What does true forgiveness feel like? How do we know if we have really forgiven someone who has hurt us?

The experience of forgiveness is so profound and refreshing that there is no doubt about it when it happens. Forgiveness changes us physically and emotionally, dissolving the stagnant weight of resentment and flooding our bodies with fresh new energy. It mends our tattered personal boundaries, and empowers us to move forward with more hope and creativity in operation than when we were holding our grudges. When we do the thorough and gritty work that goes into releasing the trauma from the past, we reestablish our connection with our spiritual Source, and that Source gifts us with a palpable sense of light and lightness. We find ourselves on new ground.

For the last ten years, I have been privileged to receive the benefits of practicing unconditional love and forgiveness as a spiritual path. "Unconditional Love and Forgiveness" is a body of work I stumbled upon in 1986 when I met my mentor, Dr. Edith Stauffer. Dr. Stauffer crafted an elegant 8-step model of forgiving others, and another one to forgive yourself, out of her spiritual studies and forty years’ experience as a psychotherapist. The result is a tool that enables people to directly tackle any injury, large or small, and find permanent healing for it. Dr. Stauffer trained me in her work and since 1990 I’ve enjoyed the lucky job of teaching others how to forgive, in workshops and in private sessions. I want to share with you some of the things I have witnessed along the road about the experience of forgiveness.

First of all, nobody really wants to do forgiveness, we just want to feel better. It’s kind of like having a tooth ache and recognizing the need for dental work. You don’t want to go to the dentist and feel more pain for an hour, so you stay in denial for a while. But the pain persists and you know that you’ll feel better if you do something about it. So you muster the discipline to make that appointment, go through the experience and get the job done. In the same way, we often put off naming the fact that we need to do an act of forgiveness, because then we have to go do something about it! Maybe we want to do it but it seems hard and we don’t know how. Maybe we are afraid that if we forgive someone who has hurt us, we will make ourselves too vulnerable and set ourselves up for further hurt. Perhaps we can’t forgive because we feel that what was done is unjust, and we think that forgiveness implies that we condone injustice.. (It doesn’t.) Or it could be that we find so much satisfaction in feeling " right" in our judgement of another, and we’d rather be right than be at peace. Usually, people are ready to forgive when they tire of the struggle and the story playing over and over in their heads. The need for peace finally outweighs the need to be right.

I once taught a short class which began with a woman defiantly raising her hand and declaring, "I just want you to know at the outset that I don’t think it’s even remotely possible to forgive my fiancee and my best friend for having an affair with each other three weeks before our wedding". She received supportive nods from the other class members as she explained that she’d already broken up with both of them but she felt like a basket case and didn’t know how to go on. She didn’t want to forgive them, but she couldn’t eat, sleep, or function at work, and she didn’t know what else to do. I encouraged her to take in any amount of this workshop that she was willing to, and we heartily engaged with the why’s and wherefores of forgiveness for a few hours.

After we had all practiced getting in touch with our Higher Power through a number of simple avenues, she raised her hand again and said, "I want you to know that I think there is a tiny shred of possibility that I can forgive them and move on." "Good!" I congratulated her. "All you need is a tiny shred of faith and a tiny bit of willingness. Then when you do the steps of forgiveness, you will find the healing you’re looking for." And because she had already cried and raged her fill, and she was so ready to feel better, she forgave both of them and herself completely in a total of two hour’s private work, and found permanent relief from this hurt.

Permanent relief? I hear you say. Can we really get permanent healing from the pain of our biggest wounds? We can. Forgiveness is a natural and a transformative process--- like fire that burns wood to ashes. If you burn a log to ash, you don’t wake up the next day and find a whole log again. It’s been changed. In the same way, if you work through an injury in all the ways that your whole being requires, (i.e. the 8 steps of forgiveness) --- you will be changed. Your own body will tell you that this is true. I once forgave my husband’s business for stressing us out for years and then going belly up anyway. As I completed the last step of forgiveness, I literally felt something go "sproing!" and pop off of my chest, leaving my heart feeling light and free. I didn’t know that I was carrying my pain about that business as a burden on my heart until I felt it leave me.

Sometimes we hold onto our resentment towards someone who we love because we feel that the resentment is the only bond we have with them. A woman at one of my workshops hesitated just as she was about to forgive her Dad for being incestuous with her as a child. Even though there was nothing more to say or do with it after seven years of therapy, she just couldn’t let it go . She thought she would feel like an orphan with no father at all if she forgave him and stopped holding her grudge against him–it was her bond with him. I encouraged her to turn her heart towards her Higher Power as a father, and let her fallible earthly Dad off the hook at last.

When she did this, and she completely released all of her expectations of her Dad, she became flooded with buried memories of a good connection with him. She found her peace. This works for forgiving Moms , too–turn to God the Mother and release all your disappointed expectations of your human mother. You will find a Divine Source pouring in the nurturing you crave. Nobody has to remain an orphan in this world! In addition to the healing about her Dad, this woman reported to me later: "It’s like all my senses woke up that day. I was numb before. Now I smell flowers, and hear birds, and feel the breezes as I do my work as a postal carrier. I came alive again that day."

From time to time I am blessed to witness that people can forgive the unforgivable. One time I taught an Unconditional Love and Forgiveness workshop at a retreat center in central Wisconsin. On the first evening, a woman I will call Liz shyly revealed that she sought healing from the trauma of having been raped by an acquaintance a number of years earlier. Her face was strained and grey, and her posture was tight and protected– her personal hell was visible to all of us. The compassion in the room from the other sixty participants was full and warm as she spoke, and I knew that I was meant to work with her that weekend.

Over the course of the next two days, I watched Liz gathering her will--- the first step towards forgiveness--- and seek in prayer and community to find the strength to completely forgive this person for his terrible act. She wanted to free herself of any further entanglement with him or with that moment. On the last day of the workshop I helped her descend fully into the hate and poison left within her from this experience, and in the course of an hour, she forgave her rapist completely, step by step. Sixty people sat patiently through her foul language and her vivid imaginary castration of her assailant. Releasing your emotional truth is the second step of forgiveness. As we moved on through the third and fourth steps I found myself wondering, "Will this really work? Can even this be forgiven?" It pushed the edges of my own capacity to forgive, big time. However, we both persisted in the process and--- faithful as the sun--- the light of forgiveness began to dawn.

As Liz reached the final two steps of forgiving, and reached to her Spiritual Source for healing, the hair on my arms and head was standing up because the room was electric with Spirit’s powerful restorative energies. It was clear to me that her nervous system was being flushed clean of the habitual patterns installed when she was victimized. Liz emerged from her journey as pink and open as a full-blown summer rose. There was a remarkable beauty and a healthy vulnerability in her face and body, and she declared with certainty that the trauma was all gone! Everything was silent for a few moments except for the soft weeping of a few of the witnesses, and then there was such an outburst of whooping and hugging and talking! I think that sixty other people simultaneously decided that they too had the courage to get to work forgiving people on their lists. If she could do that...

If that wasn’t enough to blow my mind, Liz told me later how it was that she came to be in my workshop at all. She was traveling across country from Idaho to Massachusetts in her car, and at the eastern edge of Wisconsin she followed an impulse to stop in a church to pray. She prayed again to be healed of her hurt. As she left the church she noticed a stray flyer on a pew that advertised my workshop on the retreat center’s calendar of events. An inner voice told her, "Go there!" So, she backtracked two hundred miles to arrive at my workshop just as it was starting– and got what she needed. When I heard this, it assured me once again that the Universe itself is conspiring to help us find wholeness, and forgiveness is a gift we all deserve to enjoy. We only need to be willing.

The Eight Steps of Forgiving Another Person
from Unconditional Love and Forgiveness

1. . Use your will. Decide to move forward into a new attitude and greater freedom.

2. Express your emotional truth. Speak honestly. Vent to your satisfaction. Entertain a few revenge fantasies if necessary.

3. Cancel the expectations you are holding in your mind. Break it down into parts, shift them into preferences, dissolve each one completely.

4. Sort out the responsibility and re-establish your boundaries.

5. Reach to your Spiritual Source for healing. Draw healing light down into your body, mind, and emotions through your crown chakra. (Top of your head.)

6. Send light and love to the other person, or to their Higher Power, just as they are.

7. See the good in them or in the spiritual lesson of the situation.

8. Note the changes in your body, emotions, energy, and attitude. Take time to let it gently integrate into you as a permanent change.