How To Forgive And Let Go

What is it about forgiveness that frightens us so much?

Literally.

What is it about forgiveness,

Just the mention of the word,

That in some way brings up these uneasy feelings,

There's something not comfortable around the essence of forgiveness?

Well,

It may be that in some way we think we're letting the other person off,

And I get that.

We're letting them win in some way after all that they've done to us.

It might be that there's a religious connotation to the word forgiveness.

It's in the Bible,

It's in the Koran,

It's in all religious text,

And in some way we might think it's above us.

Surely if the sages and the gurus and the wise wrote about it thousands of years ago,

We can't reach that level.

Well,

I'm here to tell you that you absolutely can.

And we'll let that unfold over the next 20 minutes or so as we look at the principle of forgiveness.

So,

It's difficult,

Or so we seem.

We're on this journey through life,

You and I,

And it's not all milk and honey,

I get that.

People cross our path,

Or won't cross our path,

And it leaves us with something.

And in some way,

We take it,

And we carry it with us.

And I'm going to look at the effect that that can have on your well-being.

That that can have on yours and my future existence,

And how it can define and shape our future existence.

So let's look at forgiveness.

About 10 years ago,

I have a dear friend who's the director of the Birmingham Holistic Health Centre.

His name is Stuart Morris,

A very special man.

Some people on this talk may even know of the work that he does.

And Stuart puts people's lives back together in a very quiet and modest way.

And if you walk into his therapy practice there in Birmingham,

In the centre of the UK,

He has certificates up on the wall for just about every healing modality,

From acupuncture all the way through to X in the alphabet,

Some that I have no idea about.

And for over 30 years,

Stuart has practised these individually,

And he's also put together his own healing modalities,

Using bits of each one.

And about 10 years ago,

I was sitting with Stuart,

And I was thinking about writing this book,

And I was talking about the principles of forgiveness.

And he said,

You know,

Ian,

I've had 20 at the time,

Over 20 years,

Thousands and thousands of people have come in and sat on that couch or been in this room.

And I've realised that healing and wellness and a good life centres around one thing,

The ability to forgive,

To let go,

To travel light,

To create freedom,

No matter what crosses our path.

And that made so much sense to me in that room.

He took me through a process.

I was going through something in my life at the time,

And it wasn't easy,

And it was to do with another person.

And I sat there with Stuart in his therapy suite,

And I said,

You know,

It's really difficult at the moment,

This is happening,

And the other person is doing this,

And it's having this effect on me.

And he asked me to stand,

And he asked me to put my arms out in front of me.

And he said,

I want you to think about the other person.

And I said,

OK.

And as I started to think about the other person,

The emotions and the thoughts and the feelings came up.

And Stuart placed a heavy yoga cushion onto my outstretched arms.

He said,

Now I want you to think about the effect it's had on your life,

The thousands of thoughts that you've had about this one incident,

One incident in the last few years.

And he placed another yoga cushion.

The weight was tangible.

He said,

Now I want you to think about how your life would have been if you would have been able not to pick this up,

If this either hadn't happened to you at all,

Or if there had been a way where you could lose this.

And he placed another cushion.

So by this point,

Folks,

And I'm not overemphasizing for effect here,

Heavy weight,

Maybe 25 kilograms,

Couldn't see over the cushions.

And then Stuart asked me to walk around his therapy room.

So I was walking around the room carrying all this weight,

Thinking about this thing that's in my life that I just can't let go of.

I can't let it lose its grip.

And as I turned to face Stuart,

He said,

OK,

Let them go.

And I let them go.

And I moved my arms and everything fell to the floor.

All of the weight,

All of the discomfort,

Everything that I've been carrying.

And Stuart said,

You see,

Here's the thing.

That's not yours to carry.

All of that weight,

All of that discomfort is not yours to carry.

At some point,

Things happen to you and I.

Things knock us over.

We can't always get up straight away and dust ourselves down.

But when we do,

On some level,

In some way,

We say to the other person,

We say to the incident,

We say to the illness,

We say to that piece of bad luck,

OK,

I'll carry it from here.

I may never speak to you again in my life.

You may be a stranger who's crossed my path,

But I'll carry the weight of this from here.

And so it goes.

If only there were a way out.

If only there were a way to put down that weight.

So let me move on now to the work that I did around the book,

Your Simple Path.

I knew that forgiveness had to play a part in the journey of simplicity.

So I started to look at the work predominantly of an author called David R.

Hawkins.

You may have heard me mention David R.

Hawkins before.

His book called Letting Go is a game changer,

Quite unbelievable.

And the famous work of Viktor Frankl,

Man's Search for Meaning,

About his life,

His existence,

His experience in Auschwitz for over four years in the Second World War.

So the first book tier is called Letting Go by David R.

Hawkins.

An amazing work.

All around forgiveness,

The clues in the title,

Letting Go.

And the second book is by Viktor E.

Frankl.

It's a classic.

It's called Man's Search for Meaning.

And he realized that the only way he was going to survive,

Frankl,

In Auschwitz,

And he survived for over four years and came out alive,

Went on to change millions of lives,

Was to let go of the treatment he was receiving.

In some way,

Reframe it,

Shape it,

Change the way he looked at it to get through.

So that sort of body of work formed what I went on to work with as forgiveness.

But I'd like to take you through a scenario where we get this idea of weight and not being able to put things down.

But let's give you a scenario about how life can play out.

Let's bring it into this chat now.

OK,

Everybody.

OK,

We've got it.

Fantastic.

OK,

So let's say that I'm in a relationship.

It's 1995.

I'm showing my age here.

Why didn't I pick a date closer?

But it's 1995 and I'm in a relationship and it's been going for about 12 months,

About a year,

And things are going well.

And then one day my partner comes to me and says,

I can't carry on with this.

I'm going to leave you.

I know it's a shock.

I know you think things were good.

But I'm finished.

I'm going to walk away.

And so it is.

The relationship breaks down.

I pull the curtains down for a month.

I pull the duvet up.

I push everything down towards with the hurt and the emotional upheaval.

And I just sort of become paused.

I can't move on.

Over time,

The curtains are open,

The duvets pulled down,

I'm eating and drinking again.

People are telling me there's plenty more fish in the sea.

You know how it works.

But I've pushed it down.

There's a message there.

I've got the weight and I move on.

Now,

I'm knocked about by what's happened.

And for a year,

There's no way I'm going anywhere near another relationship.

But about 12,

18 months later,

I enter into another relationship.

It's early days.

Everything seems to be unfolding well.

I start to talk to this person about the difficulty and the heartache I've had with my previous relationship.

This weight that I'm still carrying.

And why wouldn't I?

It's part of my story.

It's part of who I am.

About a week later,

They say that they don't think it's working out.

That they wish me all the best,

But they're going to move on.

I'm back in bed.

The curtains are drawn.

I've stepped back into this dating arena.

It's happened again.

I take all of that hurt,

All of that hope that I was going to be okay again.

And I push it down.

1997 now.

It doesn't just sit there energetically.

It attaches to 1995.

And this energetic mass starts to build in me.

It starts to define me.

It starts to create my thought processes,

My emotions,

How I go about my life.

I leave it for 10 years.

No way am I going to get hurt again.

I still tell people about how these relationships keep breaking down.

Because I'm speaking from this mass,

This energetic mass that sits there.

2007,

There's this new dating thing.

The internet.

Tinder or whatever it's called.

I think,

You know what,

In for a penny,

In for a pound.

I go on.

I meet somebody.

It goes really well.

Six months into the relationship,

They tell me that their ex has turned up.

They know how I've been hurt in the past because I've mentioned it to them.

They're really sorry to do this to me.

But they're stepping back in with their ex.

It's happened again.

I take 2007.

I push it down.

It meets 1997,

1995.

And now I can think you can see where this is going.

It's become who I am.

People leave me.

If there was one line to this mass,

People leave me.

I live my life from this position.

Now this can be illness.

This can be financial problems.

This can be your love life.

This can be relationships with a certain sort of person.

This can be not holding a job down.

Whatever it is,

The message here from David R.

Hawkins is,

What we push down sticks around.

So it's not just like this subconscious effect,

Not forgiving,

Not letting go as on us.

It's not just the suffering of the internal conflict.

It actually starts to play out in real time in our life.

Now if we don't use the word forgiveness,

If we use the word liberation,

Or if we use the word freedom,

Or if we use the word lightness,

Or if we use the term let go,

It seems to make more sense to us like that.

You see,

Forgiveness,

This work is never about saying to the other person,

It's okay what you did.

This is private work.

This is about you deserving and living a good life.

So how can we start to put this sort of forgiveness work,

This liberation,

This freedom into practice?

How can we start to travel light?

Well I'm going to introduce you now to a very,

Very simple but profound exercise.

So if you haven't already,

I'd like you just to get a piece of paper and a pen.

I'm not asking you to do the exercise now,

But this is life-changing work and I'd love you just to write this down.

So how can we start to reframe all of this stuff that we carry?

Well let me offer you a line.

We weren't born to suffer,

You and I.

We weren't born to suffer.

We were born to experience life.

We were born to understand and develop our understanding of human nature and of ourselves,

But not to suffer.

And a lot of this forgiveness work is because we've gone through it and we've got stuck at step one of two.

There is a step after the suffering and that's the key to the door.

That's what enables you to put the bag down,

To travel light,

To liberate yourself,

To let go.

So here's what I'd like you to do,

Folks.

Remember,

We weren't born to suffer.

So you take a piece of paper and at the top of the page you write the words in inverted commas,

In speech marks,

What's the gift?

What's the gift?

Really important.

And then underneath those words,

Again,

In speech marks,

You write the thing down that you wish to let go of,

That you wish to liberate yourself.

Enough now.

You've carried this long enough.

The other person may have passed away 30 years ago and we still carry the hurt.

Can you see how crazy this is,

Folks?

You deserve a good life.

So you take a piece of paper,

You write at the top,

What's the gift?

And you write underneath the person or the issue that you wish to let go of,

That you wish to remove the hurt and the emotional baggage of.

And then you draw a heart on the page.

Is everybody sort of with this up to yet?

There's not much more to it,

Folks.

It's a very simple but profound exercise.

So you've written what's the gift at the top,

The thing that you wish to let go of underneath,

And then a heart on the page.

Now this is private work.

I'm really going to ask you to close the door on this exercise,

To turn the phone off,

To mention this exercise to nobody else.

This is about you freeing you.

The second you introduce anybody else into this private work,

Even if it's someone who loves you dearly,

Just a throwaway line or a word from them can dilute the strength of what you can achieve.

So make this private work.

It's your life,

Your path,

Your journey.

Nobody else's.

And then with honesty and authenticity,

You write nothing at all in the heart.

You leave it clear.

But you start to write around the heart how this person,

How this issue,

How this person or this issue makes you feel.

When you think about what's happened,

What comes,

You start to write around the page how it makes you feel.

I'm going to give you an example in a moment.

And you empty yourself.

It might be that the pen doesn't flow at first,

But once it does,

It really does.

And you are removing this mass.

Remember my mass around three relationships that all went the same way?

Well,

Here's what David R.

Hawkins and Viktor Frankl say in a slightly different way.

When you pull the thread out of just one incident,

Everything that's attached to it over the years that's been similar falls down like a house of cards.

You're free.

You always were.

We just picked it up and carried it.

So you start to draw or write around the edge.

Just keep going.

Keep bringing this stuff out.

Just this part,

Just this part is so liberating.

You imagine something that you've had pushed down for 20 years.

And for the first time in your life,

You found the strength and the willpower to face it.

No more.

Enough now.

And then you'll come to a point where you'll realise that actually,

I think it's done.

I think I've brought out everything that I've been carrying around this person,

This incident.

But we're not done,

Folks.

We weren't born to suffer.

Can you see that if there wasn't another step,

Then this,

What you have just let out,

Would be it.

Your lot in life,

The card you've drawn,

Let out.

Bad luck.

No,

There's another step.

Here's something,

A personal thing that I went through about 12,

18 months ago.

So I've drawn what's the gift at the top of the page.

And the thing that I'm carrying with me,

That I really can't let go of,

Is a recent health scare.

Now I'd lived a bit of a Peter Pan life for the first 50 odd years of my life.

Never had anything go wrong,

Never had to see the doctor.

And then I had some symptoms.

I had to go and see the doctor.

He took a blood test.

And it was during COVID.

So the blood test,

Instead of taking two to three days to come back,

Was going to take two to three weeks.

They were the longest two to three weeks of my life,

Waiting for the test results.

My recent health scare I felt helpless.

Really,

For the first time in my life,

I felt truly helpless.

I felt vulnerable,

Terrified that out of nowhere these symptoms had come and I had no idea what that meant.

I felt like I hadn't lived this arc of life where nothing's ever going to go wrong and we're going to live to our high 80s or early 90s and pass away peacefully in our sleep.

Really,

Rock to the core.

I haven't done so much of what I wanted to do.

I felt frightened.

I'm too young.

I'm a victim.

Can you see how I've started to piece this together,

To push down,

To carry?

But that's the first step.

I wasn't born to suffer.

And here's where we move to the second step,

Folks.

And the clue is in the title.

What's the gift?

What's the gift?

I haven't gone through this just to suffer.

You haven't gone through whatever is on your mind right now just to suffer.

The world seems a bit crazy at the moment,

Folks,

But if you look out on a typical day,

You hear birds song,

You see clouds against a blue sky.

This is a good universe.

We breathe the same air and drink the same water as old oak trees and birds and grass.

It's a good place.

We just get stuck.

We just reframe it slightly differently.

So,

In the heart now,

With the same authenticity and the same honesty,

We start to write down things that we now know that are in our life,

That we've experienced,

That the lesson that has come to us,

That we simply couldn't have known or couldn't have felt if we hadn't been through this.

Around the heart is not the end.

There's another step.

So,

If you look at my heart,

It's blank there.

But I started to write things down like,

Life is short.

I'm going to go for my goals.

I'm going to tell people I love them more.

I'm not going to take anything for granted anymore.

I'm going to really move towards how I want my life to be.

I've never felt like this before.

I'd played at it.

I'd told people occasionally,

Yeah,

That's how it is.

But now,

I really knew it.

And so,

Luckily,

When the test results came back,

It was okay.

No guarantees,

But it was okay.

But I was left with this gift.

This gift that I really truly was going to move towards the life that I wanted.

I really was going to tell people that I love them.

I really was going to take care of myself.

I wasn't going to take anything for granted.

This really gave me the kick I needed to get on with life.

And so,

When I look back now,

I don't look back at that health scare,

Terrified in case it's going to happen again.

I look back at the gift that it's given me.

That I know that life is short.

I know we can't take anything for granted.

I'm going to create a life more around and define a life more around my values,

Whatever it is.

And then when you look back,

You've reframed the issue.

It's not about forgiveness.

It's not about forgiving yourself or forgiving the scare.

It's about the lesson that you've learned.

And the author Wayne Dyer come out with a great line that really defines where we're going with this.

When you change the way you look at things,

The things you look at change.

When you change the way you look at things,

The things you look at change.