For 15+ years of my life I was stuck experiencing my worst nightmares on repeat. No matter how hard I worked to control everything around me, I couldn’t break free.

In the thickness of a dark despair I made peace with death. It was like a superpower. I had nothing to lose. I felt brazen, took kid-gloves off, and started messing around with myself … with my beliefs, my consciousness, and perception.

I became an observer, an experimenter ready to learn. I wanted to see if I could put a dent into my life sentence that kept playing on repeat.

In my research when I kept meeting ‘forgiveness’ as a necessary passport out of my misery-land I still had nothing but judgment and prejudice for it, I kind of hated the idea of forgiveness.

I did not want to join the ranks of my foremothers who were told to grin, bear, and turn the other cheek in the face of abuse and indignity.

It was not until I re-read the book ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ that my stance on forgiveness loosened. I was baffled by Dr. Viktor Frankl demonstrating the potential to experience COMPLETE FREEDOM as he did as a prisoner in the Auschwitz’s concentration camp in the midst of being inhumanly abused by a cruel guard, that I started to understand the POWER, POTENTIAL, and PURPOSE of forgiveness.

My anger and indignation regarding forgiveness moved FROM:

• why would I ever let ‘this person’ off the hook?
• why would I allow ‘them’ to think it’s okay to do what they did to me?

TO understanding for the first time that:
– ‘true forgiveness’ is ALWAYS about PERSONAL FREEDOM. When forgiveness is unable to free us, it becomes a ‘secret transaction’, which sounds like: “if I forgive you, you’ll forgive me when I make a similar or lesser mistake”, or “if I forgive you, you’ll be happy, successful, grateful to me…”, etc.

Truth is: it’s not possible to know what someone does with your forgiveness.

Truth is: the only reason to forgive is to close off the carbon-monoxide-like ‘silent but deadly’ energy-leak and finally cut the umbilical cord that binds you to what and whom you are not forgiving.

Truth is: the best reason to forgive someone is because YOU DESERVE IT … ‘you’ deserve to finally be free from what is not serving you and is still hurting you.

Even when I understood all of this and started testing it in my own life, it took me much longer still, to understand, digest,and bring into my life that next big fact about ‘true forgiveness’ …

FREEDOM through forgiveness requires SELF-FORGIVENESS.

This part was far beyond my capacity at the time. I didn’t even know ‘self-forgiveness’ was a ‘thing’ … more on self-forgiveness next week but for now, I ask you:

What if YOU experimented with seeing FORGIVENESS AS:

• freedom
• release
• lightness
• self-loyalty and kindness
• self- connection

What if NOT FORGIVING meant giving ‘what/who hurt you’ a permanent residence in your consciousness … giving them a secret channel into your limited and precious LIFE-FORCE ENERGY, such that they can drain your most precious resource ‘whenever’ they want, however they want?

To release myself from the theme of deep betrayal that kept playing in my life on a loop, I brazenly forgave every single person or situation in my life that represented the pain of betrayal.

It was the scariest, most invigorating, and courageous thing I have done. It may be the greatest accomplishment of my life and I thank myself everyday for the freedom and release I continue to experience, that I didn’t know was possible for me in my living state.

What and whom will you forgive in the name of personal freedom?