracted to it: it was because it linked up with my interest in forgiveness. This insight occurred when I discovered that nearly all cancer patients, besides having a lifetime habit of suppressing and repressing emotions, are known to share a marked inability to forgive.

  I now believe that lack of forgiveness contributes to, and may even be a principal cause of, most cancers. Therefore, my healing work with cancer patients, and with those who want to prevent the disease from arising or recurring in their bodies, now centers almost entirely on Radical Forgiveness Therapy.

  Jane’s Story

  Jane came to one of our five-day retreats in the north Georgia mountains. She had had a mastectomy and was awaiting a bone marrow transplant. After the retreat, she came to me once a week for hypnotherapy and individual coaching. On the second visit, she arrived in a distressed state, because a routine MRI scan had that day discovered minute spots of cancer in her brain. While this new cancer was upsetting enough by itself, its appearance was also liable to spoil her chances of a transplant. The doctors planned to give her chemotherapy to try to arrest the cancer’s progress, but they were surprised at her condition, because normally metastasis proceeds from the breast to the liver and then to the brain; very rarely does it move directly from the breast to the brain. To me, this seemed worthy of some exploration.

  Jane was an attractive woman in her early forties who had not been involved in a romantic relationship for about seven years. She had a boyfriend of sorts, but she described the relationship as not much more than a close friendship. In fact, she said, she looked upon him as her buddy, even though she had sex with him from time to time. As I probed further into her relationship situation, she got in touch with some incredible grief she still felt around a relationship she had ended a number of years earlier. This eight-year relationship had been extremely passionate and intense, and Jane clearly worshipped the man. Four years into the relationship, which she believed was soon to be consummated in marriage, she discovered that he was married already and had children. He had no intention of leaving his wife. Jane was devastated but could not stop seeing him. It took her another four extremely painful years to extricate herself from the relationship.

  It was clear to me that as a result of this failed relationship, Jane had shut down her emotions completely and would no longer allow herself to get involved so deeply with a man. Neither was I surprised that she had suffered a broken heart; most women with breast cancer have a broken heart somewhere in their history. (The breast is the organ of nurturance and is in the proximity of, and related to, the heart.)

  As she was going out the door at the end of our session, Jane said in a whisper, “I put him in the attic.”

  I stopped in my tracks. “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well, everything I had accumulated over the years that had any connection to this man, or that would remind me of him, I stuffed in a box. I then put the box up in the attic. It’s still there. I haven’t touched it since.”

  I told her to sit down and tell me that again. I had her repeat the same thing three times. Suddenly, she saw the connection between the box in the attic that represented her broken love affair and her brain cancer. “Oh, my God,” she said. “That’s him in my head, isn’t it? He’s in my attic.”

  I told her to go home, go up into the attic, take down the box, and bring it with her to her next session. We would go through it piece by piece together. We planned for her to tell me the story behind each item until we had exorcised his energy and released the pain she had repressed. Jane understood that this might be the key to her healing and was very excited. Tragically, she had a seizure the next day and was taken back to the hospital. She died a month later without ever touching the box in the attic. Looking at the box’s contents and feeling the pain of her lost love may have been just too much for her to bear, and I feel that, at some level, she may have decided to let go of life rather than face that pain.

  ORIGINS OF ILLNESS

  Energy blocks always begin in the subtle bodies first. Then, if they are not released at that level, they move into the physical body and ultimately manifest as diseases such as cancer, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, and the like. Thus, we can say that illness always begins in the subtle bodies first and moves inward.

  We used to think that the best way to stay ahead of disease was to visit a medical doctor for regular checkups. We now know that we are much better off consulting with people who can read our auras—meaning that they can tune in to the energy patterns of our subtle bodies, particularly the etheric body. They can see blocks building energetically long before they show up in the physical body. Medical intuitives can do the same.

  There are now also sophisticated technological diagnostic systems that do this. Called electrodermal screening devices, they are mostly used by naturopaths, homeopaths, osteopaths, and chiropractors. The machine uses the acupuncture points (which are in the etheric body) to get readings on each organ system of the body and to register disease at the sub-clinical level. These are proving to be very accurate devices, though as yet most medical doctors fail to recognize their efficacy. Healing a disease pattern in the subtle body proves much easier than waiting for it to condense into physical matter, because once it does that, it becomes much more resistant to change.

  Quantum physicists have actually proven that emotions condense as energy particles that, if not expressed as emotion, become lodged in the spaces between atoms and molecules. This is literally the filter becoming clogged. Once the emotion has become a particle, it becomes much more difficult to release, and therein lies the problem. It takes much more time and effort to release that block from the physical body than it would have if it had
been released while still in pure energy form in the subtle body/bodies—in this case, the emotional body.

  It is possible, however, to shift those particles before they do harm, and the best way I know to do so involves a combination of Radical Forgiveness and Satori Breathwork. (See Chapter 27.) But if those particles are left to accumulate and coagulate into a mass that one day becomes a cancer, the problem becomes highly intractable and subsequently life-threatening.

  WHY WE DON’T HEAL

  Clearly, time and healing are directly related. For us to evolve to the extent that we can heal ourselves, we must have most of our consciousness in present time—not in the past, not in the future, but in the now. In her tape series Why People Don’t Heal, Caroline Myss maintains that people with more than 60 percent of their life energy siphoned off to maintain the past are unable to heal themselves energetically. Thus they remain totally reliant upon chemical medicine for their healing. (FIGURE 12)

  Figure 12: Why People Don’t Heal

  Myss argues that if it takes 60 to 70 percent of the average person’s precious life force to manage the negative experiences of his or her childhood, adolescence, and earlier years of adulthood, as well as to hold on to the losses, disappointments, and resentments of the past, and another 10 percent to worry about, plan for, and try to control the future. That leaves precious little energy for the present moment—or for healing. (It is important to note that it does not drain our energy to maintain positive memories or even negative memories if they have been processed and forgiven.)

  Life has its own way of bringing us—and our energy—into present time. Often it occurs through trauma. When we find ourselves in the midst of a disaster, have an unexpected accident, or discover that our lives are suddenly in danger, we become very focused on the present moment. We bring all our consciousness into the present instinctively, and suddenly the past does not matter, nor does the future. Only this moment exists. The power of such currently focused energy is demonstrated when a mother, seeing her child trapped under a car, suddenly becomes able to lift the car off the ground so her child can be rescued. Acts of incredible bravery and courage also happen when energy becomes focused in the moment, because fear only occurs when we bring the past into the future. When we are truly in the moment we are absolutely fearless, because we have no awareness of past or future.

  Radical Forgiveness helps us to be in present time because we do not forgive radically by going back into the past. We simply forgive the person who happens to be mirroring our projection right here in the present. That is the beauty of Radical Forgiveness. It is true that sometimes the past connection will be so clear that, as in Jill’s case, it illuminates the current situation. But the focus is still on the perfection of what is happening in the now.

  We can either choose to let go of the victim archetype and bring our energy into the present through Radical Forgiveness or wait for a significant trauma to force us into the now. In other words, we can either transform our consciousness as a matter of will or we can wait for a disaster or a life-threatening illness to make us do it.

  14

  As Above, So Below

  Humanity as a whole may soon be faced with the same choice that confronts each one of us as individuals. As I pointed out in the previous chapter, the decision is to heal by choice or by trauma.

  Many visionaries claim that all the signs are present that point toward humankind receiving a massive demonstration of the heal-by-choice-or-trauma principle in the very near future. The Earth has a cancer, and it is called the human race. This living, breathing, conscious planet has been in a state of perfect balance its entire life, with every little part doing what it must to sustain the system in balance. This is analogous to the job done by healthy cells in the human body.

  For thousands of years we have been part of that balanced system. In the last few hundred of them, however, we have put ourselves above the natural order and have come to believe that we can control and dominate the entire system. Just as a cancer cell multiplies out of control, metastasizes throughout the system, and begins to devour its host, so we continue to multiply exponentially out of control all over the planet and to plunder its natural resources as if nothing mattered beyond the satisfaction of our greed.

  Like a tumor wrapping itself around the heart or blocking a lung, so do we, in the same kind of deadly embrace with our own life source, chop down forests, pollute the very air we breathe, and poison the environment. Scientists are telling us that we are close to destroying life as we know it within the next forty to fifty years if we don’t make dramatic changes.

  The greatest need, however, is for a change in consciousness. Collectively, we must change mass consciousness or face unprecedented trauma at such a level that all the structures maintaining our present lifestyle will be swept away.

  EARTH CHANGES AND POLITICAL UPHEAVAL

  From earliest times right up to the present, massive and disastrous earth changes have been predicted for the early years of the new millennium. Predictions include two polar shifts, dramatic earthquakes, drastically altered weather patterns, volcanic eruptions, and a significant rise in sea levels as polar ice caps melt. The result of such events would be a radically changed map of the world, with much of what we see today as land disappearing under water and new continents rising from the sea. The disruption and chaos would be unimaginable, and millions of people would die. Political upheavals, religious wars, and environmental damage would also occur on a massive scale.

  Such predictions were most notably made by the famous seer of the sixteenth century, Nostradamus, and in this century by Edgar Cayce, the “sleeping prophet” who made very precise predictions in the 1940s. They also appear in many religious writings, including the Bible’s Book of Revelation and in the traditional texts of the Mayans, the Hopi Indians, and many other indigenous peoples.

  It is clear to many that these earth changes have already begun. As the effects of global warming become impossible to ignore, the scientific community is making its own series of predictions based on the worldwide increase in floods, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, and volcanic eruptions, all of which bear close resemblance to the predictions of Cayce and others. Just recently, the world has become a whole lot more unstable politically, and some of what is happening looks uncomfortably like what has been predicted.

  Consciousness Counts

  Scientists do not talk much about the effects of consciousness on the earth, preferring instead to focus on what action we should take to prevent impending doom. But the more spiritually oriented predictions have always carried with them the caveat that the severity of earth changes and political upheaval may be mitigated to the extent that we human beings come to our senses and change our consciousness. In other words, even though our fear/greed-based consciousness has wounded the etheric body of the planet so badly that a violent eruption in its physical form seems inevitable, we can still lessen the effect by raising our consciousness. Just as a disease pattern in the etheric body of a human being can be healed by nonphysical means (prayer, Reiki, imagery, hands-on healing, Radical Forgiveness Therapy, etc.), so the pattern of upheaval and violent change already set in the earth’s etheric body can be dissipated before it manifests in the physical. The answer seems to be, amazingly enough, prayer.

  Science has been putting the spotlight on prayer over the last few years, and there is a growing consensus in that community that it actually works. We truly create our reality through our prayers. Not the kind of prayers, I hasten to add, that consist of requests or demands that God give us this or that, or make this happen rather than that, or in some other way tell God what to do.

  No, the essence of creative prayer is not a matter of words or thoughts. It is actually feeling. Prayer will manifest what you want only when you are able to be fully in the feeling of having it already, knowing that it is done, or that you have already been gifted with it. A feeling of profound gratitude is perhaps the nearest one can come to describing
it.

  But even this is tied to a particular outcome and probably will not raise the consciousness sufficiently high to shift the energy to the degree required.

  The purest form of prayer we can engage in is to feel peace: the kind of peace that comes when we surrender totally to what is, as is—in the knowledge and comfort that Spirit has it all handled and that it will all work out for the best if we just get ourselves out of the way.

  It is only when we are fully surrendered to the situation we are in that the energy will open up for changes to occur—and what they will be, heaven only knows! Don’t pray for peace. Pray to feel peace. That’s the most creative prayer you can make. Peace is the strongest power on earth, and it is certainly called for at this time. When we can feel peace in our hearts, we will know love and our world will reflect it.

  This means that we have a choice. Each individual can make a choice to stay in the feeling of fear, lack, mistrust, greed, and guilt, or choose to let go of all that and be in peace. It is as simple as that. Peace/love is the only antidote to the fear-based consciousness that we now live in and participate in daily. So simply choose it. We have the technology. Use Radical Forgiveness daily in order to make that choice real—and see what happens!

  What we may be seeing at this time is the earth and all of humankind going through a healing crisis—and it may have to get worse before it gets better. (A healing crisis occurs when an organism goes through what looks like a dramatic worsening of its condition, such as with a fever or an eruption of boils, just before it starts to get well again. This worsened condition serves as a cleansing and detoxification process.)

  No matter how drastic things get, we must believe that perfection and divine purpose exist even in this kind of situation. After all, who could possibly have imagined a more dramatic way for Spirit to lovingly mirror our own lust for control and greed than this? Or to mirror our need to create separation between people? We cannot evolve spiritually while holding onto these energies, and if it takes earth changes to bring us to a healing of them, so be it. The planet will be healed in the process. So, too, will we.