Exercise in Transformation
To transform the victim archetype, practice the following: Every time you watch the news, shift your consciousness from one of judgment to one of seeing the perfection in the situation. Instead of accepting at face value a story about racial prejudice, for example, help transform the energy of racial disharmony. Do so by looking at the person or situation that would ordinarily receive your judgment and censure and see if instead you can move into a space of loving acceptance. Know that the people in the story are living out their part in the divine plan. Do not see anyone as a victim and refuse to label anyone a villain. People are just acting in dramas being played out so that healing can occur. Remember, God does not make mistakes!
12
The Ego Fights Back
By reminding us that we are spiritual beings having a human experience, Radical Forgiveness raises our vibration and moves us in the direction of spiritual evolution.
Such growth represents a real threat to the ego (defined here as the deep-seated, complex belief system that says we are separated from God and that He will one day punish us for choosing that separation). This is because the more spiritually evolved we become, the more likely it is that we will remember who we are—and that we are one with God.
Once we have this realization, the ego must die. If there is one thing we know about belief systems of any kind, they resist all attempts at making them wrong—and the ego is no exception. (People demonstrate all the time that they would rather be right than happy.)
Therefore, the more we use Radical Forgiveness, the more the ego fights back and tries to seduce us into remaining addicted to the victim archetype. One way it accomplishes this task is by using our own tools of spiritual growth. A good example of this is found in the ego’s use of “inner child work” to keep us stuck in victimhood.
Inner child work gives us a way to look within and heal the wounds of childhood that we still carry within us as adults and that continue to affect our lives today. In our focus on our woundedness, however, the ego sees an opportunity. It exploits the kind of inner child work that uses the inner child as a metaphor for our woundedness, in order to strengthen our attachment to the victim archetype. The behavior this gives rise to is the constant revisiting of our wounds, giving them power through constantly speaking about them, projecting them onto a so-called inner child, and using them as the means to finding intimacy.
Much of the inner child work of the 1980s focused heavily on blaming our parents, or someone else, for the fact that we were unhappy as adults. The idea “I would be happy today if it weren’t for my parents” is the mantra associated with this work. It gives us permission to feel that “they did this to us,” a perception that is much easier to live with than believing that we have somehow requested to be treated in this manner. Such a viewpoint automatically recreates us as victim. As long as we continue to blame our parents for our problems, each succeeding generation continues this belief pattern.
I do not wish to imply that getting in touch with our repressed childhood rage and pain and finding ways to release it are bad. In fact, doing so is essential. We must first do this work before moving on to forgiveness, for we cannot forgive if we are angry. But too many workshops and therapies focus purely on the anger and fail to help us transform it through forgiveness of any kind. When we couple anger work with Radical Forgiveness, all sorts of repressed emotional and mental toxicity are cleared and the permanent release of anger becomes possible. Thus we move out of woundedness and beyond victimhood.
THE NAVAJO FORGIVENESS RITUAL
I once heard Caroline Myss, author of Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can, describe the ritual that the Navajo used for preventing woundology from becoming an addictive pattern. While they certainly recognized the need for people to speak of their wounds and to have them witnessed by the group, they understood that speaking about their wounds gave the wounds power, especially when done to excess. Therefore, if a person had a wound or a grievance to share, the tribe would meet and the person could bring it to the circle. This person was allowed to air his grievance three times, and everyone listened with empathy and compassion. On the fourth occasion, however, as the person came into the circle, everyone turned their backs. “Enough! We have heard you express your concern three times. We have received it. Now let it go. We will not hear it again,” they said. This served as a powerful ritual of support for letting go of past pain.
Imagine what would happen if we were to support our friends in that same manner. What if, after they had complained about their wounds and their victimization three times, we then said, “I have heard you enough on this subject. It’s time you let it go. I will not give your wounds power over you any longer by allowing you to talk about them to me. I love you too much.”
I am sure that if we did this, many of our friends would call us traitors. They would likely see our behavior not as an act of pure, loving support but of betrayal, and they might turn against us immediately.
If we are to truly support each other on the journey of spiritual evolution, we have no choice but to take the risk, draw a line in the sand with those we love, and do our best to gently help move them beyond their addiction to their wounds. Such action will lead us to the achievement of our collective missions to transform the victim archetype and to remember who we really are.
13
Time, Medicine, and Forgiveness
Spiritual evolution brings with it a new appreciation for and knowledge of our physical bodies and how to care for them. The medical paradigm we have held for the last three hundred years—ever since the French philosopher René Descartes defined the body as a machine—is changing radically as it moves toward a holistic, mind-body approach.
We used to think of health as the absence of disease. Now we think of it in terms of how well our life force (prana, chi, etc.) flows through our bodies. For optimum health, this life force must be able to flow freely. We cannot be healthy if our bodies are clogged with the energy of resentment, anger, sadness, guilt, and grief.
When we speak here of the body, we include not only the physical body, which is also an energy body, but the subtle bodies that surround us as well. These we refer to individually as the etheric body, the emotional body, the mental body, and the causal body. Each has a different frequency. Whereas we used to define the physical body in terms of chemicals and molecules, physicists have taught us to see all five bodies, including the physical one, as dense condensations of interacting energy patterns.
The subtle fields envelop the physical body in layers like vibrating sheaths of energy, each one an octave higher than the previous. But they are not fixed bands with clear boundaries, as shown in Figure 10. Rather, they are to a large degree diffused within the same space, as if they were all part of an ocean of energy surrounding our bodies. The subtle bodies are not so much defined by their position in space as by the different frequencies at which they vibrate.
The subtle bodies resonate harmonically with the vibrating patterns of the physical body, enabling consciousness (mind) to interact with the body. This is what we mean when we speak of the body-mind continuum, with mind existing both inside and outside the physical body. (For more details on the qualities and purpose ascribed to each of these subtle bodies, refer to Chapter 15.)
To ground this concept in a practical analogy, think of our bodies as being like the filters typically found in home heating furnaces—the kind we have to clean from time to time to ensure the furnace works efficiently. Just as these filters are designed to allow air to move easily through them, the same is true of our bodies and the life force. Life force must be free to flow easily through all our bodies—our physical one and our subtle bodies too. (FIGURE 10)
FIGURE 10: The Subtle Energy Bodies
Whenever we judge, make someone wrong, blame, project, repress anger, hold resentment, and the like, we create an energy block in our body/bodies. Each time we do this, our filter becomes a little more blocked a
nd less energy remains available for our furnace. Sooner or later the filter fails, and, starved of the vital oxygen it must have to keep burning, the flame dies. More simply, when our physical and subtle bodies become too clogged for life force to flow through easily, our body starts to shut down. In many cases, this manifests first as depression. Eventually, our body gets sick, and, if the blocks are not removed, we may die.
You may recall how my sister, Jill, felt a release of energy when she moved into Radical Forgiveness. Her life force filter was blocked by her toxic belief system about her own lack of worthiness, not to mention past resentments, anger, sadness, and frustration over her current situation. When she let all that go, her energy blocks were cleared, which allowed her to shift her emotional state as well. Whenever you forgive radically, you release enormous amounts of life force energy that then can be made available for healing, creativity, and expressing your true purpose in life.
Farra’s Flu Release
My good friend Farra Allen, co-founder of the Atlanta School of Massage and a mind/body counselor, took ill with a particularly virulent strain of flu that typically keeps people in bed for ten days or more. It hit him hard, but instead of giving all his power to the virus, he decided to do some inner work around it, work that might shift the energy pattern holding the virus in place. Using a process known as active imagination, which simply involves writing down thoughts as a stream of consciousness, he came upon a hitherto unconscious and unresolved emotional issue. He used Radical Forgiveness to clear the issue, and the flu disappeared almost immediately. He was working full time and feeling great within two days of the onset of his illness. This was a powerful demonstration of the healing power of Radical Forgiveness.
Will Cancer Respond Too?
Suppose the illness had been cancer rather than the flu, and it was our belief that it had started as a deeply repressed emotion. Thinking the cure might lie in releasing that energy block, our recommendation would have have been that my friend get in touch with the repressed feelings, feel them fully, and then let them go.
However, unlike Farra’s flu attack, which probably moved from his subtle body into his physical body in just a few days, this energy pattern might have taken many years to move from the subtle body into the physical body and, in time, to manifest as a disease. The question that haunts us then becomes, how long will it take for the disease process to fully reverse itself using emotional release work alone? Conceivably, it could require the same number of years it took for the disease to manifest—not very practical if you have cancer or some other disease for which time is of the essence—or so it might seem, anyway.
Time Is a Factor in Healing
We used to think of time as something fixed and linear, until Einstein showed that time is a relative concept. In terms of how long it takes to heal a physical disease or condition, consciousness is definitely a factor. The more elevated our consciousness, the faster we create change in anything to which we give our focused attention.
Think of consciousness as our vibratory rate. It would probably take far too long to reverse the disease process of cancer energetically in a person with a low vibratory rate. It will automatically be low if we are in fear, hold anger and resentment, think of ourselves as a victim, and/or have our energy locked up in the past. For the majority of us, this represents our consciousness most of the time. Therefore, few of us could reverse a disease like cancer fast enough by relying solely on releasing the emotional cause of the disease—that is, unless we can find a way to raise our vibratory rate. (FIGURE 11)
Figure 11: Time and Healing
By letting go of the victim archetype and bringing our energy into present time through the process of Radical Forgiveness, we may be able to raise our vibration enough to create at least a quicker, if not immediate, disease reversal. We improve our chances if we also incorporate other ways of raising our vibration, such as prayer and meditation.
Here is an example. A woman who attended one of our retreats had had several surgeries for ovarian cancer, and her doctors had recently given her three months at the most to live. She was depressed and had little life force left. She said she only came to the retreat because the people in her church had collected the money for her to come, so she felt obliged to do so. We worked with her, and on the third day she had a wonderful breakthrough that put her in touch with an event that had occurred when she was two-and-a-half years old and had made her believe herself to be utterly worthless. She released a lot of emotion around that issue and grieved for the countless number of times she had created her life in ways that proved her worthlessness. After that, her life force energy increased. By the time she left, she was all fired up to find an alternative program that would help her beat the cancer and the doctor’s prognosis. She was even willing to travel outside the U.S. if the method she chose was illegal in this country. (Many treatments are illegal in the U.S.)
After two weeks of frantically searching for the treatment to which she felt most drawn, she suddenly realized that her healing would come through prayer. So she went away to a place in upstate New York and worked with a couple who offered prayer weeks: she literally prayed for a week. Upon her return, she went to her oncologist, who examined her and said, “I don’t know how to explain this, but you have absolutely no cancer in your body. I could say it was a spontaneous remission, but I believe in God, and I am not willing to describe it in any other way than as a miracle.”
This woman serves as a wonderful example of how raising the vibration through prayer reversed the physical condition in days rather than years. I believe that Radical Forgiveness would have done the same.
Seattle Forgiveness Study
An interesting but as yet unpublished study on forgiveness and time was conducted at Seattle University. It involved a series of interviews with people who, by their own assessment, had been victimized. The researchers wanted to see how that perception changed over time. Preliminary findings showed that serenity, which was described as “having no resentment left,” came not through any act of forgiveness but as a sudden discovery that the participants had indeed forgiven. All reported that the more they tried to forgive, the harder it became and the more resentment they felt. They stopped trying to forgive and just let go. After varying intervals of time came the surprising realization that they no longer harbored resentment and that they had, in fact, forgiven.
A later and even more interesting discovery revealed that the realization that they had forgiven was preceded by being forgiven themselves. (Who forgave them and for what was irrelevant.) What this certainly points to is that forgiveness is a shift in energy. Having experienced being forgiven—a release of stuck energy—they were able to release their own stuck energy with someone else virtually automatically.
This study not only reinforces the insight that forgiveness cannot be willed but also shows that forgiveness happens as an internal transformation through a combination of surrendering one’s attachment to resentment and accepting forgiveness for oneself. The study’s results also underscore the value of step nine in the twelve-step process used successfully by millions of people in Alcoholics Anonymous and other similar programs. Step nine asks that we seek to make amends to those we have harmed and that we ask them for forgiveness. When we find that we have in fact been forgiven, this frees our own energy to forgive not only others but ourselves as well.
Some might argue that the Seattle study illustrates the slowness of the forgiveness process and shows that forgiveness would offer a rather ineffective method for curing a disease such as cancer. In many cases, it took people decades to discover that they had forgiven.
The important distinction to make, however, is that the study did not distinguish between Radical Forgiveness and traditional forgiveness. What it described was definitely the latter. I would be willing to wager that, if the subject group had been divided into two—one group with insight into Radical Forgiveness and the other left basically to use traditional forgiveness—the
group with the additional insight would have reached the state of serenity infinitely more quickly than the other group.
I am not claiming that Radical Forgiveness always occurs instantaneously either—though I have to say I have seen it happen instantaneously many times now. Neither can it be claimed as a definitive cure for cancer. However, it certainly should be an integral part of any treatment protocol. Sometimes people even delay medical treatment to see if Radical Forgiveness creates enough of an effect to make such drastic intervention unnecessary. That would be unthinkable with traditional forgiveness.
Mary’s Story
My friend Mary, a co-facilitator at many of my retreats, denied for months that something was terribly wrong with her health. When she could not ignore the obvious any longer, she went to a doctor who told her she had stage three colon cancer—they wanted to operate immediately. She asked them for thirty days, and they reluctantly agreed. She went to a little cabin in the mountains and stayed there for a week, meditating and working on forgiving all the people in her life, including herself, using Radical Forgiveness. She fasted, prayed, cried, and literally went through the dark night of the soul. She came back home and worked with several practitioners to cleanse her body and strengthen her immune system.
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