The Everyday Mystic

This July 4th, write your own declaration of independence!  Announce your freedom from anger, resentment, pain, bitterness and fear.  Make this the first day of your new life of freedom from these debilitating negative emotions.  How can you attain this freedom?  Forgiveness is the key that lets you out of the jail of anger and resentment. Forgiveness sets you free!

In the United States’ Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  Forgiveness can help you attain these unalienable rights.  My clients report that forgiveness has allowed them to take back their life, provided them liberty from the bonds of their past memories and made them happier. 

One person reported that forgiveness allowed her to reconcile with her estranged daughters and her former in-laws. She reports that because she was able to forgive her ex-husband for turning her daughters against her, her former in-laws were finally, after many years, able to accept her. At the wedding of her oldest daughter, she was excluded from the family parties. She worked through a forgiveness process and, at the wedding of her second daughter, was thrilled to be invited to parties given by her former in-laws.  “Because I was able to forgive,” she says, “My former in-laws sensed the change in me and were able to open their family circle to include me.”

Another reported that he forgave his cruel father at the father’s death bed. He declared his independence from the bitterness he felt toward the father that had abused him.  This man forgave his father so that he could live the rest of his life in peace.

In my own life, I forgave a business partner who abandoned an altruistic project that we had worked on for years.  I got sick and tired of being angry and bitter about the situation. I found that every time something would trigger a memory about the project, I would mentally replay the scenes from this sad drama like a broken record, wishing I had done something differently or getting mad at my partner all over again. This is the origin of my seven-step forgiveness process, which I developed during this painful time. I used it to forgive both myself and the other person. I now feel peace and gratitude toward this situation.  I freed myself from the prison of bitterness and resentment.

Declare your independence today!  Forgiveness can set you free of anger, resentment, pain, bitterness and fear.

Kristin Robertson is the author of A Forgiveness Journal:Letting Go of the Past.

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This week, Carol Merlo, M.Ed., reviewed A Forgiveness Journal on her blog, which focuses on health and wellness. In fact, she called it “A Must Read”! You can check out her review at theeightkeystowellness.com.

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As my virtual book tour starts to pick up steam, I’ve had the opportunity to “stop” by a couple of blogs this week.

The first was at the Keener Financial Planning blog, where Jean Keener talked about how forgiveness can help you with your financial life, especially in this down economy. My article, Forgiveness: 5 Reasons It’s Good for You was also posted to the blog.

Then, today, my pastor posted a review of my book at the Sunflower Chalice blog.

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Chaos Theory offers striking parallels to the spiritual life.  Chaos is the last state a system goes through before it dissolves into completely random behavior that represents the demise of the system.  In a mathematically chaotic system, there is underlying order.  You can observe the order inherent in a chaotic system - but only when you step back and view its wild permutations over time and from a multi-dimensional view. From chaos can emerge a reformed system that is stable and stronger than what was previously.  Fractals, the beautiful hologram-like patterns created by graphing the mathematical iterations of a chaotic system, illustrate the order that becomes apparent only after time.   The picture on the left is an example of a fractal and can be downloaded as a screensaver from Tech Republic.

There is a life lesson in the behavior of chaotic systems. There are phases in life in which chaos seems to reign supreme, typically caused by illness, crisis, financial devastation, death of a loved one, a dark night of the soul or depression.  Comfort comes from realizing that our lives are passing through a chaotic state in which order, hidden from plain sight, beckons from the viewpoint of a wide-angle lens. You use that lens when you step back from the present hardship and contemplate it in the context of the bigger picture or the fractal pattern of your life. Frustratingly, the wide-angle lens takes maturity and sometimes the lapse of time before you can see through it clearly. Indeed, sometimes that viewpoint is never accessible via human understanding.

Forgiveness demands that you use a wide-angle lens.  This is why it can takes years - even decades - for an individual to to forgive and become free of his or her past.  It may take that long to be able to discern the order underlying chaos, to view the hurt and the pain you experienced through a wide-lens, to see it in the context of a bigger picture. Be patient.  Just because you are interested in forgiving means that you are already taking steps toward that goal.

Your life is a fractal image of order within chaos. It oscillates between phases of seeming chaos and order - yet inherent in the chaos is order, and within order is the possibility of chaos.  The trick is to hold onto faith in both chaos and order.  For me, the order is Source’s promise to me that there is an underlying purpose, beauty and promise.  There is safety.  As the Psalms say:

“Thou dost beset me behind and before, and layest thy hand upon me.

Whither shall I go from they Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from they presence?

If i ascend to heaven, thou art there!  If I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there!

If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there thy hand shall lead me, and they right hand shall hold me.”

-Psalm 139:5, 7-10

For more information on chaos theory and how it relates to business and life, please refer to Margaret Wheatley’s book, Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World.

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Have you been laid-off or fired from your last job? Are you looking for work and not having much success? Standard advice to job seekers includes updating the resume, attending networking events, calling your contacts, etc. What is seldom mentioned is the need to work on forgiving your last employer or manager who laid you off. Without fully processing your anger and resentment toward your last job, company or boss, you will have a hard time convincing a new employer to hire you.

What happens if you are lucky enough to get an interview and you are still full of bitterness toward your last manager? Even if you don’t say something overtly derogatory about your last job, your resentment will be felt on an unconscious level by the interviewer. What interviewer, in a very tight job market, wants to hire someone who is full of negative emotions? In a recession, employers have the pick of the field in hiring, and will almost always choose a candidate who exudes confidence, forgiveness of past employers and a broad perspective of market conditions and human frailty.

During a period of unemployment, your time would be well spent in working through your feelings about how and why you were terminated. Writing down your deepest thoughts and feelings is a good way to extract them from the inside closet of your mind and apply them to paper. In that way, your analytical brain can process them, see patterns, gain perspective and forgive the past. Forgiving yourself will be part of this process for those who feel some responsibility for losing their job.

For how-to advice on forgiving, please refer to my book, A Forgiveness Journal: Letting Go of the Past, found at www.aforgivenessjournal.com

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The virtual book tour for my new book, A Forgiveness Journal: Letting Go of the Past, is now underway. Last week, I “stopped by” The Women’s Business Gallery. Carma Spence-Pothitt, the owner of the site, promoted my book and discussed how forgiveness can help you break through barriers that might be holding you back in your business.

You can see that the stops on my tour are starting to fill in. They are regularly updated on my official Virtual Book Tour page, as well as in the sidebar of this website.

If you would like to participate in the tour … there are some perks, including the chance to win a copy of my book, as well as being spotlighted on my webistes … just contact my assistants at info@brioleadership.com.

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A shocked silence hung over the conference room. Barry, usually a compassionate and even-tempered vice president, had just loudly berated one of his managers during a staff meeting. The accused manager was looking down at his hands with a reddened face and the other managers’ jaws had dropped at this unusual display of emotional mismanagement. Barry quickly ended the meeting and hurried to his office. Later, he told me about the situation. “I was at the end of my rope, Kristin. My son is having terrible health problems and I had been up most of the night worrying about him and about work. I shouldn’t have lost my temper. How can I ever forgive myself or make it up to that manager?” As his coach, I told him that self-forgiveness is an important managerial practice, and that he had an opportunity to model good self-care to the rest of the team. He decided to apologize in person to the manager and made a public apology at the next staff meeting. Then he and I worked on ways for Barry to forgive himself.

You probably can relate to Barry’s situation. Everyone has multiple instances in their past that beg for self-forgiveness. Here are some self-forgiveness opportunities you might experience:

• You blame yourself for being laid-off or not getting a promotion
• You are angry at yourself for having to learn by making mistakes (like saying something hurtful, sending out an inappropriate email, doing something unethical)
• You deeply regret harm that you caused someone else
• You are caught in a cycle of self-talk that endlessly repeats, “I shoulda, coulda, woulda”
• You regret lost opportunities to create harmony or show love, such as losing your temper at work or missing your daughter’s soccer game
• You aren’t ready to forgive someone else

Naturally, your first step in self-forgiveness is to take responsibility for what you did. That means that you make amends for any harm you created, and do your best to right any wrong. You might have to apologize to the person you hurt, or reap the natural or legal consequences of what you did (such as paying a fine, going to court, losing a job, not closing a deal, and more). Taking responsibility is the mark of a mature individual.

However, if you think you need self-forgiveness, you already, by definition, realize the part you played in the situation and are aware of your responsibility. This awareness is positive, and you must give yourself a pat on the back for being responsible for your actions.

Then, you deserve your own forgiveness. Remember that forgiveness is achieving a feeling of neutrality toward the situation and not feeling surge of negative emotions when you think about it. Self-forgiveness is part of exquisite self-care, in which you fulfill your own needs and take full responsibility for your own happiness.

The seven-step process of forgiving that I describe in my new book, A Forgiveness Journal: Letting Go of the Past, works for both forgiving others and forgiving ourselves. Some of the highlights of the process include identifying your feelings, gaining perspective and blessing yourself.

• Identify your feelings

You must express your feelings such as regret, anger, sadness, blame and resentment. Emotions that are buried or stuffed away never die – they only cause One effective way to do this is to write about your feelings, perhaps starting your sentences with “I am angry about {blank}” or “I feel regret about {blank}”. The great thing about writing is that it is entirely private – no one needs to see what you write. One of my coaching clients types his journal entries on his computer and purposely does not save his writing, so there is no chance of anyone finding or seeing what he wrote.

• Gain Perspective

Are you even going to remember this incident at the end of your life? If not, then you realize the relative insignificance of this event. Were there good things that came out of the experience for you? List any positive outcomes. What would the benevolence of Source energy say about this? Source does not judge you but can only extend love, just as a loving parent extends loves to a wayward child. As a spiritual teacher once told me, “We must extend to ourselves the same compassion that we extend to others.”

• Bless Yourself

Understanding that you did the best you could under the circumstances, you can let go of your self-judgment and bless yourself instead. Every time you think of the situation, consciously redirect your thoughts away from “I shoulda…” and choose to practice self-love by saying, “I honor my true essence” or “I bless myself”.

Changing the world starts with changing yourself. There is a wonderful ripple effect that happens when we change our interior perspective. Our actions start lining up with our thoughts, and people begin to react differently to us. As Gandhi so famously said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” Practice self-forgiveness to create a more forgiving world.

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The following excerpt comes from my newly released book, A Forgiveness Journal: Letting Go of the Past, from a section in Chapter One called “The Big Picture.”  I think these are the reasons that we are called to forgive. 

“If you recognize that each person on this earth is a divine spirit in an earthly body, then there can be some acknowledgement that a divine hand is in everything that you experience. If you further acknowledge that everyone is connected energetically to each other and to a Higher Power (that some call God, Yahweh, Allah, Goddess, Beauty, or Truth), you can imagine that all souls are dancing together to some, as yet mysterious, heavenly music. Lastly, if you can acknowledge that everything happens for a reason and that your soul evolves most quickly when you learn to deal with earthly challenges such as suffering, then you can (almost) thank the other person who hurt you for presenting an opportunity to grow through the challenge of learning to forgive.

This is why forgiveness is a spiritual process. It is spiritual in the sense that it involves the human spirit, the essence of each person that yearns for wisdom, courage, and compassion. This essence is what makes you divine. “

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There are many common fears and misperceptions about forgiving someone who has hurt you.  You might recognize yourself in some of these fearful justifications:

• You are afraid that forgiveness will empower the other person to continue to hurt you and/or other people.
• You are afraid of giving up your victim role and the sympathy you get from other people.
• You are afraid that forgiving will make you vulnerable to experiencing hurts similar to those you’ve experienced in the past.

These fears are fallacious, as we shall see.

Since publishing my new book, called A Forgiveness Journal: Letting Go of the Past, several of my coaching clients have declared something like this, “I can’t forgive my ex-husband because I’m afraid he’s going to do horrible things to me and the kids.  If I forgive, I won’t be vigilant any more - who will protect my children?”  Or another might say, “I can’t forgive him - if I do, I’ll just attract the same type of horrible man into my life again.”  These women feel a false sense of security in holding onto their grievances - that wrapping themselves in the negative energy of non-forgiveness will somehow keep them safe.  I understand that feeling, because I was in that place for many years. 

For me, my thoughts were, “How can I forgive that horrible person for the unthinkable acts she did against me? I was right and she was wrong!  I can’t forgive her, because then, I might not be completely right anymore.”  Ouch.  To relinquish your position of being 100% right - and righteous - is to eat humble pie, and what a bitter pie that is.  Yep, that was a tough one for me!

Before I tell you why it’s counterproductive to hold on to these justifications of your non-forgiveness, let’s remember that the definition of forgiveness is not to condone the behavior of people that have hurt you, or to ignore the pain that it has caused you. Instead, the purpose of forgiveness is to achieve a neutral feeling - IN YOUR OWN HEART - when you remember the person or incident that hurt you.  It has nothing to do with the other person.  It has only to do with relinquishing your burden of anger, regret, resentment, recrimination and self-righteousness - and laying that burden down for good - so you can focus 100% of your energy on your present life.

So here is my little secret about fears about forgiving:  Unfortunately, by not forgiving, you cannot protect yourself at all. Holding on to your grievance - and the anger, regrets, resentment, recrimination and self-righteousness that go with it - keeps you in a state of mind that actually attracts those same qualities to you.  Remember the old adage that “like attracts like”.  If you are holding on to negative emotions and memories, don’t be surprised if similar events and emotions keep showing up in your life.  I’m talking about events and people that exemplify the same emotions you cling to: anger, regrets, resentment, recrimination and self-righteousness.  They will continue to show up in your life until you forgive.

If you want more of what you’ve had in the past, don’t bother to forgive.  If, however, you’d like to make a clean break from the past and live a happier life, please consider forgiveness.

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I remember a colleague saying, "Kristin, timing is everything, and this is not the time," when I offered her a job that would require a move to another state.  Her family situation didn’t allow her to move at that time, but she left open the possibility that the timing could be right in a difference circumstance.  I thought it was a wise statement, not just about jobs but about most decisions in  life.  The timing has to be right.

The same can be said about choosing to forgive.  There are times in your life when the timing will be right for you to forgive and there will be times when you are not yet ready to forgive.  In my new book, A Forgiveness Journal: Letting Go of the Past, I teach a seven-step process to forgive.  I know this process can work for you as it has for me, but I also know that the timing must be right for you.  This is not a race to see who can become the most spiritually advanced the quickest.  Source/God has all the time in the universe - in more ways than one! - and Source is patiently waiting for the right time to nudge you, to entice you, to motivate you to forgive.  In my case, Source waited patiently for the time when I was desperate to find an alternative to feeling mad, bad and sad about a particular incident and person in my past.  I was so weary of carrying grief, anger and self-recrimination, so tired of re-creating those feelings every time I remembered the person and events that hurt me, and so mad at myself for not being able to just forget about it. It took me nine months to get to this point of desperation, and then Source blessed me with the inspiration to create the seven-step process of forgiveness.  I used it to free myself of the emotional entanglements that were binding my spiritual and emotional feet, releasing me to walk again with a spring in my step. 

It may take you nine seconds, nine days, nine months, nine years or ninety years to be ready to forgive. 

That’s OK - really OK.  The first person you need to forgive is yourself - for not being ready to forgive within the timeframe that you, a mere mortal, think is right.  It’s also OK to never forgive.  Source does not judge you for that, nor should anyone else.  God waits patiently for you to live in love, and forgiveness is a building block in constructing a life of love. You are assured of God’s love whether you forgive or not, so your decision to forgive is simply to assist yourself in this life.

I have a friend who is particularly good at being patient with herself, and at forgiving herself for not being ready.  In her case, it was being ready to quit smoking. She tried to quit five times in five years, and each time except the last was unsuccessful. I watched her both during and after each of her failed attempts to kick the habit and was filled with admiration of the self-love she showed each time.  "It’s OK," she would tell me with assurance. "I’m just not ready yet to quit smoking.  I’ll be ready sometime."  When the time was right, she quit smoking.

It’s that kind of patience and self-love we need in contemplating the decision to forgive. It’s OK, you’ll be ready sometime.

In the meantime, you might go ahead and purchase my beautiful book, put in on your bedside table, look at it every night before going to bed.  In time, I know you’ll be ready to give forgiveness a try.

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