Forgiveness: Free and Awaken Your Soul - Week #11 of The Awakening Journey
We all know what forgiveness is right? It’s letting people know we are over it and they can move on because we have given them grace. They are getting away with it and we are giving them the signal that what they did wasn’t wrong. No. That is not what it is. Nor is it begrudgingly saying “Forget it, it’s over. We’ll just soldier on.”
Forgiveness is about YOU. It's not about THEM. It's about your empowered leadership and your spiritual evolution.
It is about you releasing toxic patterns and this frees you from accepting the same behavior ever again. It is a critical component of wholeness, healing, living, and thriving in our world. Part of being an adult in the greater sense of the word.
“We choose forgiveness because it is how we find freedom and keep from remaining trapped in an endless loop of telling our stories and naming our hurts.” Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu
Who cares, let’s just move on, I don’t have time for this.
Really? Do you have time to model yourself as a leader for your family, in your relationships, and at work? Do you have time to continue to have the same challenges show up in different ways in your life over days, weeks, years even sometimes spanning decades?
When we choose forgiveness, we are empowered as leaders.
Wouldn’t you like to be able to look back at your pain points in the past and have no attachment to or pain connected to it?
When you truly do your forgiveness work, you close the arc on what we’ve talked about Owning impact, doing your work & processing your baggage.
Think of this final piece as the caboose of your train to make it complete. It cleans up the residual energy and sets you free to move along your tracks on your journey to awakening.
Taking Forgiveness to the Next Level
A quick story about me & my forgiveness… I had a long relationship with someone and I was stuck on trying to forgive this person. Over and over I did the steps and just couldn’t seem to either renew or release the relationship.
One day, when I was going through the steps, I had an aha: I had to first forgive myself and take myself through the process of forgiving. It was like a bright sun came out after years of it being overcast.
Once I was able to forgive myself, I was able to forgive the other person. Then I was able to release the toxic relationship. Not only did I feel completely empowered, whereas before I had this hidden way of feeling like a victim, this opened up greater levels of awareness, freedom & true authenticity. An extremely necessary step in awakening and living my life as it was meant to be.
My Favorite Forgiveness Resource
I highly recommend “The Book of Forgiving” by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. This moving story tells many tales of personal forgiveness as well as shares his experiences during an unprecedented time, the ending of apartheid in South Africa. I have since traveled to Africa to see for myself how forgiveness has impacted people in this area and have felt inspired by the results.
This Week’s Awakening Practice:
Make a list of people that you feel you need to forgive.
Include yourself if you have forgiveness work to do on yourself.
Choose the person that is most triggering.
Follow the fourfold path to Forgiving:
Tell the story - relive the experience & document every detail
Name the hurt - give voice to what hurts most
Grant forgiveness - write the words, speak them, paint them. You decide how to do this step.
Renew or Release the relationship - Decide. Take action to either renew the relationship in a way that works for you with new agreements or release the relationship altogether.
“A hero has the strength and the ability to be generous and forgiving, and the power and freedom that come from being able to make the choice to grant forgiveness.” Desmond Tutu
Next, we will talk about Containers, in the meantime remember the present moment is where your best life happens!
With love, presence and gratitude,
Darla