I, _____, do hereby forgive _____.
I release him/her to his/her highest good and set him/her free. I bless him/her for having been willing to be my teacher. I sever all unhealthy attachments to this person and send him/her unconditional love and support.
I, _____, do hereby forgive myself, accept myself just the way I am, and love myself unconditionally just the way I am, in all my power and magnificence.
I, _____, do hereby release myself to my highest good and claim for myself freedom, fulfillment of my dreams, wishes, and goals, clarity, love, full expression, creativity, health, and prosperity.
Signed: _____ Date: _____
Witnessed by: _____ Date: _____
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The Forgiveness Rose
When we open our hearts to others, we become vulnerable and face the danger of becoming the target for their projections. Their psychic energy can become mixed with ours, and this can deplete our energy.
The more workshops I do, the more I realize that in many cases the problems people appear to be having with someone in particular stem from the fact that the latter person is able to get into and manipulate their energy field. Almost invariably, the one with whom they have the problem seems to be entering through the third chakra, which is the one where issues of power and control are stored. Once in, it is easy for that person to control them—sucking their energy or dumping their own energy onto them at will. Of course, this is all done subconsciously—without awareness and hopefully without malice—but it can be debilitating to the one being manipulated and puts a great strain on the relationship.
You probably won’t be surprised to learn that it is most often the person’s mother who is doing the invading and controlling—even from the grave, I might add. It might also be the father, or the spouse, or any other person who wants to have some control over the person’s life, but most often it is the mother.
The easiest way for you to stop this or prevent it happening with people you come in contact with is to simply place an imaginary rose between you and the other person. It is a surprisingly powerful protective device.
The rose is a symbol of psychic protection in a great many esoteric writings. For whatever reason, it possesses a great deal of potency in this regard, probably because it is the universal symbol for love. Visualizing a rose gives us protection from the projections of others, offering a way to block negative energy without closing our heart to the person. I cannot explain why the rose visualization works so well in this regard; in truth, we can create psychic protection with any kind of visualization, because just doing so creates the intention of self-protection. But the rose has been used for centuries for this purpose and seems to work better than most other symbols.
So, from now on, any time you encounter someone whose energy you don’t want mixed with your own, visualize the rose existing at the edge of your aura, or halfway between yourself and the person. Then notice whether you feel differently while in their presence. You should feel a much greater sense of your own psychic space and identity while at the same time being completely present for the person. You don’t have to be in someone’s physical presence for them to be able to control your energy, so it is a good idea to put up your rose even while talking on the phone. (FIGURE 19)
FIGURE 19: The Rose
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A Wake for the Inner Child
Our spiritual evolution depends heavily upon our recovery from our worst addiction—our addiction to the victim archetype, which traps us in the past and saps our life energy. The inner child represents nothing but a metaphor for our woundedness and a cutesy form of victim consciousness. Wrapping our victim consciousness in baby clothes does not make it any more acceptable. Invoking our inner child still represents addictive behavior.
Please note that I am not talking about the playful, creative, and life-affirming inner child, such as the one described by Richard Bach,[6] or the part of ourselves that comes forward to inspire and awaken us. I am talking about the whining little brat who lives in the back room of our mind, that unhappy victim who can always be relied upon to blame everyone else for our unhappiness. This is the one we pandered to at all those inner child workshops in the 1980s.
For the sake of our spiritual evolution and our eventual release from the victim archetype, we must bring the inner brat’s life lovingly to a close. I therefore propose that you hold a funeral and pronounce him or her dead. If you choose to go ahead with this exercise, you will probably grieve the loss of your inner child, and that is okay. No doubt your inner child has given you solace and comfort in your pain over the years, but now is the time to move on. Radical Forgiveness releases you from the need to hold onto the woundedness, so allow yourself to release your inner child now.
As long as you hold onto your past wounds, Radical Forgiveness remains impossible. Clinging to your inner child only holds you back, because that child represents your past wounds. While you want to move on with your life, you may be surprised to find that your inner child wants to move on too! To release your inner child, try the following meditation.
THE FUNERAL MEDITATION
Sit comfortably and take three deep breaths, allowing your body to relax as your breath leaves your body. Notice any areas of your body that remain tight. Consciously relax them, knowing that during this meditation your body will continue to relax with every breath you take—and soon you will be profoundly relaxed from head to toe. Now look inside yourself and find the room in which sits the young person who has willingly carried your pain. Find the inner child who holds your memories of being abused, ignored, betrayed, abandoned, unaccepted, or unloved.
As you come upon this little person in that room, notice that he or she is surrounded by lists, ledgers, charts, and scorecards. The walls of the room are covered with people’s names, what they did to you, and the punishment you have believed they deserve. In the ledgers, the child keeps a careful tally of all the times someone victimized you and what it cost you. Notice the joylessness of this room. As you look at this young child, realize how sad he or she really feels being locked down there alone with the pain, mired in victim consciousness.
Realizing that it is time for a change, you walk across the room and throw open the windows to let in the sunlight. As it floods into the room, the ink on the charts on the wall starts to fade and the ledger books begin to crumble to dust. The lists tacked to the wall also fall to the ground and dissolve. Look at the little person who has lived in this room for all those years, keeping resentment scores day by day. See his or her broad smile and joyous expression.
“Now I am free to go,” the child says.
“Go where?” you ask.
“I’m free to go to the next place. I should have left years ago, but I’ve been waiting for you to release me from this job.”
Suddenly you notice that this person, who was young and childlike such a short while ago, is growing old and becoming wizened and gray-haired right before your eyes. Yet a great peace has replaced his or her sadness.
“Thank you for letting me go,” he or she gasps, lying down slowly on a couch.
You say, “I’m sorry it’s taken so long to bring light into this room. I’m sorry I’ve held you back.”
“That’s quite alright,” comes the quiet reply. “It really is okay. Time is just an illusion anyway. Goodbye.” With that, the little person dies, looking peaceful and serene.
Lovingly, you wrap the little person in a white cloth and take the body upstairs and out into the light. A horse and buggy wait there, and angels hover nearby, singing softly. All the people who have ever been in your life are waiting to pay their respects. All past hurts are forgiven. Love is everywhere. The bells on the horse and buggy ring softly as the entourage slowly begins its journey to the hill where a grave has been prepared. At the graveside, everyone sings and great joy envelops the group. Your angels are with you and support you as you say your last farewell. See the little person being lowered lovingly and gently into the grave w
hile the celestial choir sings. As a stone is placed onto the grave, you feel a new sense of freedom and love moving through you.
You walk to the bottom of the hill where you find a fast-running stream. You wash your hands and face in the water and see your reflection there. Feel the cleansing water of the stream running through your being, taking with it all the dust and debris from the room where the little person once dwelled. Hear the sound of the water babbling over the rocks. See the sun sparkling on the water, and feel the warmth of the sun on your body. Notice the green of the surrounding fields and the many bright flowers all around you. All is well. Open your eyes whenever you feel ready to do so.
Being without your wounded inner child will feel strange for a while, but you will also begin to notice some positive changes. You will feel lighter, less burdened, more in the moment. Your life energy will increase as you retrieve the energy that was previously spent holding on to the wounds of the inner child.
Be prepared to encounter problems with close friends with whom you previously spent time sharing wounds. They will not like this change in you, for they will see that you no longer give your wounds power. Since they remain committed to their wounds, they may be uncomfortable with you; they may even begin feeling as if you have betrayed them. If you are a member of a support group that thrives on sharing wounds, such as Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOA) or Incest Survivors, be prepared to disconnect yourself from the group. You will probably find your need to attend group meetings diminishing anyway, but if you are the least bit codependent, you might still feel as if leaving the group is a challenge. Stick to your guns, and do not take personally other people’s attempts to disconnect from you or talk of betrayal. These people will come around eventually and probably will want some of what they see you have gained.
Afterword
Twelve years after first publishing this book, I have finally caught up with my own thinking about Radical Forgiveness being much larger than a mere process of forgiveness—bigger, in fact, than I ever imagined.
I have known from the beginning that Radical Forgiveness has never been about forgiveness per se—at least not as we have traditionally conceived of it. It is indeed an alternative way of forgiving that is quicker and more effective than any other form of forgiveness, but it’s something infinitely greater, more all-encompassing, and more revolutionary.
It is nothing less than a mind-blowing idea that shatters our existing ideas of reality and challenges our current worldview. It invites us to engage in a process that is rooted in a fourth-dimensional reality that we don’t yet understand. Neither is there much proof of its efficacy, other than the evidence of our own awareness of how significantly changed we become when we engage in it. (If you’ve done a worksheet, you’ll know what I mean.)
It requires that we suspend our normal way of thinking about ourselves and our relationship to the world at large, and be open to the possibility that we can begin operating from this new reality—before we really know what it is or how it works—just by being willing to do it.
But the truly amazing gift that it offers humanity lies in its capacity to serve as a bridge: a bridge that enables us to move freely and easily, without knowing it, between third-dimensional reality and fourth-dimensional reality. A bridge that enables us to practice operating from the love vibration of the latter while existing physically in the former. Such a bridge is necessary because even though deep down we know that fourth-dimensional reality is based on love, peace, oneness, and joy—and we yearn desperately to go there—we are terrified at the thought of letting go of what is all so familiar. This is true even though the current reality is one based on fear, separation, and pain. The doubt is real and deep-seated—what if I jump into the void and find that the other reality doesn’t exist after all?
So, while the technology of Radical Forgiveness ostensibly appears to be about helping us forgive ourselves and others, its real purpose is to give us a chance to practice being in that other reality while being blissfully ignorant of our actual presence there. It lulls us into thinking that we are simply doing a forgiveness worksheet, or one of the other processes, when in fact we are—without realizing it—actually stepping across that chasm and operating in fourth-dimensional reality. By the use of “smoke and mirrors” and the blessing of ignorance, our ego happily goes along with the process.
Like anything else, the more we practice something, the less fear we have about it. When the time comes for us to make the shift—which I believe is imminent—we will be so accustomed to being in the vibration of the love-based reality (through using Radical Forgiveness) that our fears about making the final leap will have evaporated.
This brings me to a question that people who have just completed one of my workshops frequently ask: “How can I stay in the Radical Forgiveness vibration and not get pulled back into victim consciousness by the world around me?”
The quick answer is simple—keep using the tools. Each and every time we practice Radical Forgiveness, we become more and more anchored in the fourth-dimensional reality and, in turn, it becomes less and less likely that we will choose to return to the third. Eventually, it will become our default way of being, and we will have become fully stabilized at the higher vibratory rate.
But there is a much deeper aspect to this question that we must also address. In order to keep using the tools so that we remain playing in fourth-dimensional reality and raising our vibration, we must stay awake.
Refer to the Victimland Roller Coaster diagram see “FIGURE 18”. Here we see that if we become so upset that we go above the line marking both the loss of spiritual consciousness and our crossing into Victimland, we are in deep trouble. The result is a dramatic lowering of our vibratory rate and the loss of awareness of the newfound reality. We find ourselves back in the world of separation and fear-based reality—back in the grip of the ego. The furthest thing from our mind at this point is doing a worksheet or listening to the Radical Forgiveness CD. In short, we are lost.
I now see this phenomenon as not just a setback for the people who lose what they have gained through the Radical Forgiveness experience (as the question about falling back into victim consciousness implies might happen), but as the thing most likely to impede the achievement of the mission to create a world of forgiveness by 2012.
As you know, to create this Awakening, a certain critical mass of people whose consciousness is sufficiently raised to counteract the many whose vibratory rate remains low is required. It is critical, therefore, that all those who have had their vibration raised (even by reading this book), remain awake and engaged in the very process that keeps them traversing that bridge.
Until now, my primary goal in using Radical Forgiveness has been to heal our wounds and release energy blocks in order to improve our lives—not that I have restricted it to working with individuals, for I have found it to be every bit as potent a technology for healing communities. Working in Australia gave me the opportunity to try it in the context of the reconciliation movement that is happening there as white and aboriginal Australians come together to heal their terrible past. I wrote and published a book there called Reconciliation Through Radical Forgiveness: A Spiritual Technology for Healing Communities. This book was designed to give everyone in Australia who wanted reconciliation the spiritual technology to bring it about—something they could use in their own homes, schools, and communities. I am doing the same thing now with corporations.
So yes, of course this work will continue, but my colleagues and I at the Institute for Radical Forgiveness are also extending that focus to include helping people not only to maintain the high vibratory rate gained during the Radical Forgiveness experience, but to increase it steadily to as high a level as possible so that there will be no going back.
To this end, we have created a Radical Empowerment program designed to enable people to operate from a higher-than-normal vibratory rate, and, instead of always being the effect in a cause-and-effect world, to become th
e cause in their own life. Radical Empowerment is a combination of Radical Forgiveness (to clean up the past and deal effectively with the present), and Radical Manifestation (to create the future). Hence the formula: RE=RF+RM. Empowered in this way, people will be able to manifest what they want, easily and quickly.
One of the keys to our spiritual empowerment, and central to our maintaining our connection with the Radical Forgiveness vibration, is the systematic development of that part of our consciousness known as the observer. This is the self-aware part of ourselves that is able to witness or observe the whole community of selves within. From its vantage point outside of, or separate from, ourselves, it will, if trained to do so, notice when we begin to go unconscious. It will then take steps to bring us back—probably by reminding us to do the four-step process in that moment, or to listen to the Radical Forgiveness CD. A trained observer will keep us out of Victimland—free and always with choice in our lives.
Another question that inevitably comes up is: “How can I effectively apply the Radical Forgiveness technology to every area of my life?”
The answer to this is also contained in the Radical Empowerment program. Once you have integrated the Radical Forgiveness/Radical Manifestation model into your consciousness and developed your observer to a reasonably high degree, you will naturally begin to utilize Radical Empowerment in every aspect of your life. It will be hard not to.
The third question that arises once people realize the potential of this work to make a difference in the world and see in it for themselves the possibility to do meaningful spiritual work, becomes: “How can I share this with others?”
The answer is that we now have in place a professional certification program through which you can be trained to become (a) a Radical Empowerment Teacher, (b) a Radical Forgiveness coach, or (c) a Radical Manifestation coach and workshop facilitator (see Further Resources).
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