Unconditional forgiveness is one of the more challenging lessons I’ve come up against. “How do you forgive someone who has committed the most horrid acts against you?”, your ego might ask. I would switch it around to ask, “How can you allow whatever or whoever that hurt you continue to do so by attaching your identity to it and giving is power over you?”. My challenges may not be as severe as many others, but nevertheless, they remain as stuck in my ego as anyone else’s. Hence, they are as difficult to get rid of as anyone else’s. It is first when you have truly granted unconditional forgiveness that you will realise the healing power and how counter productive it was to hold on to the traumatic event. The good news is that it is within everyone’s power to give and receive unconditional forgiveness.

Unconditional forgiveness does relate to the earlier article I wrote on “Healing Permission – The First Step In Healing“. You have to give yourself permission to heal from your trauma in order for the healing to begin. You may feel that nobody’s going to take the pain away from you because only you know how it feels? Yes it is true, but is that pain serving you to giving you a better life? You may even feel guilty for feeling that way. It is a vicious spiral that only serves to perpetuate your negative emotions.

Forgiveness has nothing to do with anyone else but you; you own that power. It is each and everyone of our jobs to do it; forgive yourself and others. You don’t need anyone’s forgiveness for what you may have done to them, but you do need to forgive yourself for what you have done and the choices you made that led to your traumatic experiences. Then of course you need to forgive the perpetrators of those events.

It takes true strength and power to forgive someone that has not asked for it. Those driven and controlled by ego will claim that forgiveness is for the feeble and weak, but I disagree, it takes great courage and determination to unconditionally forgive someone. Try it and you will see if the territory you venture into is for those of a weak constitution, c’mon I dare ya! 🙂

In my practice I pay attention to my thoughts and emotions that arise. Whenever shame, guilt, anger, bitterness, etc. comes to my consciousness I fill my heart space with energy and love, observe the emotion and say, aloud or in my head, “I forgive you” and feel the emotion flow away or drain into the ground. Wow, what release that is! After 45 odd years on this earth, not of course counting ancestral and past life karma, one has added quite a bit to the ol’ karma tab that will come up for healing, so expect to be doing this for as long as it takes. The end goal is for you to feel as peace and you need to do what you must to reach that.

There are countless stories where victims have gone on to perform greatness after fully forgiving their perpetrators, so the healing power of unconditional forgiveness is well documented in anecdotal evidence. If we can each embody this concept and gift our children with this power we will leave a far better world behind, like Robert Goodwin Sr. did for his children: https://edition.cnn.com/2017/04/18/us/cleveland-victims-family-we-forgive-killer-cnntv/index.html