PREFACE
When I set out to write For Giving Love, I realized that most of the great works of art are created not with the audience in mind but as a creative expression of the Divine — an expression that simply must be manifested. You didn’t arrive here to live your life for others, or to express what others think, value and want. You’re living your life because life lives itself through you. Yes, you can choose to take this life force and devote it to the well-being of others, but the life force didn’t come here for that; it came here to just express itself. In other words, life is to be lived and has an inherent impulse to become conscious of itself. And Essence is simply a sense of being. To be aware of being, and then to share it as part of the complexity called awakening is what For Giving Love is really about.
Leonard Laskow
December 2015
INTRODUCTION: ON LOVE AND FORGIVENESS
If you’re holding this book in your hands — or reading it on your screen — you already have some curiosity about forgiveness. Perhaps you’ve had a profound experience of forgiveness yourself or seen how it has transformed the life of another. Or maybe you’re skeptical about forgiveness because you imagine that it’s a way of pretending to make something all right when it isn’t or condoning something that cannot be condoned.
It is my hope that this book will transform your experience of forgiveness and give you lifelong tools for generating genuine peace and healing in your life and in the world. You may be surprised to discover that your assumptions about what forgiveness is have been limited by misinformation or missing information. You may be relieved to find that forgiving has nothing to do with forgetting, denying, or condoning horrors. It is not about anyone else “out there.”
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It is about how YOU are holding the circumstance. When you release identification with or an attachment to the past then...
FORGIVING IS GIVING LOVE... AND FOR GIVING FREEDOM
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.
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This book will offer you a clear and practical pathway for forgiving. It will offer inspiring stories of those who have transformed their lives through the Holoenergetic® Forgiveness Process. You’ll learn how forgiving changes you on a cellular level — the biology of forgiveness — and how it can change the field around you so that other people you haven’t spoken with in years suddenly have a change of heart.
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You’ll learn about what I call “the Game of Awakening,” an operational cosmology that will give you otherworldly resources to deal with this-worldly challenges. I’ve found that this operational cosmology helps seminar participants negotiate the unmanifest that is beyond the understanding of the thinking mind.
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You’ll also learn what forgiveness is and is not, and perhaps gain some insight into why forgiveness may have been challenging for you until now — and why it can lead to the next level of breakthrough in your life. You will learn how to practice “presence” so you can look at any situation through the eyes of your soul. Of course you will learn the Holoenergetic® Forgiveness Process and be inspired by stories of how forgiveness heals. And you will get a glimpse of what is “beyond” forgiveness — a world where presence is being alive and aware here and now.
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Whatever condition or situation you find most challenging in life — whether that be health, relationships, money, career, or overall happiness — forgiveness has the power to release the blocks that have been keeping you from unconditionally loving yourself exactly as you are.
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At this point you might also be wondering how someone trained as a scientist, and as a medical doctor, could get so involved with healing through love and forgiveness.
So ... a bit of background.
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What brought me to the realizations I share with you in these pages began in the 1970s with my discovery of the healing effects of love, which was documented in my first book, Healing with Love: A Breakthrough Mind/Body Medical Program for Healing Yourself and Others. At the time of its publication, Deepak Chopra said my work revealed that “Love is truth and beyond sentiment ...the ultimate healer.” Since then, my research, healing work, further discovery, and teaching have continued. I present it here in a rich, practical way that can be applied to every area of our lives, and most certainly for our own inner development and for a deepening realization of our essential wholeness.
ABOUT STEVE BHAERMAN
STEVE BHAERMAN is an author and humorist who’s spent the past twenty-eight years writing and performing comedy as Swami Beyondananda. Author Marianne Williamson calls him “The Mark Twain of our generation.” On the serious side, Steve is the author of Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future and a Way to Get There from Here, written with Bruce Lipton. Since 2006, he has written a political / spiritual blog called Notes from the Trail bringing humor and perspective to challenging times. His website is www.wakeuplaughing.com.