What is Unconditional Love and Forgiveness?

"It’s not hard to forgive   —  you just need to know how."  -  Dr. Edith Stauffer

Unconditional Love and Forgiveness are laws of the Universe that are inter-related, and that allow our lives to proceed harmoniously within Life’s creative flow. We need to draw on the unconditional love available to us from the level of soul and Spirit in order to accomplish the act of forgiveness. And the act of forgiveness opens us up to experience greater unconditional love in our relationships and harmony in our interactions with others. Unconditional Love and Forgiveness are spiritual practices that keep us physically healthy and help us evolve to greater levels of worldly success and spiritual freedom.

Unconditional Love can be understood in two ways:

1. Personally, as an act of mental will in which we choose to see the good in a person or situation.
   
2. Transpersonally, as a divine energy that freely extends itself to all beings without expectation, condition, or demand. This energy fosters blessing, good will, and optimal thriving for both the giver and the receiver of this love.

Forgiveness is to cancel any expectation, condition; or demand that I am holding in my mind that prevents the free extension of unconditional love and forgiveness between myself and another being.

The Eight Steps of Forgiveness of Another

4. Sort out the boundaries: give them responsibility for their actions and take yours

6. Send unconditional love to the person

FIVE STEPS TO SELF-FORGIVENESS

STEP ONE: Prepare for self-forgiveness.
Sit on the floor or a chair. Align your will to make a change and stop carrying this issue against yourself. Picture your Higher Self above you, listening compassionately and waiting to grant you the relief of self-forgiveness. Use an image that works for you.

STEP TWO: Talk out your problem in detail with your Higher Self, and ask it to help you. Allow your full misery to surface and express it with trust and vulnerability, feeling and releasing your emotions about it. Remember there is nothing you can say or do that is unforgivable.

STEP THREE: Connect with the Higher Self and lift yourself to its level of consciousness. Lift above the emotional level by first seeing the good in yourself and saying a few examples of that out loud. Then visualize your image of the Higher Self again and meditate on some of its qualities: peace, wisdom, compassion, etc. Imagine you can lift yourself as a soul to the level of that Self, leaving your personality down in the chair. Stand up and turn to face the personality from above as you continue to fully resonate with God’s great qualities. Allow your consciousness to shift to it’s highest level and perspective.

STEP FOUR: Forgive yourself from this higher level.
When you feel you are in this higher consciousness, look down upon where you were sitting and picture your personal self there awaiting your help. Allow yourself to view your personality and his/her situation from a wise and compassionate and expansive perspective. Extend your hands in healing and blessing, imagining light flowing from you and God to bathe and release the person below from all burdens. Speak words of advice and comfort out loud to your little personal self from your new perspective. Or just enjoy the silence and light of the Self. When you feel complete, make a statement like, "... and I forgive you completely," or "I release you from your shame."

STEP FIVE: Give thanks for the forgiveness and take in your new perspective. Take your sitting position and quietly allow this experience to settle and integrate. Note the relief and new understanding. Say: "Thank you for this forgiveness."

Adapted from  The Peaceful Heart by Mary Hayes Grieco

The Experience of Forgiveness

What does it feel like to forgive someone? How do I know I really let go of something that hurt me?

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 twenty 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, and to invite you to my next workshop.

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.

The relief of forgiveness comes to us if we are able to work through a wound through all the parts of our being. This is a process that breaks down into steps. Dr. Stauffer crafted these steps because of what she observed in over forty years of work as a psychotherapist. It goes like this: first we need to strongly assert our willingness to make a change in attitude and move forward in our life. We need to thoroughly share the painful emotion of our experience with a compassionate person. Then we dissolve our attachment to the unfulfilled expectations we are addicted to in the mind that prevent a natural flow of acceptance and love between ourselves and another. We set new boundaries and get into right relationship to responsibility for the hurtful event. Then when we reach to Spirit for healing, energy---grace--- it comes flooding in! When we truly forgive, we are physically and emotionally transformed, and our Higher Power picks us up and sets our feet on new ground. We can walk forward.

I’ve seen a man forgive the death of his six year old son in a violent home accident...a woman forgive her father for chronic incest as a child... a mother forgive the man who raped her daughter...a man forgive his wife for suddenly divorcing him and leaving him with a miserable alimony and custody contract... a woman whose new husband went into a strange state of emotional isolation for months... a person whose fiancee and best friend had an affair three weeks before they were to wed... It goes on and on, the baffling circumstances and unpredictable traumas and suffering of human life. In this boot camp experience of life on Earth there is so much we are asked to endure! I don’t know how we do it, except for the gift of the experience of unconditional love and forgiveness from time to time. Whether we stumble into it through the clever machinations of our Higher Power, or we consciously cultivate it and practice it as a spiritual discipline, it looks like a way through all this.

I am so grateful for what was given to me twenty years ago and how it is still unfolding as my path today. Even as I write this, my heart is heavy with pain from stories of war and injustice that are playing in the daily news. Some of the wrongs I see there seem impossible to forgive, and I feel that familiar desire to withdraw, to contract, to seal off my heart. I am still working up to the first step--- the willingness to forgive. Fortunately I can draw on past successes to know that I won’t regret it if I take the leap to heal this pain. I know I will feel better. I hope and imagine that when I am a white-haired old woman, I will still be deepening into and serving from my growing understanding of unconditional love and forgiveness.

If you want to have more information and direct experiences of forgiving yourself and others, and order  The Peaceful Heart  audiotape, or check out Mary’s  workshop page.

The Nine Month Self Mastery Program (30 CEU)
In Depth Healing and Spiritual Teaching with Mary Hayes Grieco

The Nine Month Self Mastery Program 2006-2007 (30 CEU)
(Currently in progress; registration is closed.)

The Nine Month Self Mastery Program 2007-2008 (30 CEU)
(Now accepting applications)

This in-depth program provides committed students of self-mastery an opportunity for more intensive study with Mary Hayes Grieco, and a supportive learning community while you practice and master the tools of the Unconditional Love and Forgiveness healing model. This program is suitable for:

• Committed spiritual seekers dedicated to serving others
• Anyone who is ready to break free from the past, move to higher ground, and live more joyfully;
• Anyone who recognizes that forgiveness is a lifelong tool that they want to have as an active part of their spiritual life;
• Professionals (psychologist, coaches, social workers etc.) who help others and want a powerful method that will transform their client’s suffering;
• Those interested in becoming trainers in Unconditional Love and Forgiveness. This program is the foundation, followed by more practice, individually arranged.

100 hour course (exact dates to be announced):

October "The Path of Self Mastery; building community"
November "Unconditional Love and Forgiveness Workshop I"
December "Psychosynthesis: Soul, Personality, and Will
January "Psychosynthesis: Subpersonalities"
February "The Essenes: Spiritual Practices"
March "Unconditional Love and Forgiveness Workshop II"
April "Intuitive Development and Personal Boundaries"
May "Unconditional Love and Forgiveness Workshop III"
June "Living My Purpose"

Registration is open now for next year’s program.

This 100 hour course takes place on nine weekends, October through June.

Located at the peaceful Carondolet Center in St. Paul, Mn.
On-site, affordable overnight accommodations are available for out-of-town students.

Enrollment is limited; register soon to secure your place.
Cost is $3800; payment plan available.

Please fill out the email application below, and send it to Mary. Mary will call you to set up a time for a telephone or in-person interview to determine whether this program is a fit for you.

To complete Online Application, click here.
For a printer friendly description of Certificate Program: click here.