Hello, and welcome back to the Heal With Affirmations Podcast. Today, I want to talk about an important topic, and that is the topic of forgiveness.
Forgiveness is one of the most important steps in the affirmations practice, and especially when getting started, but it is also one of the most invaluable tools for life.
Often, when we get started with affirmations, we want to affirm for a relationship, a job, or money.
But most of the time, affirming for these things doesn't materialize well because deeper patterns are at play that prevent us from manifesting them in the way that we want.
This means that we need to go deeper before manifesting these goodies, and resolve the patterns that prevent us from having them.
These patterns were often created by a past experience or some kind of trauma or issue, and they continue to operate in our life until we clear them.
But on this note, I want to emphasize that these past experiences don’t have to be dramatic or tragic. I think many of us who come to this work expect, and may even want to see, something very dramatic or painful that has happened that is behind the present blockages.
It might be the case, but it doesn’t have to be the case. There are as many different issues as there are people, some of them are difficult, some of them not, and that is fine. The idea is to be open to understanding and to resolve the blockages whatever they may be, so we can move on to creating the life we say we want.
WHAT IS FORGIVENESS
So what is forgiveness?
There are many interpretations as to what forgiveness is. From religious ideas to theories in psychology, different people, spiritual groups, philosophies, and schools of thought, all have different definitions of what forgiveness is.
I don't want to get hung up with semantics, but I do care to talk about what forgiveness is from the perspective of us having firsthand experience with affirmations and healing. So I want to be specific about some key concepts when it comes to what forgiveness really is.
For starters, forgiveness is not just a nice word, it is a real experience, and not an imagined one projected out of a definition or a belief.
Like I emphasized in the first episode of this podcast, there is no amount of theories and explanations that substitute for your firtshand experience with affirmations, healing, and the true manifestation work.
When you practice affirmations for releasing the past and forgiving yourself and others, you will know for yourself what it means to forgive. And you will know it as an experience, not some kind of definition that you're trying to fit your experience into.
So in our context, what does it mean to forgive?
The answer is that forgiveness means releasing yourself from the negative energy or the unwanted pattern.
You might not like this simple definition, and I don’t blame you because many of us have been taught that forgiveness is a very loaded topic, if not an obscure one.
But as I’ve told you before, the complicated mind is not good at healing. In fact, decomplicating the mind is a big part of healing. And people who want to make it sound like these things are beyond your understanding, are usually the gurus and priests who want to recruit followers and keep you in place.
In our common understanding, we think of forgiveness as having to do with forgiving someone, because the issue that needs to be forgiven often involves another person, being hurt by them, or feeling resentful toward them.
So we often think of forgiveness as being tied to that person, and we think that forgiving them means that they have to apologize to us, or we have to accept their poor behavior, or accept that they were right, and things like that.
But in truth, forgiveness is none of these. In fact, forgiveness has very little to do with other people.
I appreciate that this idea might challenge you at first and you might feel resistant to it. But I invite you to do forgiveness affirmations and see what materializes for you.
If you want to heal, you cannot hang on to past thinking, unless of course, you’re happy with the results. As they say, if you like the results you’ve been getting, keep doing what you’ve been doing.
Remember what we talked about in our previous episode, your willingness to change is the master key.
Forgiveness is an inside job, because it is about releasing yourself from the negative energy.
When you appreciate that forgiveness is about releasing yourself from the resentment or the whatever, you won't be concerned about whether that person was right or wrong or whether you were right or wrong.
Forgiveness is tangential to all this. You will be more concerned about freeing yourself from the bind to what happened. This also means that forgiveness is not always tied to an episode with another person, it can be about any experience that binds us to a negative moment or pattern.
Forgiveness is a lifting off of the attachment to the issue, and that is why it can often feel like a release, a relief, an opening, or even sometimes, a miracle.
Because the issue that needs to be forgiven often creates blockages, releasing it can feel like something has been dropped or a veil has been lifted, and this can feel like a miracle, especially when it goes deep.
In a similar vein, paradigm shifts can also feel like a release or an unveiling, as our realizations create a depth of clarity that permeates our consciousness, and this too can feel like a miracle of sorts.
But let me say this early on in this podcast. Describing our spiritual experiences uses a wide range of interesting and beautiful metaphors, but I wish for you not to be caught up in them. They are only metaphors and you will need to discover for yourself what your own process of healing and forgiveness is like.
While these metaphors are often helpful to make a point about intangible experiences, they have too often been taken literally and have been confused with the process itself. So spiritual seekers look for them thinking they are the end goal.
And yes, as you might expect, I will warn you against the priests and gurus who try to sell you these metaphors without insisting that you be the leader of your own spiritual journey. Do not follow others, follow your own unique journey, and just pick up interesting ideas along the way.
So, to begin the process of forgiveness, start by appreciating that forgiveness has very little to do with other people, and that it can materialize in a very different way from what you might expect.
HOW TO FORGIVE
So how do we forgive?
Of course, I appreciate that when you're first starting out, you don't know what to expect or how all this works.
You don’t know what to do to forgive. Not knowing what to do often keeps us stuck, precisely because we believe we need to do something.
We think about what actions we need to take in order to forgive, and this is often the case when there’s another person involved. We wonder how we need to behave around them, and what forgiving them means we need to do.
But for one, forgiveness is not an outward action, it is an inner state of release. And second, no action will have integrity when it is not in alignment with our inner wisdom.
This is why affirmations are so wonderful and powerful: They align our thinking and generate actions that have integrity with our higher self.
And all this means we do is repeating forgiveness affirmations over and over. We might not know how to behave around the other person, but we can repeat our affirmations. And in time, the outward expression of our affirmations materialize, although we cannot anticipate what they will be ahead of time.
The truth is that releasing the issue, our attachment to the issue, to blaming the other person, or to being right, will release us from having to do anything at all.
The secret is that our affirmations change us. We become a different person, a person who does not have the issue or resentment anymore, and who therefore does not have to worry about how to behave around this person or in relation to that issue.
I appreciate that this sounds mysterious and you don’t really know what it means. But if you’re looking for some kind of formula or instruction as to how to behave around a person, then you’re on the wrong track. There isn’t an instruction manual for this - not one that I would encourage you to follow anyway.
The only instructions I’m happy to offer you are about how to do affirmations. When you affirm long enough, your mindset changes and your outward behaviors will flow out of you naturally. They are unique to you and your circumstances.
Affirming helps us shift our consciousness and this shift leads us to act in enlightened ways that align with our inner wisdom. Our actions feel right and are effective, and the worries we had about that person or this issue dissolve.
The whole thing falls off, and in essence, this is your goal.
Affirm that you are willing to forgive, and your consciousness will begin to shift toward release, and clarity will open up.
Really, the only practical issue with all this is that you give your affirmations a chance and repeat them often enough so they materialize. This is part of having enough faith and willingness to change in order to get started with your affirmations, and then sticking with them long enough to see changes.
We talked about the willingness to change in the previous episode. It is a cornerstone of the affirmations practice, so I encourage you to listen to it if you haven’t already.
You will experience change if you consistently stick with your affirmations and for long enough. But it is not my job to promise you a guarantee. It is your job to commit to your changes and to your own discovery process.
You need to discover firsthand how your affirmations will help you forgive and heal, and how they enable you to manifest what you say you want.
So to sum up. How will you know what forgiveness is? When you go through the experience yourself.
And how do you line yourself up to experience forgiveness? By doing forgiveness affirmations, meaning repeating them over and over until your mindset shifts.
This is what this podcast is about, this is what I teach in it - how to do affirmations to create the changes you want to see. And again, and again, it is practicing affirmations that will create change - not theorizing about how and why they work.
FORGIVING YOURSELF
The master key to healing is to forgive ourself.
I find that many of our resentment toward others is in fact resentment toward ourself. It covers up the regret that we have for not having acted in a way we know we could have.
We could have been honest when the moment was right, we could have said no, we could have said yes, we could have spoken out, or we could have acted differently when we had the opportunity. But we didn’t, and this creates resentment toward ourself, which we often project onto the other person.
And beyond the issues involving other people, we have regrets about other things in life, like not doing some things for ourself, not having taken better advantage of our time, passing on some opportunities we should have taken, and so on.
There are long lists of regrets out there. All of us have them or have had them. I feel that the passing of time is a key player in this, and I will have more to say about this very important topic another time.
In all cases, releasing resentment and other negative states of mind toward ourself is critical because it unleashes our energy to live life in the way we want.
When we are upset with ourself, our attention and energy are taken up by this negative state. It gets in the way of the things we say we want to do in life. It clouds our thinking, it dampens our emotions, and it holds back our life force.
So instead of being fully engaged in life, we’re sort of just chugging along and not doing all the wonderful things we could be doing.
Regret is a bit like a ball and chain, so when you forgive yourself, you will find yourself with lots of momentum to move forward, embrace your life, and enjoy the many things you can do for yourself.
Forgiving yourself is a good place to start in your affirmations practice. You want to be free of all the regret and negative attachments to those past events. You want to give yourself a break from all the should-have-done’s and did-not-do’s.
Ask yourself, how long do you want to feel regretful and stuck in this state of unforgiveness?
Do you think you'd like to reach a point when these issues are behind you? Do you think you would like to be someone who has forgiven herself from regrets and negative attachments? Can you imagine your life without any regrets or hangups?
You deserve to forgive yourself and to be free from regrets. Give yourself a chance to live life free from past issues.
Another reason why it's important to forgive yourself is that it is often needed to manifest other things in your life.
Like I said earlier, if you start affirming for a job or a relationship, but you haven't done any forgiveness work before, you are not likely to manifest the job or the relationship, and instead will most probably come up against the deeper issues. You will then wonder why your affirmations are causing you to feel upset instead of attracting these goodies.
The reason is that the current issue you're having with the job or the relationship, which is leading you to do an affirmation about work, is probably rooted in a deeper state.
So these challenges are in fact helping you highlight the deeper issue, and your job or relationship affirmation was a gateway to unlock it.
Often, the same kind of issues keep coming up in your life until you clear their root cause. The fact that the problem is recurring, or as we say there is a pattern, is actually helpful because you can read it as life trying to tell you that you need to look at this more deeply.
When we're first getting started with affirmations, almost any affirmation we do about work, money, relationships, and other day to day matter, we might feel that things aren’t going anywhere, and in fact are getting worse. Indeed they often do before they get better. We might think that affirmations don’t work and that the whole process is ridiculous.
But what is happening is that the deeper issue is being highlighted. We are being guided to it, and that is what needs forgiveness.
It is often a frustrating process, because we're in a hurry to get the goodies of life. But it is a wonderful thing too because we have an opportunity to really get in there and dig out what is causing our present limitations.
You can't build on top of problems and expect positive results in your life. And you can’t really bypass the deeper work, it catches up with you sooner or later, and this too you can observe for yourself.
Once the issue is genuinely cleared, affirming for the job, the money, the relationship or whatever, materializes in positive ways.
That is why the affirmations work is not for people who like shallow results, like those who discover the manifestation work and go out shopping senselessly, going broke, and thinking this is an affirmation of abundance.
As with all first steps with affirmations, you might not know what it means to forgive yourself, what it means you need to do, or how to feel.
But again, this is where the power of affirmations comes through. When you affirm often and consistently, your mindset begins to shift and the possibility of healing appears. You will be able to see yourself as someone healed. Change becomes tangible, and from there healing happens.
Your path is unique and the process is yours to discover. The only guidance here is that you pick up a forgiveness affirmation and commit to repeating it often.
Your goal is to heal and live your life to the fullest. Give yourself the gift of forgiveness.
FORGIVING OTHERS
What about forgiving others?
When it comes to forgiving others, we are often entrenched in the idea that we're right. We get stuck in self-righteous resentment. These feelings are often associated with the idea that forgiveness means we need to accept that person’s behavior.
I feel this is mostly an issue when our relationship with that person is ongoing. We’re not sure how to behave around them without coming across as accepting their bad behavior.
It might be less of an issue when we have severed our relationship with them, although we often continue to feel resentful afterwards, which is another sign that forgiveness has much more to do with us than with the other person.
Our self-righteous resentment does nothing to the other person, but it does keep us stuck.
Why would we hang on to such an apparently useless attitude? The answer is that it is not useless. What’s interesting is that our resentment actually serves a purpose.
We hang on to resentment, negative emotions, and seemingly unsupportive patterns, because on a deeper level, they serve a purpose.
What purpose might our resentment toward someone serve?
It can be the need to be right, or it can be a form of protection, or It can be covering up some pain or embarrassment. These are just a few examples and there are many possibilities because our experiences are unique.
Forgiveness affirmations help us release these needs along with the resentment, the negative feeling, or pattern.
So think about how your resentment might be serving you in some way. What might you be getting out of it? Is it protecting you in some way? Is it that you needed to be right? Was there some kind of image of yourself that you needed to uphold? There are many questions we can ask to probe into the issue so follow your own path.
From the get-go you can see that looking at something or someone in your life can tell you a lot about yourself. This is a masterkey in the affirmations work:
Life is a mirror.
Just about everything in our life is mirroring something within us. What we dislike in someone is in us in some form or other.
We will talk more about what it means for life to be a mirror, but when it comes to forgiving someone, it is a good idea to realize that we contributed to the situation.
On the day to day level of things, we might not see how this is possible, especially with more challenging situations, nevermind abusive ones.
But when we do the affirmations work, and we appreciate how our thoughts, beliefs, and other aspects of our consciousness create and attract our experiences, we can see things with a different pair of eyes.
This kind of soul-searching helps us understand ourself better. It is also fun because we discover interesting things about our life and how it played out in deeper ways. Of course, I appreciate this can be painful, but clarity is a true gift. Doing affirmations is in fact an amazing tool to cultivate our spiritual vision.
Appreciating how we create our experiences further enhances our understanding that forgiveness has very little to do with the other person. It is not related to approving or disapproving of their behavior, and it does not involve figuring out how we need to behave around them.
Forgiveness means releasing ourself from the issue. It is an inner release. It is an inside job.
When we accept this, we won’t fret about the other person. We don’t even have to accept any of these ideas, we can just do our forgiveness affirmations and discover the process for ourself.
In other words, we don’t have to think about how to behave around them. Instead, we practice our forgiveness affirmations to change our mindset. Our improved mindset will in turn take care of the outer manifestations and our behavior.
The work is inside out.
When you try to engineer it as outside in, you will most likely be misaligned. And you can’t engineer every one of your actions.
With affirmations, your inner state changes and manifests naturally across the multitude of interactions you have with the outside world.
So what happens with the other person once you forgive simply depends on your specifics. You might continue to have a relationship with them or you might not. And your interaction with them will be unique and appropriate to the moment.
This is the power of affirmations. You don't figure out the how's, and in fact, you can’t, because there are external factors at play.
You affirm for yourself, and your consciousness shifts. And soon enough you become a person who doesn't have that issue. So the issue falls off.
You can discover this firsthand.
Although using affirmations to purge resentment and other upsets can be a difficult process, it is necessary to till the soil of your mind, so you can actually sow seeds that can bloom into what you want.
Wouldn't you want to know what it feels like to be on the other side of forgiveness?
Give yourself a chance to practice affirmations, and discover how you can genuinely free yourself from the binds of unforgiveness.
AFFIRMATIONS FOR FORGIVENESS
Doing affirmations for forgiveness is one of the quickest ways to heal yourself. If you haven't done healing work before, if you're going through a tough time, or if you have a general malaise in life, then it's a good idea to do forgiveness work.
So let’s talk about what forgiveness affirmations you can use to get started on this work.
Remember that for an affirmation to be effective you need to repeat it often. And repeating it in front of the mirror, looking into your eyes is even more powerful.
Here are some really good affirmations to get started with:
I forgive myself, I forgive others, and I am free.
This simple affirmation can have sweeping effects on your consciousness.
To focus on self-forgiveness, you can try this one:
I forgive myself totally and I love myself unconditionally.
Loving yourself is the key to a happy and fulfilling life and I will have more to say about it in coming episodes. Forgiving yourself and loving yourself go hand in hand.
Here is another one:
I easily forgive myself and others. I let go and I flow with Life.
This next one by Louise Hay is one of my all time favorites for releasing the past:
I forgive everyone in my past for all perceived wrongs and I move into love.
You can also come up with your own affirmations. In my Workbook, you will find guidelines for how to create affirmations and I’ve also talked about it in the first episode, but it’s pretty straightforward: Affirm your good, and state it in present tense. And once you've got your affirmation, repeat it often.
When you get started with affirmations, especially with forgiveness and self-love affirmations, you are likely to experience a lot of emotion.
There are many possible reasons for this, but often it has to do with re-living something painful, and because your attachment to the issue is being extracted. You can think of it as spiritual surgery.
At the same time, you are seeing your own vulnerabilities, and your heart is softening toward yourself. You are developing real compassion for yourself, and you will begin to appreciate yourself in deeper and more authentic ways.
Despite the challenges, I wish for you not to give up on your affirmations. A common mistake is to think that we have uprooted what needs to be removed, but often, there’s more work. So stick with the process and don’t be quick to wrap this affirmations cycle. You could be led to do another affirmation, but again don’t be quick to switch. With experience, you will feel these things out.
You are tilling the soil of your mind, and you want a real clearing, otherwise you will keep recreating the pattern and attracting these unwanted experiences.
And again, if you avoid doing forgiveness affirmations and go straight to doing money or job or relationship affirmations, you will probably come up against the deeper issues at some point, which is just fine if that’s the path you want to take.
Doing this work takes courage and I am so happy that you're here with me. I hope these ideas inspire you to begin your forgiveness affirmations. Remember, no one can do your affirmations for you. The fruits of this work are yours to discover.