The Forgiveness Flip

I wanted to share with you my newest Happiness Hack! These Hacks are direct paths to peace that start to live in you… I’ve given you the ‘CHEAT SHEET’ below, and you can just CLICK HERE or click any of the photos below to download your own PDF of this radically freeing tool.

You may feel you have worked through many of your issues by this point, as you’re getting to the forgiveness part of the Six Keys to Dependable Peace and Warm Connection. But this happiness hack is about really going deep and facing what you’ve feared facing. Going into the places where you really and truly feel that someone did something hurtful, dangerous, threatening, or minimizing to you, or took away the sense of love and safety you wanted to be able to count on from them.

Who have you still not forgiven?

After working the newest Happiness Hack, The Forgiveness Flip around her childhood, one Mastermind participants shared with us all this week about a most amazing shift she had experienced in a perception that had in many ways dominated her relationships and her perceptions of herself:

“I finally got to the point where I felt that my parents had been loving supportive parents and not people who undermined me and blocked me and didn’t understand me… I had spent a lifetime thinking that… And feeling that security gave me an example of where I’d like to be with each inquiry that I do–I know what I am aiming for now. I can see that I haven’t achieved it in many parts of my life, but I am really encouraged by having it in ONE relationship, and am now believing I can have it in lots of others.”

The Forgiveness Flip helps us address and move past the complex interplay of blaming ourselves and others. Blame and shame are the flip side of the same coin, and our pain is simply a call to action to free ourselves from a pre-conceived notion that life or others need to show up a certain way for us to be happy.

When we find forgiveness, we find true freedom. Our happiness is no longer tied to needing another to change, apologize, or make amends before we see that we have options that let them be exactly as they are.

Forgiveness is the opposite of condoning, excusing, or ignoring an action–it is volitionally bringing inner/outer peace into the world by becoming the change toward peace that you want them to be. In this true forgiveness, you find there is nothing to forgive by removing yourself from the position of judge and jury altogether, humbly accepting that you can’t know the meaning of someone else’s path, or what blind spot you are trying to see through via your pain that was only based on your mind’s definition of what you or others needed in a given moment.

Finding out for yourself–through this process–that your trigger was as much lack of forgiveness of yourself as of them, and that you don’t know what is ultimately a good or bad/write or wrong/fair or unfair action or outcome, helps you find the Spark of Love behind all actions–in other words, that the intent to help another or help ourselves (when we feel small and threatened).Forgiveness is true freedom, as it restores your unconditional connection to others and also restores your choices–i.e. you suddenly find yourself disentangled from others’ actions and put the focus back on how YOU are reacting and what you CAN do.

We don’t even want to think of ourselves as someone who holds grudges, or retaliates, or tries to control others to keep them from committing actions or saying words we experience as unforgivable. It’s OK sweetie. You are always doing the very best you can, given what you’re believing, so start by forgiving yourself UNCONDITIONALLY! It’s OK to take a look… that is, if we want freedom, and see where we are doing to others and especially to ourselves EXACTLY what we thought was being done to us. Finding how ‘we are them’ is humbling, but living life in that right-sized place is much more FUN!

NOTE: IT’S OK NOT WANT TO FORGIVE. HONOR THAT. IF OU DON’T YOU WILL RESIST THIS PROCESS. After working so hard on ourselves, we often feel resistant or resentful about being the one who always goes in and finds your part or does the work to reconnect to what seems to be an unforgivable person or situation! Take your time and try this:

Attend to that part of you.
Notice the resistance.
Notice the “NOT FAIR!” story.
Find the fear story about letting them off the hook.
Notice the ways you don’t want to be a doormat, or have your needs overlooked.
What does it tell you you will loose? What do you really want?
Can you have it without the condition that they have to change or see the error of their ways?

When you question the beliefs behind those stories, you will find that waiting for the other’s actions to change is the very powerless stance that is causing you to suffer. This is about your happiness, not about being right or orchestrating a change in others or life. When you realize that, you may realize that the work of forgiving put you in the most empowered position of all.

While we spend a week on Forgiveness in the Radical Relief Bootcamp, we spend a whole two months looking at this in the Mastermind. Right now they are wrapping up the 5th Key to Dependable Peace and Delightful Connection: “Finding Forgiveness and Fearless Faith.” |I’m sharing here with you the guidelines for how to go about doing just that— check out my newest Happiness Hack available here: The Forgiveness Flip.