It is interesting to look at what might have been happening here. Most people would have agreed with Debi that this man had betrayed, insulted, and dishonored her with his selfish attitude. Yet the very fact that he exhibited this really quite peculiar kind of behavior was a clue that something else was going on beneath the apparent situation.
At the time that event occurred, Debi’s self-esteem was very low. Even though she was always being told what a good singer she was, she could never accept it; she would always put herself down. She had an unconscious belief that she wasn’t worthy of what she could rightly charge for her talent.
It is a principle of Radical Forgiveness that if you have a limiting belief which prevents you from becoming whole or from achieving your true purpose, your Higher Self will always find a way to acquaint you with your limiting belief so you can heal it. It can’t intervene directly, because you have free will. But it can, through the Law of Attraction, bring into your life someone who will act out your belief for you so you can see it for what it is and choose to let it go.
This man resonated with Debi’s limiting belief that she was unworthy, not good enough, and undeserving, and he responded to the call. His Higher Self colluded with hers to play this worthiness issue out so that she could see the idea, feel the pain of it, and choose again.
Far from being a villain, then, this man was in fact a healing angel for Debi. At great discomfort to himself—for who would enjoy being a mean-spirited jerk?—he played out Debi’s story for her. Unfortunately, she missed the lesson at that time and simply took it as an opportunity to enlarge her “not good enough” story and prove it right.
Thirteen years later she did a simple little process called the 13 Steps to Radical Forgiveness. As a result, she got to see the truth—that he was providing a healing opportunity for her and that he was in fact her healer. Immediately the energy started to move again, and the money flowed almost instantly in her direction. (Money is just energy.)
A few days after Debi returned from the training, she ran into this man. He made a point of coming up to her and saying, “You know, Debi, I never did thank you for what you did for me all those years ago when you did that first ad for me. You gave me a break, and it worked. I really appreciate it. Thank you.” He still didn’t offer her money, but that doesn’t matter. What she got from him was the acknowledgment that she was previously unable to accept. That was the final healing moment.
Since then, Debi has stepped out into her power. She has stopped hiding her talent by doing anonymous studio work and is now out there doing concerts and recording her own CDs. She has even started her own production company. All that old “I’m not good enough” stuff has disappeared completely, and she is living her purpose.
I always tell Debi’s story to convince people of the power of these seemingly simple tools and to encourage people to use them, and I am grateful to her for allowing me to do so.
Note: Once I became aware of the power of the Radical Forgiveness worksheet to create transformation in people, I was curious as to whether it would prove equally effective as an audio experience. To find out, I crafted thirteen questions that were similar to those on the worksheet and recorded them on a CD. After bringing to mind the story and feeling the feelings, the listener simply had to answer “Yes” out loud to every question that followed.
I believe that the potency of the Radical Forgiveness process improves when the questions are heard aloud. The oral response is important, because the body feels the resonance of the word “yes” and it goes in deep. Countless numbers of people have attested to its effectiveness. It is not a hypnotic experience, so many people keep it in the car and listen to it while driving.
To obtain a copy of this CD, called Radical Forgiveness , see section entitled “Also from Sound True and Collin Tipping”.
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The Five Stages of Radical Forgiveness
No matter what form the technology of Radical Forgiveness takes, whether it be a workshop, the 13 Steps, the Radical Forgiveness worksheet, or the ceremony, each is designed to take you through the five essential stages of Radical Forgiveness. These are:
1. TELLING THE STORY
In this step, someone willingly and compassionately listens to us tell our story and honors it as being our truth in the moment. (If you are doing a worksheet, this person might be yourself.)
Having our story heard and witnessed is the first step to letting it go. Just as the first step in releasing victimhood is to own it fully, so must we own our story in its fullness from the point of view of being a victim and avoid any spiritual interpretation at this stage.
Here we must begin from where we are (or were, if we are going back into the past to heal something), so that we can feel some of the pain that caused the energy block in the first place.
2. FEELING THE FEELINGS
This is the vital step that many so-called spiritual people want to leave out, thinking that they shouldn’t have “negative” feelings. That’s denial, pure and simple, and it misses the crucial point that authentic power resides in our capacity to feel our feelings fully and, in that way, show up as fully human. It is only when we give ourselves permission to access our pain that our healing begins. The healing journey is essentially an emotional one. But it doesn’t have to be all pain either. It is surprising how, as we go down through the levels of emotion and allow ourselves to feel the authentic pain, it can quickly turn to peace, joy, and thankfulness.
3. COLLAPSING THE STORY
This step looks at how our story began and how our interpretations of events led to certain (false) beliefs forming in our minds that have determined how we think about ourselves and how we have lived our lives. When we come to see that these stories are, for the most part, untrue and serve only to keep us stuck in the victim archetype, we become empowered to make the choice to stop giving them our vital life force energy. Once we decide to retrieve our energy, we take back our power, and the stories wither and die.
It is also at this step that we might exercise a high degree of compassion for the person we are forgiving and bring to the table some straightforward, honest-to-goodness understanding of the way life often is and just how imperfect we all are—and the realization that we are all doing the very best we can with what we are given. Much of this we might categorize as traditional forgiveness, but it is nevertheless important as a first step and a reality check. After all, most of our stories have their genesis in early childhood, when we imagined that the whole world revolved around us and that everything was our fault.
So this is where we can give up some of that child-centered woundedness. Here we can bring our adult perspective to bear and confront our inner child with the plain truth of what really did or didn’t happen, as distinct from our interpretations about what we think happened. It is amazing how ridiculous many of our stories seem once we allow the light in. But the real value in this step is in releasing our attachment to the story, so we can more easily begin to make the transition required in the next step.
4. REFRAMING THE STORY
This is where we allow ourselves to shift our perception in such a way that instead of seeing the situation as a tragedy, we become willing to see that it was in fact exactly what we wanted to experience and was absolutely essential to our growth. In that sense, it was perfect. At times we will be able to see the perfection right away and learn the lesson immediately. Most often, however, it is a matter of giving up the need to figure it out and surrendering to the idea that the gift is contained in the situation, whether we know it or not. It is in that act of surrender that the real lesson of love is learned and the gift received. This is also the step of transformation, for as we begin to become open to seeing the divine perfection in what happened, our victim stories, which were once vehicles for anger, bitterness, and resentment, become transformed into stories of appreciation, gratitude, and loving acceptance.
5. INTEGRATION
After we have allowed ourselves to be willin
g to see the perfection in the situation and turned our stories into ones of gratitude, it is necessary to integrate that change at the cellular level. That means integrating it into the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual bodies so that it becomes a part of who we are. It’s like saving what you have done on the computer to the hard drive. Only then will it become permanent.
In my workshops, I find that Satori Breathwork is a very good way to integrate the change, whether it is done as part of the workshop or soon thereafter. This entails lying down and breathing consciously in a circular fashion to loud music (see Chapter 27).
Using the worksheet method, the integration comes through writing the statements and then reading them out loud. Using the 13 Steps, it comes through making the verbal affirmation to see the perfection. With the ceremony (see Further Resources), the act of walking across the circle and saying something of an affirmative nature to someone else coming in the other direction is what accomplishes integration. Ritual, ceremony, and, of course, music are all used to integrate the shift in perception that is Radical Forgiveness.
These five stages don’t necessarily occur in just this order. Very often we move through them, or some of them at least, simultaneously, or we keep coming back and forth from one stage to another in a kind of circular or spiraling fashion.
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Fake It Till You Make It
Forgiveness is a journey, and it always begins from a place of no forgiveness. Getting there can take years or minutes, and we know now that this is a matter of choice. Traditional forgiveness takes a long time, but we can do it quickly through Radical Forgiveness simply by expressing our willingness to see the perfection. Each time we do this, it represents an act of faith, a prayer, an offering, a humble request for divine assistance. We do this at moments when we feel unable to forgive, and in that sense it is a fake-it-till- you-make-it process.
SURRENDERING
Faking it until you make it really means surrendering to the process, neither putting forth effort nor trying to control the results. In the Seattle study mentioned in Chapter 13, the more effort the participants put into trying to forgive, the more difficult they found it to let go of their hurt and anger. After they stopped trying to forgive and control the process, at some point in time forgiveness just happened.
It is true that the energetic shift from anger and blame to forgiveness and responsibility happens much more quickly with Radical Forgiveness, because, using the tools given here, we can drop the victim consciousness. Consciousness, you will recall from Chapter 13, changes time. Nevertheless, even with Radical Forgiveness, we must enter the process with no expectation of when an energy shift might happen—even though we know that it can happen instantaneously. Exactly when the results begin to show up may depend on things we know little about. It might take a while before we begin to really feel unconditional acceptance for the person involved and peace around the situation, which is how we know when forgiveness is complete. It might take many worksheets, for example, to reach this point.
However, it can be of comfort to many to learn that we do not have to like the person to forgive them. Neither do we have to stay in their company if their personality and/or their behavior is toxic to us. Radical Forgiveness is a soul-to-soul interaction and requires only that we become connected at the soul level. When we feel this unconditional love for their soul, our soul joins theirs and we become one.
TAKING THE OPPORTUNITY
Whenever someone upsets us, we must recognize it as an opportunity to forgive. The person upsetting us may be resonating something in us that we need to heal, and in that case we can choose to see it as a gift—if we care to shift our perception. The situation also may be a replay of an earlier time when someone did something similar to us. If so, this current person represents all the people who have ever done this to us before. As we forgive this person for the current situation, we forgive all others who behaved likewise, as well as forgiving ourselves for what we might have projected onto them.
An example of this appears as a diagram in FIGURE 1. Here, Jill’s story is represented as a time line on which appear all the opportunities she had been given to heal her original pain arising out of her misperception that she was “not enough.” When she finally saw what was happening in the situation with Jeff and forgave him (healed), she automatically forgave and healed every previous occasion—including the original one with her father. Her entire story, including those aspects of it connected to her previous husband, collapsed in an instant as soon as that lightbulb went on.
This is why Radical Forgiveness requires no therapy as such. Not only does forgiving in the moment heal all the other times the same or a similar thing happened—including the original situation—but you don’t have to know what the original situation was. That means you don’t have to go digging up the past trying to figure out exactly what the original pain was. It is healed anyway, so what’s the point?
FIRST AID FORGIVENESS TOOLS
The following chapters contain processes that shift energy and offer opportunities to change our perception of what might be happening in a given situation. This change constitutes the essence of Radical Forgiveness. All of these processes bring us into the present moment by helping us retrieve our energy from the past and withdraw it from the future, both of which must be done for change to occur. When we are in the present moment, we cannot feel resentment, because resentment only lives in the past. Neither can we feel fear, because fear only exists in relation to the future. We find ourselves, therefore, with the opportunity to be in present time and in the space of love, acceptance, and Radical Forgiveness.
Some of the tools included in this section are more appropriate for use at the very moment when a situation requiring forgiveness occurs. They help to jerk us into an awareness of what may be happening before we get drawn too deeply into a drama and go to Victimland. When our buttons get pushed, we easily move straight into the defense/attack cycle. Once in this cycle, we find it tough to get out. Using these quick tools helps us to avoid ever beginning the cycle. The Four Steps to Forgiveness process (see Chapter 22) is one of these. It is easy to remember, and you can say it to yourself in the moment.
Other tools described in the following chapters are designed for use when we are in a more reflective state of mind. The Radical Forgiveness worksheet works wonders in this regard. Use them all as an act of faith in the beginning. The payoff will prove incredible in time. Consistent use of these tools helps us to find a peace we may never have known was even possible.
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Feeling the Pain
Feeling the feelings is the second stage in the forgiveness process, and it usually arises as a consequence of telling the story. This step requires that we give ourselves permission to feel the feelings we have around a given situation—and to feel them fully. If we try to forgive using a purely mental process—thus denying that we feel angry, sad, or depressed, for example—nothing happens. I have met many people, especially those who think of themselves as spiritual, who feel that feelings are to be denied and given over to Spirit. That’s known as a “spiritual bypass.”
In 1994, I agreed to do a workshop in England. This was ten years after I had immigrated to America, and I had quite forgotten the extent to which English people resist feeling their feelings.
The workshop was to take place in a monastery in the west of England, and, as it happened, most of the participants were spiritual healers. The workshop attendees and I arrived at the monastery, but there was no one from the monastery around, so we went in and rearranged the furniture. I began the workshop by explaining that life was essentially an emotional experience for the purpose of our spiritual growth and that the workshop was designed to help us get in touch with emotions we have buried. Well, you would have thought I was telling them they had to dance naked around a fire or something! Here’s the essence of what they all said: “Oh, no. We are spiritual. We have transcended our emotions. We don’t give our emotions any credenc
e at all. If we have them, we simply ask Spirit to take them away, and we go straight to peace. We don’t believe in this kind of work.”
About an hour into the workshop, I knew I had a disaster on my hands. It was like swimming through treacle. I couldn’t get through at all, and there was no way they were going to do this work. I was feeling progressively more awful every moment and was convinced that the workshop was going to fall apart completely.
At this point Spirit intervened. A young monk in full habit burst into the room demanding to know who was in charge. When I said I was, he demanded that I go outside with him. He wanted to “talk” to me, but I could see that he was seething with anger; he was all red and puffed up. I said that I was conducting a seminar and that I would come and find him when I was finished.
He went out very upset but came back almost immediately, clearly enraged. He pointed his finger at me, hooked it as if to motion me toward him, and screamed, “I want to see you, right now!”
It was the gesture with the finger that got me. All the frustration and tension of the past hour came rushing to the surface. I turned to my class and said in a very menacing tone, “Just watch this!” I strode over to the red-faced, puffed-up monk and told him in no uncertain terms, pointing back at him with my finger very close to his face, “I don’t care what you are wearing and what those clothes represent—you don’t come into my workshop and hook me out as if I were some little schoolboy who has offended you. I’ll come out and talk to you when—and only when—I am ready. In fact, I will be done right at twelve noon. If you have anything to say to me, you’d better be outside in the lobby right at that time. Then we can talk. Now, get out of my room!”
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