Five Steps To Healing and Forgiveness - 8/19/05

The Process of Healing and Forgiveness

We've all had times when we've felt something churning inside us, like a bad dinner we're unable to digest. I'm talking about emotions, unresolved pain, and reliving a wound. Sometimes, we have something painful in our lives that we seem unable to let go of. We don't want to keep being triggered into negative emotions, but we can't seem to move beyond them.

That's when we need to start our forgiveness and healing work. I don't mean forgiveness in a passive way, as in, "I'll just decide to love that person who hurt me, even if he is a rat bastard." That's not going to accomplish much.

I'm talking about a process that YOU do for YOURSELF so that you can move through the energy of the wound you experienced, process the accompanying emotions, and MOVE BEYOND them. There are five basic steps to healing and forgiveness which are necessary if you want to shift out of pain and come into the light again, moving out of woundedness and into empowerment.

Here are the Five Steps to Healing and Forgiveness

Step 1) Give voice to what happened.

Acknowledge that s$%t happened to you or that Person X did this to you or Person Y did that to you. Tell the truth to yourself instead of stuffing it all away.

For minor matters (say, admitting to yourself that you hate your current job and are finding your work environment intolerable,) it can take weeks to work up to this. It takes a while because you know that once you admit the truth to yourself, you're going to have to DO something about it - like, find a new job - or you won't be being true to yourself.

For big issues (such as acknowledging that you were abused as a child or dealing with the fallout of having an alcoholic parent) this stage of forgiveness work can take years. It can require a lot of help from an understanding therapist, some holistic healers who can nurture you and help remove energy blockages from your body, and a very strong connection to Spirit that acts as your guiding Light. You need to pull in an army of helpers from many levels of reality, from the world of 3-D and the world of Spirit, so you can keep moving forward instead of sliding back into denial. You need to feel energetically supported if you want to make real progress.

Step 2) Honor the emotions that arise.

Giving a name to what you experienced can stir up some intense reactions. Be in those emotions fully. This will often involve a period when you will need to have a "pity party," where you feel sorry for yourself and "go into the wound" for a while. You'll feel like a child for a bit as you just let the emotions roll through you. This is a necessary part of the healing and forgiveness process. It's important not to judge yourself while you are having these emotions. And it's equally important for family members, especially your spouse or romantic partner, to honor this stage of your personal homework.

Unfortunately, when it comes to healing while you are in a relationship, things often fall through the cracks. Most of us haven't built up room in our relationships so that we can comfortably process intense emotional energies that need to be healed. We feel like we have to be perfect all the time or that our partner has to be. Or we don't leave space in our relationship for each person to experience true privacy so they can work on their own healing. Couples get very jealous and dysfunctional around these things. It's usually step 2 of the healing and forgiveness process that causes people to start thinking about divorce or separation.

People need to realize that being in a long-term romantic relationship will involve many peaks and valleys, many natural times of healing and release. If you quit one relationship because a healing process is attempting to happen, you'll just end up going through similar intense times with somebody else. The key is to find a partner who is COMMITTED TO GOING THROUGH HEALING WORK WITH YOU. Then you become partners in healing and true collaborators in the art of love.

Step 3) Assume responsibility for your part of what happened.

After you have done some work being in the emotions for a while and have calmed down, reached a place of quiet, you need to assume responsibility for your part in what happened, the role that you played. You might say, "Well, if a woman has been abused by a parent, she didn't do anything to deserve that!" To that, I say, WRONG.

When you follow the shamanic path of spirituality as I do, you learn that nobody is ever a victim. We are all capable of being predators, of having our loving heart energies closed down. And it is in moments when we have our heart shut off that even the best of us can be overtaken by anger and commit acts of abuse against another.

Oh, the abuse might seem "minor." We might cut in front of someone in traffic because they are driving too slow for our tastes, giving them an angry stare and perhaps making a rude gesture at them.

If you're an empath like me, you FEEL THE ENERGY of such acts when they are directed at you or another person.

And believe me, there is NO DIFFERENCE between the hateful person who is aggressive in traffic and the parent who beats the crap out of their kid on a daily basis. They are projecting the same exact hostile, hateful energy.

That's how out of touch we are with understanding energy. We DON'T SEE how we all have the capacity to be abusers, at all times, and that it takes conscious work to start shifting the way that we express personal energy. We need to do this as individuals, but we also need to do it as a society. This place just isn't very liveable, and it's all because of our ignorance about how energy affects us all.

Most people think freaking out at fellow drivers and contributing to the psychic darkness polluting our nation's highways DOESN'T MATTER. "I'm still a spiritual and enlightened person, even if I have no patience when I'm driving and want to kill my fellow drivers on the road, they make me so angry."

The energy BEHIND your thoughts and actions is just the same as the energy behind the parent who abuses his kid.

Remember Jesus said that to look at a woman with lust in your heart was the same as committing adultery with her? He was a master at understanding how energy worked. TO BE IN THE ENERGY OF THE THING IS TO HAVE DONE THE THING.

In the same way, projecting an intense desire to kill a fellow driver on the highway is no different than taking out a gun and shooting him.

The shamanic path of spirituality teaches SELF-RESPONSIBILITY, of owning up to our flawed nature. But it doesn't teach us to sit in judgment of ourselves or hate ourselves because of those flaws.

The shamanic path acknowledges that we are living in psychically fragmented times when most people are spiritually "off-center," disconnected from Spirit and that never-ending, constantly nurturing source of love. It's because we are disconnected that we have become so dysfunctional.

The key is to move closer to Spirit and away from dislocation. This is a gradual process. The most important thing you can do to put yourself on the path (or get yourself back on the path, because we all slip from time to time) is to assume responsibility for where you ended up. You chose to be in your current situation, whether you can face that fact fully in this moment or not. Meditate on it and feel the truth of it for yourself. Once you get it, I guarantee you will have an "Aha!" moment of amazing illumination. You'll suddenly perceive the connection between where you ended up and what energies caused you to be there.

Once you accept responsibility for ending up where you are and for attracting predators in your life to teach you certain lessons REALLY WELL, you can let go of the need for that type of experience. You may even be able to feel gratitude for the lessons you have been privileged to learn through whatever challenges you have faced. And you can start focusing on your own healing, moving beyond where you currently are, and embracing different ways of living.

Step 4) Take action to affect healing on the physical plane.

Step four happens after you have assumed responsibility and are through with playing the victim. You may decide to make a physical change in your life, changing jobs or residences. Or you may choose to have a heartfelt conversation with someone. Sometimes this will be less of a conversation and more of a situation where YOU SPEAK YOUR TRUTH to the person in your life you need to heal with.

You can't always manifest a direct healing of the relationship, especially if the person is still pretty low in their consciousness. If your abuser is still stuck in a predatorial mindset, it's not your job to change them. It is, however, your job to GIVE A NAME to your experience, whether you do this directly in confrontation with the person or through a letter or even through prayer.

You can always talk to that person's Higher Self if it isn't safe or practical to talk to that person in the flesh. In many circumstances, it's not safe to talk to the person in the flesh, and you should only work through spiritual channels. All you should be concerned about is affecting your OWN healing. Once that is completed, the situation will fade from your life, it will stop having power over you, and you will begin to magnetize much healthier relationships and experiences.

Step 5) Dare to start living your life in a new way.

You are not your past. By releasing the emotions, doing the spiritual homework around past trauma, and reclaiming your vital energies, you are no longer going to feel that you are powerlessness over your life. That was the voice of all that past pain talking, hypnotizing you into feelings of powerlessness. But that was just deception. Time to put that behind you.

By reclaiming your energy from the situation and completing your healing, you are refreshed, revitalized, and renewed. (By the way, I highly recommend the process of soul retrieval, which can be done by many practitioners trained in the shamanic traditions. They are excellent at helping you to reclaim fragments of your spirit, your vital essence, that were lost to you during times of past trauma. You can also pray to have Spirit and your spiritual helpers return your soul fragments to you. The angels are always happy to do this. A lot of chronic fatigue sufferers recover after they receive soul retrieval, because fatigue and other physical and emotional illnesses can be caused by soul loss.)

Complete unto yourself again, you are now ready to start experiencing a new life, from a fresh vantage point. And the world you wish to be a part of has always been within your reach. Your life is waiting for you. Go and grab it!