I strode back to my class; to a person, they were sitting there aghast with their mouths gaping. (You don’t talk to religious figures like that!) “Right,” I said, pointing to each one of them in turn, “I want to know what you are feeling right now, in this moment, and don’t give me that B.S. that you have given it to the violet flame and you are feeling peaceful, because it is obvious that you are not. What are you feeling? Get real!”
Well, as you might expect, they were in their feelings big time, and we started to discuss them. With the help of the monk, I had broken through their wall of resistance to acknowledging that humans have feelings and that feelings are okay. I had busted their story. They had been doing the spiritual bypass, and I let them know it.
At noon I went out of the room into the lobby. The monk was there. I went straight up to him and, much to his surprise and consternation, hugged him. “Thank you so much,” I said. “You were a healing angel for me today. You were my seminar. You saved the whole thing.”
He really didn’t know what to say. I don’t think he got it either, even when I tried to explain it to him. He had calmed down, though, and it turned out that all he was upset about was that I had not rung the bell to let him know we were there. He had been sitting in his room waiting for the bell to ring, not thinking that we might push open the door and go on in. Can you imagine getting so enraged about such a small thing? Do you think he might have had an abandonment or “not good enough” issue running?
That seven-day retreat became one of the best workshops I have ever done, and that’s because the participants got real and became authentic. I took them into their pain, some of which dated back to wartime incidents they had never shared before. They came to realize that the power to heal is in the feelings—not in talking or thinking, not in affirmations, and not even in meditation if it involves shutting out feelings.
Another myth is that there are two kinds of feelings, positive and negative, and that negative ones must be avoided. The truth is that there is no such thing as a negative emotion. Emotions only become “bad” and have a negative effect on us when they are suppressed, denied, or unexpressed. Positive thinking is really just another form of denial.
We Want the Emotional Experience
As human beings, we are blessed with the capability to feel our emotions. In fact, some say the only reason we have chosen this human experience arises from the fact that this is the only planet carrying the vibration of emotional energy, and we have come here precisely to experience it. Consequently, when we do not allow ourselves to experience the full range of emotions and instead suppress them, our souls create situations in which we are literally forced to feel them. (Have you noticed that people are often given opportunities to feel intense emotions just after having prayed for spiritual growth?)
This means that the whole point of creating an upset may simply lie in our soul’s desire to provide an opportunity for us to feel a suppressed emotion. That being the case, simply allowing ourselves to have the feeling may allow the energy to move through us, and the so-called problem to disappear immediately.
But not all situations are dissolved so easily. When we try to cope with a deep-seated issue and a remembrance of what seems an unforgivable transgression, such as sexual abuse, rape, or physical abuse, it takes more than just experiencing our emotions to get to the point where we feel unconditional love for the other person. Feeling the emotion fully is just the first step in faking it until we make it, and it definitely cannot be bypassed.
I am not saying that emotional work will not benefit from insight gained through a shift in perception that might have occurred before the emotions were felt and expressed. It certainly will. But the converse does not hold true; the perceptual shift required for Radical Forgiveness will not happen if the underlying repressed feelings are not released first.
Invariably, when we feel the desire to forgive someone or something, we have at some time felt anger toward them or it. Anger actually exists as a secondary emotion. Beneath anger lies a primary emotional pain, such as hurt pride, shame, frustration, sadness, terror, or fear. Anger represents energy in motion emanating from the suppression of that pain. Not allowing one’s anger to flow can be likened to trying to cap a volcano. One day it will blow!
Stages one and two of Radical Forgiveness ask us to get in touch with not only the anger but the underlying emotion as well. This means feeling it—not talking about it, analyzing it, or labeling it, but experiencing it!
LOVE YOUR ANGER
All too often when people talk about “letting go” of anger or “releasing” anger, they really mean trying to get rid of it. They judge it as wrong and undesirable, even frightening. They do not want to feel it, so they just talk about it and try to process it intellectually, but that does not work. Trying to process emotion through talking about it is just another way to resist feeling it. That’s why most talk therapies don’t work. What you resist persists. Since anger represents energy in motion, resisting it just keeps it stuck within us—until the volcano erupts. Releasing anger actually means freeing the stuck energy of held emotions by allowing them to move freely through the body as feeling. Doing some kind of anger work helps us experience this emotion purposefully and with control.
Anger Work Moves Energy
What we call anger work is not really about anger. It is simply the process of getting energy that is stuck in the body moving again. It might be more appropriately called energy release work. Whatever we call it, the process can be as simple as screaming into a cushion (so as not to alarm neighbors), yelling in the car, beating cushions, chopping wood, or doing some other explosive physical activity.
Combining physical activity with the use of the voice seems to provide the key to successful energy release work. All too often we block the energy of emotion—whether it be anger, sadness, guilt, or something else—in the throat, so vocal expression should always be a part of the process. We should go into it not with the idea of trying to rid ourselves of the feeling, but with the intention of feeling the intensity of it moving through our body—without thought or judgment. If we truly can surrender to the emotions, we will feel more alive than we have felt in a long while, and we will find that the energy has dissipated.
If Anger Is Scary
For many of us, the thought of bringing up anger may be too scary even to contemplate, especially if terror lies underneath the anger. The person who did these terrible things to us may still exert a strong influence on our subconscious mind. Under these circumstances, it is not advisable to do anger work alone. Instead, we should work with someone who knows how to support us while we feel both the anger and the terror—someone with whom we feel safe and who has experience in helping people to move through intense emotion. A counselor or psychotherapist of some kind would be a good choice. I also recommend doing Satori Breathwork (see Chapter 27) with a skilled practitioner. This provides a way to release emotion.
Anger Addiction Warning
A note of caution needs to be sounded here. It becomes all too easy to get addicted to anger. Anger feeds on itself and easily becomes resentment. Resentment relishes going over and over an old hurt, constantly revisiting the pain associated with it, and venting the resultant anger in some form. It becomes a powerful addiction in and of itself.
We must realize that anger that persists serves no useful purpose. Consequently, once the energy of anger has been allowed to flow as feeling, we should use the energy to create a positive outcome. Maybe we need to set a boundary or a condition on future interactions with the person around whom our anger revolves. Perhaps we can make a decision of some kind, such as being willing to feel compassion for the person or forgive him or her. Only when we use anger as the catalyst for positive change, self-empowerment, or forgiveness will we prevent it from becoming an addictive cycle.
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Collapsing the Story
The story is where the pain resides. It is what we write in Step 1 of the worksheet in the
next chapter to complete the sentence, “The situation around which I have an upset is or was...”
Since it appears to be the source of all our pain and discomfort, it is worth turning the spotlight on our victim story to see the extent to which it is real and whether holding onto the pain is justified. We might find that there’s very little in it that is actually true. We might find that it is just a story we have created to keep us stuck in separation in order to reinforce our belief that we are not all one. It might also be that we have created this story to give us clues about what we might need to heal (forgive) within ourselves so that we can come to the realization that we are indeed all one.
Obviously it is this last possibility to which Radical Forgiveness gives attention, for it is my belief that the very purpose of the story—and of course, the roles of all the players within it—is to highlight and bring to conscious awareness that which needs healing. It is in the dismantling of the story that we find our opportunity to learn the real truth about ourselves and to remember who we really are.
In tracing back the story and how it was formed, we usually discover that a core negative belief arose out of the experience. Such beliefs are unconscious but they nevertheless remain active and, in order to reinforce themselves, tend to create circumstances in the world “out there” that prove the belief correct. This is what happened to Jill (see Chapter 1). Her unconscious core belief was “I’m not good enough for any man,” and she lived it out. Once we collapsed the story and she saw that it was not true, she healed the core belief and everything worked out.
These core beliefs usually form when we are very young. When something happens to us, we interpret the experience and give personal meaning to the situation. Then we confuse what really happened with our interpretation of what did. The story we make up based on that mixture of fact and fiction becomes our truth and an operating principle in our lives.
For example, let’s say our father leaves home when we are five years old. For us, this event is traumatic and painful, but in our mind that is only the beginning of our story. At that age we think the world revolves around us, so we can only see it from that egocentric point of view. So we make our own interpretations based on that viewpoint. The first interpretation is that he left me! After that come many more interpretations that expand the story egocentrically, such as: “It must be my fault. I must have done something to drive him away. He doesn’t love me anymore. Maybe he never did. I must be a very unlovable person if my father would leave me. He can’t care about me, and if he doesn’t care about me, who will? I guess if he doesn’t love me, nobody will love me, and even if they do they are sure to leave me after five years because that’s the way things are with men who say they love you. You can’t really trust men who say they love you because they are bound to leave after five years anyway. I am just not very lovable. I will never have a relationship that will last more than five years. If I was not good enough for my father, I will never be good enough for anyone.” (FIGURE 14)
FIGURE 14: How a False Story Grows
We might also, if we are female—and as happened with a woman in my workshop recently who had this story running—make it up that men are always subject to being “stolen” by other women. Then we will unconsciously create situations where this happens—in this example, after about five years of being in relationship.
These stories become like internal gyroscopes, with their own frequencies that attract events and people to them so that they get played out according to the beliefs they contain. But, as we can see, the only part of the story that is true is the original event: Father left. That might be perhaps 5 percent of the total story. The rest is simply interpretation—assumptions made by a very immature, frightened mind. That makes the story 95 percent B.S. (Belief System)!
Your Higher Self knows that those ideas are not only B.S. but are highly toxic as well, so while it cannot intervene directly (since Spirit gave us free will), it brings people into your life who will lovingly “act out” parts of your story over and over until you realize that it is not true.
Again, this is what happened with my sister, Jill. When our father demonstrated the kind of love for my daughter Lorraine that Jill had always wanted to feel from him and had not felt, Jill took that to mean that she was inherently unlovable. That became the story she believed until she brought someone into her life (Jeff) who was able to make her discover her story and to see that it was false.
Jesse’s Story
Sometimes you are aware of the story, sometimes not. Jesse was at one of my workshops and appeared fully aware of her story but nevertheless did not see the error in it. This was in spite of the fact that she was spiritually very aware. She told us that she had just been fired from her job. “That’s okay,” she said. “It’s my abandonment issue playing itself out again. I get fired or lose a relationship every couple of years. It’s because I was abandoned when I was a baby.”
I suspected a B.S. story, so I began to investigate the abandonment. What we soon discovered was that her father had died just before she was born and that her mother had become ill and unable to cope when Jesse was about two years old. Consequently, Jesse was reared for a while by her grandparents.
Though she was no doubt traumatized by being separated from her mother, the actual truth of the matter was that her parents never did abandon her—they were simply absent through no fault of their own. To abandon someone is to make a calculated and conscious choice to leave them. It is a deliberate act. Mere absence does not constitute abandonment.
Taking absence to mean abandonment was an interpretation a small child might easily make, and the importance goes way beyond semantics. Interpreting her parents’ absence as abandonment, she went on to make a number of other interpretations such as: “If my parents abandon me, I must be a very unlovable person. No one will ever stay with me for more than two years because, if my mother abandons me after that time, everyone will do exactly that. They won’t want me after that. They will realize I am a bad person and will leave. That’s how life is.”
Jesse had been living out of this particular story for all her fifty-two years. Yet it was founded on a complete misinterpretation of the situation. Once she saw that, and from that point on, she was able to let it go and become free from the need to create abandonment every two years.
Even though she had spiritual awareness, she had consistently failed to realize that in providing instances of abandonment every two years, Spirit was in fact giving her opportunities to wake up and heal a toxic story that was a limitation on her life and a wound to her soul. Doing some Radical Forgiveness worksheets on the person who had last fired her helped her clear all the other times she had been “abandoned” over her fifty-two years and neutralized her original abandonment story.
THE FORGIVENESS CENTRIFUGE
One tool might have saved Jill and Jesse many years of painful struggle. The forgiveness centrifuge helps us separate what actually happened in any given situation from our interpretation of what happened. If you own the type of juicer where you put carrots and other things in the top and the juice is separated from the fiber by the centrifugal force of the spinning grater, you know what is meant by the term centrifuge. A centrifuge is also used to separate plasma from blood, cream from milk, and so on. A washing machine spinning out the excess water from clothes works in the same manner. (FIGURE 15)
FIGURE 15: Separating Fact from Fiction
A forgiveness centrifuge simply reverses the process by which we come up with stories about what happened to us. To use it, take the story you are living now—the one that is causing you discomfort. Remember, it is certain to be a hopeless mixture of fact (what happened) and interpretation (all your thoughts, judgments, assessments, assumptions, and beliefs about what happened). Feed the story into the top of the imaginary centrifuge, just as you would with carrots in a juicer, and then, in your mind, see the machine separating the facts from the interpretations.
Then, like any good resea
rcher, first make a list of the facts as they emerge, being as objective as possible. Then make a list of the interpretations you made about the facts. (FIGURE 16)
Figure 16: The Facts About What Happened
After writing down your results, acknowledge the facts and accept them. Recognize that they tell what happened and that no one can do anything to change that. You have no choice but to allow what happened to be exactly what happened, but watch for any tendency to make excuses for what happened—this will impose interpretation on the facts once again. Just stay with what actually took place.
Next, examine every thought, belief, rationalization, idea, or attitude you imposed on what happened, and declare them all to be untrue. Affirm that none of them have validity. Tell yourself they just represent mind-talk. Then, recognize how important your ideas, beliefs, and attitudes are to you. On a scale of 1-100, indicate in the left-hand column how much attachment you think you have to each of your interpretations, and then decide which of them you may be ready to drop and which you are not.
Be Gentle with Yourself
Do not criticize yourself for being attached to any of these ideas, beliefs, or attitudes, or for being unwilling to let them go. You may have had them for a long time. In fact, they may define who you are. For example, if you are an incest survivor or an adult child of an alcoholic, these labels, which represent ideas or beliefs about yourself, may provide a reference for who you are. If you let go of the ideas associated with these labels, you might lose your identity. So, while you want to be firm with yourself in separating what is real from what you have made up, be gentle with yourself and allow time to release these beliefs. (FIGURE 17)
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