When we truly join with another person and become one with them, we have no need to attack and defend—so in that moment of joining, we raise our vibration, drop all our mechanisms of defense, and become our true selves. At the same time we let go of our projections and see the other person as a child of God, perfect in every sense. This is the essence of Radical Forgiveness.
SEEING THE CHRIST IN OURSELVES
It is important to recognize that the mechanism of projection does not just apply to our shadow side. We also project onto other people the things we like about ourselves yet have a hard time acknowledging. Thus we see in those people our own inner beauty, our own creative talent, our own intelligence, and so on.
THE POSITIVE REFLECTION EXERCISE
This is an exercise taught by Arnold Patent. It is powerful in its effect on everyone who tries it because it asks you to, first, see what is wonderful in another person, and, second, claim that quality as your own. It connects people with their essence—with the Christ in themselves—and allows them to really see who they are. The exercise is usually done in a group setting, but it can be done equally well with two people. It is similar to seeing the Christ in a person, but instead of doing it silently, this exercise is done verbally and with eye contact:
Person A, speaking from the heart, says to Person B, “The beautiful, wonderful qualities that I see in you, that you reflect in me, are...” Person B listens and responds by saying, “Thank you.” They then switch roles and repeat the exercise.
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Forgiveness Is a Three-Letter Word
This tool simply involves writing three letters to the person you feel has wronged or hurt you in some way. It works wonderfully when you are really upset about something that has just happened; it even works on something that happened a long time ago.
Vent all your anger in the first letter. Hold nothing back. You can threaten vengeance of the vilest kind if it makes you feel good. Keep writing until you have nothing left to say. The process of writing this letter may cause you to shed a lot of tears—tears of rage, sadness, resentment, and hurt. Let them flow. Have a box of tissues beside you. If you are angry, scream into a pillow or do some physical activity to help you feel your anger. Under no circumstances mail this letter!
The next day, write another letter. This one should carry somewhat less anger and vengeance, although it still does not let the person with whom you are angry off the hook for what you believe they have done to you. It should, however, make an effort to bring compassion, understanding, and generosity, as well as the possibility of some sort of forgiveness, into the equation. Do not mail this letter either.
The following day, write a third letter. In this one, attempt to describe a new interpretation of the situation based on the principles of Radical Forgiveness. Since this mimics the Radical Forgiveness worksheet, refer to the notes on the worksheet as signposts for your letter, but write it in your own words as best you can (see Chapter 21). This may feel like a struggle at first, but persevere. Remember, you will have to fake it for a while before you make it.
None of these letters are ever mailed—it is neither necessary nor desirable to do so. They are designed to shift your energy, not the energy of the recipient. Venting your feelings, rather than projecting them once again onto the other person, serves as the objective. Sending the angry letter, in particular, accomplishes nothing whatsoever. Doing so will only keep the attack-defense cycle going, and that will drag you deeper into the drama. Remember, as you shift your energy in the direction of Radical Forgiveness, the energy of the other person changes automatically.
You can either keep the letters for future reference or use them in a forgiveness ritual. My personal preference lies in using the ritual of fire to transform them. Something powerful happens when you see your words turn into ashes and rise up in a column of smoke.
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Forgiveness Rituals
The power of ritual is underestimated in our society today. When we ritualize any procedure, we make it sacred; thus the ritual speaks directly to our soul. While rituals can be very simple or quite complex, the complexity matters less than the reverence you show the ritual. The ritual invites the participation of the divine in human affairs and, as such, represents another way of praying.
Rituals become all the more powerful when we create them ourselves. When devising your own rituals, be as creative as you can. However, here are some general guidelines and ideas you may want to use.
RITUAL WITH FIRE
Fire has always been the element of transformation and alchemy. Whenever we offer something up through fire, we tap into primordial beliefs in fire’s transformative power. For this reason, a ritual burning of a Radical Forgiveness worksheet, a release letter, or the letter trilogy provides a sense of completion and transformation. Carry out the burning with ceremony and reverence. Say a prayer as the item burns.
Burning scented woods, sage, sweetgrass, and incense will intensify any ritual and bring special significance to a forgiveness ceremony. The smoke from sage and sweetgrass also cleanses your aura, thus removing unwanted energies from your energy field.
RITUAL WITH WATER
Water possesses healing and cleansing qualities, and we give it the ability to make things holy. Ritualized washing, immersing, and floating can all be used to good effect. For example, instead of burning a release letter, fold it into a boat and let a fast-flowing stream of water take it away.
BE CREATIVE
Be creative with your rituals, and make them meaningful to you. You may recall the story of Jane, who had brain cancer and had put in the attic a box containing everything associated with a man who broke her heart. I asked her to take the box down from the attic and bring it with her to therapy. Had she not had a seizure and died before we could do so, we would have gone through the box, examining every item in it and what it meant to her. Then we would have disposed of them one by one with a ritual bearing meaning for her. This process would have released much repressed energy.
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Artful Forgiveness
Art provides a powerful tool for forgiveness and emotional release. One of the most dramatic healings through art I have ever been privileged to witness and/or participate in occurred at the retreat I did in England. One of the participants was a young woman with multiple sclerosis. Her body was weak and wasted, and her voice was hardly audible. Her throat chakra was virtually shut down. She had a husband and two children, but the marriage was basically nonexistent, and she felt trapped, helpless, and hopeless.
At one point during a group art therapy session, she began to draw in a particularly striking fashion. She could not talk, but she kept drawing and drawing. It was hard to discern what she was drawing, but it became clear over time that she was using the medium as a way to regress herself and release old childhood pain.
My wife and I sat there with her as she drew hour after hour, her drawings becoming more and more childlike as time went on. In addition to her pictures, occasionally she would scrawl phrases like “bad girl” and “God doesn’t love me” and other words indicating deep shame, guilt, and fear. Finally, she made a crude stick drawing of what she later was able to recall as childhood rape by an uncle. In this cathartic release, she was able to express in drawings what she had found impossible to say in words and sounds. Her throat chakra had shut down because of what she had been forced to do with her mouth. (Her uncle had made her have oral sex with him.) Suddenly, art became an outlet for memories and emotions that had remained repressed for many years. These memories and emotions were responsible for her illness.
To support this woman in her catharsis, my wife went to the far end of the rather large room in which we were holding the retreat. We then asked her to use her voice to tell my wife that she was a good girl, and that God loved her. I made her do it louder and louder until she was shouting at the top of her lungs. After she had shouted “God loves me!” about twenty times, she stopped and looked at me and affirmed, “He rea
lly does love me, doesn’t he?” That healing moment I will never forget.
Three months after we got back from England, we received a letter from her saying that she had left her husband, gotten a new place to live, and found a job. She was using her voice and asking for what she wanted, and she was finding that she had the power not only to ask but also to receive. She had even started a support group for people with multiple sclerosis and was doing art therapy with them. Her strength was returning day by day, and after three years we still hear from her and marvel at her continuously increasing strength.
If you are not a verbally inclined person and are not comfortable writing things down, try drawing. You may be surprised by what happens when you communicate in this manner. Buy some decent-sized white and black paper as well as some colored pastel chalks and crayons. (The pastels work really well on the black paper.)
Know that to use this tool requires no artistic talent whatsoever: it is not about painting pretty pictures. In fact, if you are full of anger, your pictures will probably be anything but pretty. It is about getting emotions and thoughts out on paper.
Begin drawing with no expectations or preconceived ideas. You might ask God or your spirit guides to help you release through the process of drawing and coloring whatever needs releasing—and then simply start. Whatever wants to come, allow it. Do not judge. Just go with the flow. Do it like a meditation. If you want to tell a story, do that. If you just want to use color, do that. Do whatever you feel like doing.
To use art therapy as a forgiveness tool, use an approach similar to that of the letter trilogy. Do a series of drawings that express how you felt about what a particular person did to you; these pictures would express your anger, fear, pain, sadness, and so on. Then move into a more compassionate and understanding frame of mind and do some drawings that reflect this attitude. Do a third set that expresses the feeling of Radical Forgiveness. You might want to put some time between each phase, or you can do them all in the same sitting. Make sure, however, that once you start doing this art therapy, you complete all three stages—even if you only do three drawings in all. Doing just the first one, for example, might leave you stuck in anger.
As you finish each picture, hang it on a wall. Place the pictures in the precise order in which you complete them, and create a vertical or horizontal band on the wall with them. If you are creating a vertical display, begin with the first of the angry ones at the bottom and end with the last Radical Forgiveness one at the top. When you place them in such a manner, you will be amazed to see the progression and the change in the quality of the energy each picture expresses.
Title each drawing and date it. Spend some time with the drawings. Let them “speak” to you. While you were drawing each picture, you were thinking certain thoughts. When you look at the drawing later, clear your mind of those thoughts and examine the pictures for anything else of importance. Invite others you trust to give you their interpretations of the pictures; they may see things you do not. Ask for their input by saying, “If this were your picture, what would you see?” If what they see resonates with you, fine. If it does not really ring true for you, that is fine too. They see into your drawing through their own subconscious, not yours, but you will find that other people’s observations will trigger within you a whole new way of looking at your drawings, and you may have some new insights as a result.
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Satori Breathwork
As we have discussed previously, suppressed or repressed emotions have toxic effects on both our mental and physical health. Releasing these emotions serves as the first step in the Radical Forgiveness process. We can release held emotions most quickly and most effectively by using a process called Satori Breathwork, with the guidance of an experienced teacher. (Satori is a Japanese word meaning “insight” or “awakening.”)
Satori Breathwork is usually done lying on your back and involves breathing with full awareness in a circular pattern. In other words, you consciously breathe in a manner that has no pause between the in-breath and the out-breath. Carefully selected music is played rather loudly throughout the process.
The person breathes for forty to sixty minutes through an open mouth, sometimes long and deep into the abdomen and at other times fast and shallow into the upper chest. This oxygenates the body to such an extent that the body releases from its cells suppressed emotion that has crystallized into energy particles within the cells. As these energy particles are released, the person often becomes consciously aware of these old feelings in present time.
The feelings may be expressed as pure emotion, such as sadness, anger, or despair, unattached to any memory associated with them. Conversely, the memory of an event, idea, association, or misperception that caused the emotion to be felt and suppressed in the first place may come sharply into focus. It may even surface in a symbolic way or in the form of a metaphor. For each person and in each breathing session, the experience is different—as well as impossible to predict.
As emotions come up, the person “breathes through” them, which allows the person not only to feel them fully but to release them. We often stop breathing to hold emotions in check, so breathing through them allows this feeling and release to take place. In some cases, the person expresses them verbally and kinesthetically while breathing. No matter how the emotions are released, almost invariably a sense of profound calm and deep peace results from the process.
This simple technique provides dramatic and long-lasting healing effects. I have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone who is serious about wanting to clear out their emotional closet. (See Further Resources for more information.)
The effects of Satori Breathwork are profound precisely because they happen completely within the person, without any interjection, guidance, steering, or manipulation whatsoever by the facilitator. In fact, a facilitator is only present to hold the space as safe and support the breather in moving through the feelings—which sometimes can be scary—rather than suppressing them again. I would not recommend that you do this process on your own for that reason.
Conscious connected breathing is also called rebirthing, because researchers have found that breathwork gives us access to memories and emotions lodged in our cells as early as our in utero experience, during the actual birth process, and soon after birth. Birth represents our first major life trauma, and we form profound ideas about struggle, abandonment, safety, and acceptance as we go through this experience. These ideas often become beliefs that literally run our lives. When someone re-experiences their birth and releases the traumas and beliefs they formed at that time, their lives change dramatically.
Another great benefit of Satori Breathwork comes from the fact that it integrates new energy patterns into our existing energy fields and restructures our subtle bodies accordingly. This means that when you shift your perception, have an insight, or release old emotional patterns, breathwork integrates this into your body’s data banks. Using the computer analogy, it is as if breathwork serves as a downloading process in which data currently stored in the short-term computer memory is transferred to the hard drive for permanent storage.
This also explains why Satori Breathwork is so important in the Radical Forgiveness process. It accomplishes these tasks, not just at the beginning of the process for the purpose of emotional release, but afterward too, when our belief systems change and all the resulting changes in our energy fields need integrating. The integration process anchors the changes in our bodies and helps prevent us from going back to our old ways.
I would suggest that you have between ten and twenty supervised breathing sessions over a period of time, which may take up to a year. After that, you can probably do the breathing process on your own.
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The Radical Release Letter
The Release Letter is an adaptation of a letter given to me by hypnotherapist and mind/body therapist Dr. Sharon Forrest of the Forrest Foundation, a nonprofit corporation dedicated to alternative holistic healin
g, located in Mexico.
The Release Letter proclaims to your Higher Self and to every part of your being that you give full permission for all aspects of unforgiveness still remaining in any situation to be released. It also serves as an instrument of self-forgiveness, for it recognizes that you have created the experiences as a way to learn and to grow.
Photocopy the letter as written on the following page and enlarge it to an appropriate size. To use the Release Letter, fill in the blanks, have it witnessed by someone, and then burn it in a ritual manner.
Date: _____ Name: _____
Dear Higher Self:
I, _____, hereby grant you, my Higher Self, my Soul, my Super-Conscious Mind, my DNA, my cellular memory, and all parts of myself that might want to hold onto unforgiveness for whatever reason, permission to release all of the misunderstandings, unfounded beliefs, misinterpretations, and misguided emotions, wherever they may reside, whether in my body, my unconscious mind, my DNA, my conscious mind, my subconscious mind, my unconscious mind, my chakras, and even my Soul, and I ask all those who want the best for me to assist in this releasing process.
I, _____, thank you, my Soul, for creating the experiences that created the unforgiveness, and I realize that on some level they have all been my teachers and have offered opportunities for me to learn and grow. I accept the experiences without judgment and do hereby release them to the nothingness from which they came.
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