About Forgiveness
Forgiving frees you from the past and frees you to be who you really are.
By Dr. Leonard Laskow
When I started exploring healing and forgiveness in my practice selectively with patients, I noticed that almost all the suffering, distress, and many illnesses were associated with a perceived sense of separation — from others, from our environment, or most importantly, from our spiritual nature. Specifically, I noticed a tendency to “dissociate” or deny a part of oneself from an experience or wound too painful to hold in consciousness. Often this wounding came in early childhood, and sometimes it even went back to being in the womb. It’s not uncommon for people to pick up feelings from their mother or father or the collective consciousness while in this precognitive state and then attribute these to themselves. For example, “I’m not good enough,” “I’m a mistake,” “My father wanted a boy, and I’m a girl.”
Sometimes they sense the fear the mother has about her own capability to care for her infant, particularly if they are the firstborn. Again, because they are precognitive, these are feelings without language. If they did have words, the words might say, “How am I going to survive if she feels that way?” or “There must be something wrong with ME.”
Forgiving heals the separation from your inner light — your loving presence — by dissolving the veils of conditioned perception and belief.
We are, of course, rarely conscious of holding these early beliefs and decisions about how the world is and how things are. And yet, they are so often at the root of our problems, our suffering, and most of our illnesses. These emotional wounds initiate our sense of separation from others, from our environment, and ultimately, from our essential nature.
Forgiving yourself dissolves the veils that obscure your inner light — your loving presence. What are these veils of separation? What are these structures in consciousness called the conditioned mind? Unconscious identification with your mind-made self veils you from your loving presence as: thoughts, feelings, sense perceptions, as your story, illness, pain, suffering and loss, your attachments and aversions, your judgments of others and especially of yourself. So forgiveness is about letting go, about releasing, about dissolving these veils of the conditioned mind.
Forgiving yourself is one of the most powerful ways to unveil your essential nature to let your inner light shine. And through forgiveness, we experience freedom, truth, love and peace. You may ask yourself where is this freedom, truth, love and peace? It is within. It’s about what is happening inside of you, the forgiver. So forgiveness is not about another, although that is the common misperception. Perpetrators need to forgive themselves. However, everything is non-locally connected, so when you release them through forgiveness, they frequently feel it. Another way to say this is that, since we are all interrelated, actually entangled at the level of consciousness, when you change, the relationship changes.
Forgiveness is about letting go. Letting go of what? It is about releasing attachment to the past, and attachment to resentments, grudges and anger. It’s letting go of attachment to judgment, blame, shame, guilt, suffering and loss, victim-victimizer perspective, and especially identifying with the story. It’s letting go of the story of abandonment, betrayal, loss, and the need to control through continued judgment and anger.
Fundamentally, forgiveness is letting go of the charge around the memory so that upon recalling what happened in the past, there is no longer an emotional reaction, just the memory. Now you are free — free to love and free to be.
The most important person to forgive is yourself, including all parts of yourself — the child, the adolescent, and the adult.
When you release the identification with the story, when you release the illusion that who you are is the story with its experiences and memories, when you really release the illusion, what remains is love.
Forgiving is a way of clearing the spiritual “palate” for the next taste of life and for truly loving yourself more deeply — or perhaps for the first time. Forgiving frees you from the past and frees you to be who you really are. With the energy of the past cleared, we are free from the emotional charge of old stories, conditions, and patterns ... and free to be fully present.
Is there a situation or condition in your past that you consider out of your control? Can you recognize that your initial response to the situation was reactive — from pain, hurt, and confusion? You are now free to choose again. This choice point is where the Holoenergetic® Forgiveness Process becomes a doorway to freedom, empowerment and true healing.
That is why the most important person to forgive is yourself, including all parts of yourself — the little child, the adolescent/teenager, and the adult. Why all three? Because the “you” you were at each of these ages and stages exists in you as memories, experiences, and energy. As part of the Holoenergetic® Forgiveness Process, you will be asked to call forth images of yourself as a child first, then as an adolescent, and finally as an adult. You will be asked to forgive each of the images that represent a portion of your life for which you consciously or subconsciously now feel guilt or shame. You will have an opportunity to communicate things that perhaps you hav- en’t ever consciously accessed before. By releasing any past hurts, you will be inviting all parts of yourself home, reconciling some parts that may have felt separate and alone for a long time. This part of the healing process demonstrates a further level of healing into wholeness.
The Holoenergetic® Forgiveness Process
The Holoenergetic® Forgiveness Process helps us transform the painful situation or memory by releasing the charge we’ve been holding on to.
There is another aspect to forgiving ourselves at every stage of life. Not only do we forgive ourselves for any perpetrations, real or imagined, we also forgive ourselves for being unloving to ourselves or to others. The key is to feel strongly enough so that you are releasing the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline. In doing so, we separate the traumatic memory from the emotional charge. While this is a process each individual does for him or herself, imagine the power and release when done individually en masse for some global atrocity, massacre, or holocaust. We collectively might never have to repeat these trauma-inducing patterns again.
Releasing the Emotional Charge
Recent neurologic research suggests that short-term memory goes through a molecular process called “consolidation” during which it is converted, under certain circumstances, into longterm memories. The process of converting short-term memories to long- term ones is enhanced by stress hormones, which alert a part of the midbrain called the amygdala, the brain’s emotional control center. The amygdala is activated either by stress hormones or those associated with love and caring. You probably can’t even imagine how many events in your life you have forgotten. Notice however, how many of the events you do recall are associated with either con- tractive or expansive emotions. That’s because recall is tethered to emotions.
Exciting new research suggests that original memories can be changed or reconsolidated. For example, when rats were given an electric shock at the exact moment a sound was played, the rats formed a memory that linked the sound to fear. For a memory to be consolidated from short term to long term — from unstable to stable — it undergoes a process called protein synthesis. The researchers theorized that during this unstable memorizing period, the memories could be reconsolidated. They injected a drug that stopped the protein synthesis in the amygdala of the rat. When the sound was played after that, the rats no longer reacted with fear to hearing the sound alone.
The quality of our lives depends on the amount of charge we carry. To live freely, we need to be free of reactive conditioning expressed as emotional charge.
The implications are this: Reactivating a memory temporarily returns it to an unstable state, providing an opportunity to reconsolidate the memory. If the reactivation occurs in a loving field, the memory can be favorably reconsolidated. That’s why the Holoenergetic® Forgiveness Process works so well. It allows us to remember the experience without the painful emotional charge.
The quality of our lives depends on the amount of charge we carry. To live freely, we need to be free of reactive conditioning expressed as emotional charge.
When you forgive fully, you open a portal to ever-present Oneness. Once charge is released, you are free to experience “what is” directly instead of through the filter of past conditioning. Your quality of life dramatically improves and you are free to be who you truly are.
Excerpt from the book 'For Giving Love'
© Leonard Laskow | All rights reserved