Forgiveness As An Initiation, How To Break The Bonds That Imprison You – Soul Initiation Series

In this Soul teaching on Forgiveness as an Initiation you will learn:

• How to recognize being initiated into forgiveness
• Why forgiveness is non-negotiable from a Soul perspective
• Why blanket forgiveness doesn’t work
• How forgiveness allows the Kundalini into the heart chakra
• And more…

Life is our Ascension or Mystery School and our Soul is our initiator! The Soul Initiations series is a collection of Soul Teachings on the various Soul Initiations we can be led through in our current incarnation. To be initiated by our Soul means to cross a threshold, going from one state of being to another. These initiations serve to bring us to the next evolution of our Soul journey and the embodiment of the truth of who we truly are on a Soul level.

Often these initiations require a period of time in the unknown. They bring a sense of uncertainty as we go into uncharted territory. A period where we instinctively feel that we cannot go back to the way things were, but we also don’t know yet how things will be in the new reality we are birthing. Like Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, we venture into a no man’s land (the initiatory realm) to journey back into the world forever changed by our experiences. As we cross the threshold, it is clear that things will never be the same again. We are asked to walk blindfolded into a whole new world and a whole new way of being, trusting the path our Soul has put us on.

Soul initiations come in different areas of our lives and in different moments within our Soul journey. The various teachings in this Soul Initiation series, offer you the Soul’s perspective on these initiations and how going through them as messy and as painful as it can feel, serves your personal growth and spiritual evolution. In the end, these are processes happening for you, meant to bring you to the next level in your Soul journey and help you strip away all that is not the truth of who you are. They are an invitation to let go of all your ego’s misunderstandings, false beliefs, and false self-identifications to bring you face-to-face with your true self. Each Soul initiation helping you reclaim yet another piece of your wholeness.

Are you being initiated into forgiveness?

Forgiveness is one of the most healing and powerful forces in the world, but that doesn’t always make it easy. This is because forgiveness always involves letting go of a painful story (experience or situation) for which we blame someone else or ourselves.

We all have people, situations, and experiences we struggle to forgive, it’s part of the human condition.

What I have found in my work as a Soul Embodiment® therapist is that we are often attracting the people, situations, and experiences that are meant to help us heal unresolved pain and trauma that we brought in through our ancestral lineage and past life experiences that we have been struggling to release for lifetimes and lifetimes.

When it comes to forgiveness this can show up in three ways:

Not from this lifetime

We are either still trying to forgive something or someone from the past, for example, a traumatic event that was left unresolved such as a betrayal by someone we deeply trusted that has created a repeating pattern of betrayal in this lifetime and often has been on rinse and repeat over lifetimes and lifetimes.

When we stick to the theme of betrayal which is one that runs through my Soul journey with many examples in this life especially by the men in my life, as well as past lives. I was able to trace this back to a past life where I was bloodily sacrificed while pregnant in primitive times of Goddess worshipping.

There was also an element of not being able to see things as they really are, rather how I wanted them to be which is an ancestral pattern on my mother’s side of the family. Meaning because I struggled to see things as they are rather than how I wanted them to be over lifetimes and lifetimes, I chose this maternal lineage because they struggled with the same pattern from different angles so that we could help each other break the pattern this lifetime while we played the incarnation game together.

At the same time, because my mother has struggled to see things as they are rather than how she wants them to be (more from a naive angel), it has led to her failing to protect me in crucial moments because she was too trusting of the people involved.

My struggle since that lifetime where I was sacrificed is to trust how I see things, something my mother has as well again from a different angle which was that she believed other people knew better/had more authority than her which I believe many women of her age born during WWII suffered from (i.e. are here to heal).

So, even when she would see something a certain way, she would allow others to tell her how to see it ‘correctly’ which of course led to her easily being manipulated.

Where I have been a lioness as a mother fiercely protecting my cubs, my mother was so trusting that she wasn’t able to discern friend from foe. This created various situations in my life where I was left completely unprotected that I had to forgive my mom for and understand that she did not do this on purpose. Seeing the ancestral pattern we shared was part of that healing and being able to forgive her.

To restore a (past life) connection back to love

Another possible scenario is that we are for example born to a parent that we couldn’t forgive in a previous lifetime or that we fall deeply in love with someone who hurt us badly in a previous lifetime that we were unable to forgive them for at that time. Such encounters serve to restore the connection back to love on a Soul level.

For example, in a previous lifetime, I died in my mother’s womb, when she committed suicide by hanging herself from a tree after being raped and impregnated by her uncle. Through the mother-child symbiosis, I experienced her death by strangulation as my own and left that lifetime believing my mother had strangled me to death. My current life mother was that past life mother and my current life father was my past life father – her uncle.

My father had never hit my mother until she was pregnant with me, which triggered this past life memory. I decided I wasn’t going to die in the womb again because of how traumatic that was in that lifetime and I became my mother’s protector even before I was born.

Alternatively, we could also want a redo to fix in this lifetime certain mistakes we felt we made in a past life with someone we have been incarnated with before. I know that in a past life, as a shaman I made choices that I regretted in the end. I then chose to have that soul born to me as a child to restore the connection back to love through the mother-child bond in this lifetime.

From this lifetime

Last but not least, we can struggle to forgive the people situations, and experiences that come into our current life to help us heal the subconscious wounds that we brought with us through our ancestral lineages or our past lives, in an attempt to heal them this time around (think of the personal examples I have shared thus far).

Especially because we often can’t see the connection between our current reality and our painful past lived experiences that were left unresolved in our ancestral lineages or past lives, we tend to see our current life painful experiences as separate issues or new affronts rather than attempts to heal our unresolved past.

Thus creating new painful stories and new people to blame that we struggle to forgive.

This means that we are always in some sort of situation that could benefit from forgiveness whether it’s restoring a relationship back to love, breaking repeating cycles which often requires forgiveness of the self as well, or realizing that the people who have hurt us in our current life were at the same time helping us heal on a Soul level.

Forgiveness from a Soul’s perspective

The latter is often a difficult one to wrap our heads around because that is not how we normally look at things from an incarnated perspective. It also certainly doesn’t mean that the pain caused was justified or that the people who have hurt us should not face the consequences of their actions.

Two things can be true at the same time; something can serve us on a Soul level and that very thing can be morally wrong or even a culpable offense on an incarnation level.

In a Soul Embodiment® Therapy session, I help clients connect the dots of how their current life experiences are helping them heal on a Soul path level and how the current players in their lives factor into this. I also help them see any past life connections with said players that are potentially muddying the water within their current life connection with them.

For example, clients who were parentified children in this lifetime due to a past life connection with their parent where they felt responsible for their deaths. I had one client who identified her current life mother as a past life sibling, she was unable to save from drowning in a river as children for which she blamed herself.

This past life guilt was bleeding through in their mother-daughter relationship, making her overprotective of her mother and subconsciously reversing the mother-child role in an attempt to get it right this time where she felt she had failed in the previous lifetime. Such subconscious influences can make our current life relationships very messy as subconscious past life dynamics and roles blur our current connection with this person.

At any given time we carry multiple painful stories, both subconsciously and consciously, that we struggle to forgive ourselves and others for. When we are initiated into forgiveness, we are being asked to not just forgive one person but everyone including ourselves which can actually be the trickiest part of our forgiveness journey.

Surprisingly, the most difficult person to forgive is the self

In my work as a Soul Embodiment® therapist, I have found that the person people struggle to forgive the most is themselves. This is especially true when we internally hold ourselves to unreasonably high standards which can lead to patterns of being hard on ourselves and perfectionism, which are all a result of self-blame.

Self-blame not only stems from (past life or ancestral) guilt, but it is also a well-documented defense mechanism.

This happens when out of self-preservation (survival) someone blames themselves for what others have done to them. Although, it makes no sense logically this often happens in an attempt to maintain a sense of control in a situation where one is completely helpless, to protect the self from the feeling of annihilation that acknowledging the reality of one’s situation would otherwise bring.

In assuming the blame, this acute threat to the self is diminished but the long-term consequence is that the person believes to be complicit to their own pain, trauma, and abuse. This eats away at their sense of worth and self-esteem.

This phenomenon of self-blame is termed ‘turning against oneself’, which is a psychological defense mechanism that deeply affects our self-esteem and relationships. We can be turned against ourselves or ‘pitched against ourselves’ on a current life level, an ancestral level, a past life level, and a Soul path level. This is especially true if we carry the outcast wound as a result of how we interpreted our split from Source.

Because our split from Source represents our childhood on a Soul path level, it carries great parallels with our incarnated childhood and the development of defense and survival mechanisms as described below:

‘By internalizing the belief that they are somehow at fault—perhaps perceiving themselves as not good enough or believing they have failed to meet the standards of an ideal child—the abused child creates an illusion of control within the chaotic environment around them. Self-directed anger suggests that if they are the problem, then perhaps there is something they can do to “fix” it. In essence, if they can change or correct their behavior, they might prevent further neglect or abuse.’ Source: Psychologytoday.com

These mechanisms are tucked away deeply within our subconscious mind leading to patterns of trying to prove our worth without realizing that we are the ones that eroded our sense of worth, to begin with, by blaming ourselves. Finding these places within ourselves where we took the blame is extremely difficult because we cannot release the self-blame until we acknowledge the pain it was created to protect us from.

The subconscious mind has been protecting us from this pain for multiple decades and still believes that the pain it is protecting us from may very well eviscerate us. Yet, we cannot come to complete forgiveness of the self without dismantling such defense, protection, and survival mechanisms.

Soul Embodiment® Therapy is the only modality I know that addresses trauma at this deeper level, by helping you navigate past your own defense, protection, and survival mechanisms to the cut-off parts of yourself that you are protecting. These cut-off parts are the missing pieces to your wholeness, not only on a current incarnation level but also on a past life, and Soul path level.

Six powerful reasons that make forgiving non-negotiable

While I have heard other healers and business mentors say that you don’t actually have to forgive or that you can somehow fake forgiveness, I disagree. On a Soul level, forgiveness is non-negotiable, and although you might be able to get by cutting corners (bypassing forgiveness) on an incarnation level, on a Soul path level you have to pay the piper at some point.

Especially when your time has come to be initiated into forgiveness, there’s no way out of it.

Remember that Soul initiations are meant to help us cross a threshold, going from one state of being to another to bring us to the next evolution of our Soul journey and the embodiment of the truth of who we truly are on a Soul level.

When we are playing the game of life at this level we can’t fake it until we make it or back out of it altogether because those are the things that keep us stuck in the OLD reality.

Here are six powerful reasons why forgiveness is non-negotiable on a Soul level:

It binds you to the people and situations you can’t forgive

Cord-cutting (read a previous Soul teaching on cord-cutting here) is super hot in the woo-woo world at the moment. But what they don’t explain is that cords are made out of the energetic attachments we form with the people in our lives or that we formed with people in previous lifetimes. Unforgiveness is such an energetic cord, it acts as a trauma bond that keeps us energetically chained to the people and the painful situation or experience we can’t forgive.

The ONLY way to break these energetic cords is through forgiveness, recently I worked with a client who was sexually abused by a much older family friend in her teens. Because penetration didn’t take place until it was legal, in many European countries the legal age to have sex is sixteen – she had convinced herself that she had consented to this relationship.

We had revisited this connection in previous sessions. However, it came up again in the final session of her package only to show her that she was still energetically corded to this man, even though she had through our work together come to forgive him. When we zoomed in on the nature of this cording, she saw that although she had told herself all these years that it had been consensual, the reality was actually that she was raped and manipulated into believing she had consented to it.

Acknowledging this truth allowed her to realize that in order to protect herself she had taken the blame and in her mind became complicit to her own abuse. I explained to her the mechanism of self-blame and how this allows us a sense of control where we have none as a way to survive the experience, but that this comes at a price we pay by our sense of worth becoming eroded.

This client recognized the struggle she had experienced throughout her life with her self-worth. She was not only able to break this pattern by giving the responsibility back to her abuser but also by forgiving herself for the self-blame out of self-preservation and the negative outcomes this had created in her personal and professional life.

This set her free from the energetic cord she had seen that had still kept her bound to this man and the abuse even long after he left her life and had also died more recently.

No amount of generic cord-cutting can free you from such deeply held subconscious energetic cords, you have to make them conscious to be able to ‘cut’ yourself free through forgiveness.

You can’t raise your vibration or the Kundalini without it

Forgiveness helps us let go of the so-called negative and more dense emotions. On the vibrational frequency scale, the emotions connected to unresolved pain and trauma such as grief, shock, anger, resentment, hatred, and so on are the lowest frequencies.

We cannot have them in our vibrational field even repressed, dissociated from, or disowned without them pulling down our overall vibrational frequency. This is why, excuse my French, the high-vibe tribe who usually tries to bypass any painful or difficult emotion is full of merde.

They are keeping themselves stuck by avoiding any and all so-called negative feelings out of fear that this will attract more painful experiences in their lives through the Law of Attraction. This is the problem with a superficial understanding of spiritual law that people interpret them incorrectly.

You can’t raise your vibrational frequency in any significant let alone lasting way without addressing the unresolved emotions lurking in the shadow of your subconscious.

Not only does it lower our vibrational frequency, but these stuck emotions also block our chakras which makes it impossible for the Kundalini energy to move through said chakras to support us in our self-realization process which I will explain more in depth further on.

It contributes to illness in the body

When we hold unresolved pain, trauma, anger, hatred, and resentment in the body it can create a host of illnesses in the physical vessel. This is why more and more, forgiveness therapy is being brought in as a support in the healing and recovery process of not only cancer patients but also other diseases such as cardiovascular disease.

‘Exposure to trauma during childhood can dramatically increase people’s risk for 7 out of 10 of the leading causes of death in the U.S.—including high blood pressure, heart disease, and cancer—and it’s crucial to address this public health crisis, according to Harvard Chan alumna Nadine Burke Harris.’ Source: Harvard.edu Other physical effects associated with childhood trauma are anxiety, depression, diabetes, obesity, stroke, and substance use disorders.

It’s not the trauma that is the actual problem though, it’s the stuck emotions around the trauma that are the real problem. Emotions that we couldn’t allow ourselves to feel at that time because our survival depended on the people that were hurting us whether they intended to or not. Abuse and neglect are in many cases ancestral patterns passed on from generation to generation, for many families it is hard to break the cycle.

Spiritual psychologist Clara Naum says, “It’s not that unforgiveness causes cancer. It’s that the suppression of anger, resentment, and grief disrupts the normal operation of our bodies. These disruptions lead to weakened immune system responses, and it’s this weakened immune system that opens the doors to illnesses and diseases.”

Although it’s not unforgiveness that creates disease in the body, it does perpetuate it. Because as long as we harbor or perhaps even nurture our anger, resentment, sense of injustice, or maybe even downright hatred of the people who have hurt us our bodies cannot heal. Forgiveness is the healing balm we need to help us release these negative emotions that disrupt the vital functions of our body that in the end lead to us becoming sick.

Read this Soul teaching here on illness as a Soul initiation.

It keeps you imprisoned in the past

Unforgiveness keeps you imprisoned by the emotions and the stories that you can’t let go of. For many people, this can really affect their day-to-day lives not only through flashbacks but also everyday life experiences tearing open the wound each time you thought it had finally healed.

Sweeping it under the rug or pretending it didn’t mean that much does not make the pain go away. Neither does repressing, disowning, or dissociating from the pain prove to be effective long-term strategies. They can be temporary solutions while you grow strong enough to face what was left unresolved, but the downside of all of these coping mechanisms is that they keep you imprisoned in the past you so desperately want to escape.

Even if you wouldn’t get the constant reminders through the outside world that the pain is still there and unaddressed, you would still look at every situation, experience, and person through the lens of this past painful experience unable to forget what happened to you or to be able to go back to before this experience changed you in ways that don’t actually serve you.

The only way out of this unintentionally self-made hell is through forgiveness. Understanding the bigger picture of your experience on an ancestral, past life, and Soul path level can really accelerate this process helping you forgive the players involved in your current and past life dramas, as well as forgiving yourself where applicable.

It locks you out of your own good

When we harbor anger, resentment, hatred, and so on, we cut ourselves off from our own good. Our desire to punish the other becomes our own punishment because the subconscious mind doesn’t know anyone but the self. Every time you wish ill to another you end up on the receiving end of those ill wishes.

In the business coaching industry, there are countless anecdotal examples of people opening the way to their own good such as success, fame, money, and so on after finally forgiving the person or people they struggled the longest to forgive. By letting go of their resentment the flow of good in their own lives was restored.

An example from my own client base was a woman who came to me because she was having huge money struggles and was trying to sell a house that she couldn’t get rid of. She hadn’t had any viewings in months and it looked like she was stuck with the property. Out of desperation, she booked a session with me and in the session, she came to forgive someone that she thought she would never be able to forgive. That same afternoon she got a cash offer on the house literally out of nowhere, the house was quickly sold and her money struggles were solved.

That is how powerful forgiveness can work through in our own lives.

It attracts similar situations as the one you can’t forgive

It doesn’t seem fair when a great injustice has been done to you that it becomes a scenario you can’t seem to escape, this is because the stuck emotions you are holding around this experience pull in the people, situations, and experiences you need to help you release them. This is how the actual Law of Attraction works.

This does not mean that if you were raped and are struggling to forgive what happened, you will continue to get raped. It’s not an unintelligent law as some teachers like to portray it that just gives you this uncaring output, your Soul, the Universe or the Divine cares deeply about you. This is why it only gives us what we can handle and we only subconsciously attract the people, situations, and experiences that will help us HEAL.

We may not recognize them as such, but this is as I have explained before due to the fact that we don’t consciously see or know what is being healed, especially if they are ancestral and past life wounds.

I will give an example of my own experience, when I was pregnant with my youngest son his father had a secret affair with another woman that did not come to light until my son was one and a half years old. I had suspicions, but the truth didn’t come out till much later. Then when I was pregnant with my daughter who died shortly after birth due to a rare birth defect, my husband again had an affair with the same woman.

This came to light a month after our daughter died when I was divinely led to this woman’s house where my husband was getting something to drink from the kitchen when I walked in the house to find my husband because the front door was left open.

I had taken the children on a surprise visit to cheer him up because the death of our daughter had hit him hard it seemed. When we arrived at his apartment in Germany, he wasn’t home but I found a card from this woman on his nightstand. I didn’t know her address, but I knew the village she lived in, and from there I was miraculously led to the house. I asked once if someone knew where she lived and it was literally the house at the end of the street.

I was furious with my husband and so was she not because I was there, but because she had not even known that I was pregnant again as he had told her that we had separated. I struggled tremendously to forgive the woman and my husband, not in the least because there was also a deep past life wound where a similar scenario had played out except it had cost me my life that time.

When I went back on the dating market, every guy I met was either cheating on their wife or girlfriend and two guys even lied or failed to disclose that their partners were pregnant at the time.

I got to find out firsthand how easy it is to be lied to without realizing what is really going on.

For seven years or so, every man I was romantically interested in was either cheating or lying to me about his relationship status and this included the love of my life (the Twin Flame) who swore that he wasn’t seeing anyone else until I was in his arms and he confessed that he had been seeing someone that he had not been honest about.

I had been so angry with this other woman that she didn’t respect my marriage and had an affair with my husband when I was carrying his children, (don’t worry I was angry at my husband too) not only in this lifetime but also in the previous lifetime. In the past life I had died a very traumatic death (I was buried alive) for which I had blamed this woman because she took my place, my husband, and my child in that lifetime.

Although looking through my own eyes now, I could see things I had not wanted to acknowledge back then that had led to my own death and they had little to do with her. An important part of past life healing is to see the Soul’s perspective (the Soul truth) rather than the ego’s perspective (i.e. how we remember it) because the ego’s perspective is distorted by the unresolved trauma that it is still stuck in.

By being put in her shoes of being the reluctant mistress rather than the wife, I understood how easily one gets into that position without knowing what’s actually going on.

Even before I was invited to come to India a mutual friend of the man I loved and I tried to warn me that he was involved with another woman. I confronted him with this information and he assured me that there was no one in his life. We weren’t together so he had every right to be in a relationship with someone else. There was no reason to lie about it, so I believed him. I believed him even more when the mutual friend made a pass at me and I almost didn’t want to make the trip anymore, but the man I was in love with intervened and the trip was back on.

I remember seeing a photo of a party the man I loved was at with what later turned out to be his girlfriend and although the photo didn’t show any signs of intimacy I felt this huge surge of jealousy. But, because I trusted the person who showed me the photo, my and my lover’s best friend, I pushed away that feeling as ridiculous possessiveness rather than realizing that I was energetically sensing something was off.

When my husband’s mistress and I met a second time after our first chaotic meeting where I showed her the photo of our recently deceased daughter that had sent her into shock, we came together to make things right between us. She was also very spiritual and we both wanted to break this cycle that even had past life roots, she told me then that there had been these moments in hindsight that she should have seen what was going on but didn’t want it to be true.

Hello, pattern seeing things as they are, rather than what you want them to be.

Having been married half of my life, I had never before been in a situation where I was the other woman, it wasn’t until my experience with the man in India that I truly understood how one can ignore the signs and be the other woman without necessarily knowing it.

With all the men before, I didn’t care when I found out they weren’t single. I usually just left them immediately because I wasn’t interested in being anyone’s side chick. But in this case, I cared deeply. This was the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with and he had told me and continued to tell me that this was his deepest desire as well. If it were up to him alone, we would already be together and have everything we had talked about he said, which included our desire to have a baby.

In the other situations, the girlfriends or wives didn’t know their men were trying their luck elsewhere and I didn’t know the women. All I could do was send their men back home to them which I did. I had no desire to be a homewrecker or to be involved with someone who would not be able to spend their life with me. I also don’t believe any man is worth fighting over if I wasn’t in a committed relationship with him, to begin with.

In the situation in India, the girl knew I was in love with her boyfriend – I was the running joke in their friend group because they all knew my feelings for him, but they didn’t really know if he felt the same way about me which would seem logical if he was dating someone else at that time that I didn’t know of.

The girlfriend also knew I was with him for a whole week in a remote village in India during our best friend’s wedding. She saw the pictures I posted online. He told me later she had read everything I had shared about the trip, including the truth about our relationship which paradoxically was much more serious than theirs. They were just blowing off some steam before their parents would marry them off to people the family deemed fit to be their future spouses. They are both married to other people now and have been for years.

When I came back home and had time to digest the truth of the situation, I reached out to apologize to her and to let her know that I had genuinely not known that he was taken and that he had assured me there wasn’t anyone else in his life. Knowing how painful it is to have someone intrude on your relationship, I wanted her to know that it had never been my intention to hurt her. I knew he wasn’t in too deep emotionally in that relationship, but I had the feeling she was very much in love with him.

I did not tell her that a mutual friend had tried to warn me but that I didn’t believe him because he hit on me, as this guy was her best friend’s boyfriend and there was no reason to start a fight in another couple. I also didn’t tell her that he had told me he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me, and that I was the one. I just wanted to let her know that it had not been my intention to hurt her and that had I known, I wouldn’t have come to India at all.

Why travel to a far-off country for someone who is already involved? I wouldn’t have bothered. I am not the side-chick type, so I wouldn’t have gotten on a plane to someone who wasn’t available to pursue a future with me. I did not have to fly across the globe to have hot sex with a younger guy, there was plenty of hot sex with even younger guys available to me right where I lived.

In fact, when I was there in his arms, knowing that a guy just had to look at me to get me pregnant he said ‘ Until I am sure I can be with you I don’t want to risk making you pregnant.’ So we kissed, held hands, and slept in each other’s arms instead. It was all very sweet and semi-innocent.

After that experience, one more guy showed up in my life with whom I had a great first date that lasted seven hours. We had huge chemistry, but I quickly found out that he had a girlfriend and even though I continued to bump into him randomly over the years I refused to go out with him again.

I am a main woman character, I don’t do side-chick. I am either your girlfriend, fiancee, or wife or I am nothing to you romantically.

That was the end of it. Since then the men that have come into my life have been single and available. I haven’t found someone that I wanted to continue dating or spend my life with, but that is something else. I am sure that person will show up when the time is right, in the meantime I have given up kissing frogs hoping they will be a prince.

The mistakes we make when trying to forgive

Because forgiveness is such a virtue that is hammered upon in every religion and spiritual teaching we may rush to want to forgive too soon, for all the wrong reasons, or trick ourselves into believing we have forgiven when in reality we haven’t. Alternatively, we may struggle to forgive because we can’t let go of the pain, or because we want the other person or people to pay for what they have done to us. Here is an overview of some of the mistakes we make when trying to forgive:

Thinking we have already forgiven

The most common mistake we make is to think that we have already forgiven someone or something because we have consciously forgiven them or because we don’t feel any negative emotions around that person or the experience. I mean if we don’t feel any negative emotions, we are in the clear right? Well, not necessarily.

Often times when we have experienced very painful situations and experiences we dissociate from that pain for various reasons. There are a lot of reasons to hide our pain from ourselves, because it’s too painful, because our emotions might be socially or culturally unacceptable, or because for example, our survival depended on the people hurting us. So, we had to turn a blind eye to the abuse in order to survive. This is very common in betrayal wounding, where children can’t afford to be angry at the people hurting them because they depend on them for food, shelter, and care.

When this is the case, we shove these emotions that we feel aren’t allowed to see the light of day deep down into the shadows of our psyche where they cancel out each conscious attempt to let go and move on from what has happened.

We might want to forgive, but because we are not being emotionally honest with ourselves due to our protection, defense, survival, and coping mechanisms that were put in place to protect us from this pain, the subconscious mind can’t execute ‘the forgiveness program’ in its supercomputer because it’s still pre-programmed to be in protection mode.

Trying to forgive too soon

Last summer when I finally saw how much damage the incest I experienced had done in my life and really allowed it to finally sink in, I cried deep tears. My mother rushed over to me and as I was explaining what was going on she immediately said ‘You need to forgive your father.’

My body felt like I had been hit by a cold shower because here I was finally acknowledging how the childhood sexual abuse I had experienced as a child had changed me fundamentally in ways I was only starting to see and now I had to rush to forgive. I distanced myself from my mother’s embrace and clearly stated that I cannot forgive what I am not allowed to acknowledge and feel. That’s not forgiving, that is trying to sweep things under the rug so you don’t have to deal with them.

Her desire to even this out as quickly as possible for my sake, for her sake, it doesn’t matter would rob me of truly being able to digest and release what had happened to me as a child. You cannot brush what has happened to you and how you feel about it under the rug because it will continue to ambush you when you least expect it or want it to. Take the time you need, not the time others try to impose on you because forgiveness can’t be forced or rushed.

Wanting to forgive for all the wrong reasons

Above we discussed all the reasons we would want to forgive and the benefits they bring us and even though these are powerful motivators to want to forgive, we can’t force ourselves to forgive for what we will gain when we do.

The actual forgiveness work is about facing our pain and not expecting the other person or people who hurt us to apologize, take responsibility for their actions, or help us undo the damage done, because more often than not this will never happen. My father who sexually abused me and my older half-sister apologized for many things before he died, the one thing he never took responsibility for nor apologized to us for, not even on his death bed was the sexual abuse.

When it comes to forgiveness we often don’t get the closure or even acknowledgment we would like, many sex offenders for example when they get confronted with their crimes seek to downplay their offense denying the gravity of what they did and the effect it has had on their victim’s lives.

Part of the forgiveness process is coming to terms with this, validating our own feelings, giving ourselves closure, and allowing ourselves to acknowledge the impact the painful experience has had on us. Just as much as we can’t rush this process, we also can’t brush over it so that we can finally have x, y, or z.

The question is how do you forgive even when the person who hurt you shows no remorse? For example when you find your husband leaves you for your mother or your sister? No amount of ‘reward’ can get the subconscious to just drop this pain without us allowing ourselves the time to feel through all the difficult emotions that such an experience can trigger.

I had a dear friend who this happened to in her early twenties and it took her years to forgive her mother, even though the boyfriend was with her mother for decades and even nursed her in her death bed. It was true love, but that didn’t make it a less bitter pill for her to swallow, especially in the beginning. When I met her in my early teens she hated her mother but as time passed she was able to forgive them both, especially her mother.

Using methods to blanket forgive

We are often so motivated to forgive that we use blanket methods such as prayer, ho’oponopono, or forgiveness meditations, etc. to blanket forgive everyone and everything known and unknown from this lifetime, our ancestral lineages, past lives, and Soul path experiences. You know the beautiful words that sound powerful and worth a shot.

Except this DOES NOT work.

You cannot blanket forgive, because you cannot forgive what you don’t know, don’t acknowledge or don’t allow yourself to feel.

Ask me how I know this. I know this because I spent years actively ‘forgiving’ my abusive narcissistic first husband and my lying and cheating second husband, as well as my father who sexually abused me, and even my mother who didn’t protect me from the abuse of my father and his friends. Although in this case, my mother didn’t know I was being abused, my inner child was still angry at her for not seeing what was happening.

We can consciously forgive the people who have hurt us until we are blue in the face until we get our subconscious mind on board with the forgiveness – it ain’t happening. No matter how much we consciously want to. You might not remember what you aren’t forgiving, but your subconscious does, and until you address that unresolved pain – the subconscious won’t budge.

Not knowing what we are actually forgiving

That is why you need to get specific. Allow yourself to acknowledge what happened and why it still hurts as well as how this experience has impacted you and perhaps even changed you; think of hypervigilance, trust issues, anxiety, depression, PTSD, and so on.

This is where things get tricky, because we don’t know what we don’t know and there are many reasons why we may have blocked out (‘forgotten’) painful experiences.

We didn’t actually forget them, the subconscious mind certainly hasn’t forgotten them and is silently keeping score. Our subconscious mind is full of painful stories from this lifetime, our ancestral lineages, our past lives, and even from our experiences on a Soul path level since we split from Source.

These are stories we may not consciously remember, but our subconscious does and these painful stories are creating the fabric of our lives as we are forced to play out any wounding we haven’t consciously cleared out.

But even when we consciously remember what has happened to us we may still be dissociated from some or all of the pain this experience caused, especially when we struggle to feel our emotions. We might know that we are forgiving incest, physical abuse, betrayal, and so on because we know the story but without really allowing ourselves to digest our (negative) emotions and release the past there will still be missing pieces of the puzzle.

Recently, a situation arose that triggered all the ingratitude my second husband displayed in our marriage. Did you know that there is a whole list of characteristics that ungrateful people have in common? I didn’t know it either. Just Google ‘signs of ungrateful people’ and you will get a whole list and it describes my second husband to a T.

It will take too long to explain how this was applicable to my second marriage, but it was something that I had not seen before and it really helped me forgive my second husband even deeper and understand his personality traits a little bit better and why we were incompatible even though we had this very caring and relatively harmonious relationship compared to the violence in my first marriage. Our sex life had been off the charts, which was why an affair was the last thing I expected.

Not allowing ourselves to feel the actual pain that the unforgiveness is tied into

Another more recent experience was fully acknowledging how my first husband had successfully alienated our children from me and then programmed them to believe it was my upbringing that had not only damaged them but made them not want to have contact with me during various periods in their lives.

I revisited the new information available on parent alienation syndrome, something that was still relatively unknown twenty years ago and now much more common knowledge and I recognized all the ways my first ex-husband had weaponized my own children against me.

My first ex-husband died in 2021 and I gave him back all the responsibility for his own actions that he had tried to shove on me, even after he had been happily married for years he would tell our children at any sign of problems in their lives that none of that would have happened to them if I had not left him.

The reality is that in the end, he left me when I put my foot down after thirteen years of abuse and told him he had to go to therapy if he wanted me to move back in with him. After that, he decided he did not love me, because I wasn’t who he wanted me to be (I kid you not). He spent the rest of his life making me pay for ‘leaving’ him and turning our children against me was part of his revenge. I recently came to find out that sadly my daughter is now also a drug addict like her older brother.

For twenty years I have been told by my ex, my son, and for the past almost ten years by my daughter that I am to blame for all of it when I was the only actual parent they had. They tell me things that have never happened that they are convinced are true, this is very common for children with parent alienation syndrome because they were fed a certain narrative.

My oldest son called me in 2022 to thank me for always sticking by him no matter what and to apologize for putting me through hell during that time. Then he said with wonder ‘Who would have thought you would be the one to always be there for me?’ I might be paraphrasing but that is what it came down to. So I answered maybe the more important question is why would you have ever doubted that? I am your mother, of course, I was going to be there for you.

But for children who have been alienated from a parent, this isn’t always that obvious because they have been indoctrinated to see the other parent the way the alienating parent sees the other parent, as cold and uncaring for leaving the relationship and perhaps even feeling that they (the previous spouse) abandoned them.

‘False memories, often implanted through manipulation and emotional conditioning, can distort a child’s view of their alienated parent. Over time, the child may come to believe these fabricated memories as truth, damaging their relationship with the alienated parent.’ Source: Getcourtready.co.uk

For example, their father refused to come and see them and then told them it was because I didn’t allow him to see them. Even when I was in the town where he lived because I was visiting my father in a village close by, I offered to bring by the kids so that they would be able to see him. He initially refused and angrily hung up on me then called me back to meet in a public place so that he could spend some time with his children whom he had refused to come visit for two years.

The children’s (now adults) excessive drug use, which includes daily large amounts of cannabis has only increased this phenomenon. As detailed in this research paper ‘Telling true from false: cannabis users show increased susceptibility to false memories’. ‘An unknown aspect of long-term cannabis use is its potential to disrupt memory and reality monitoring mechanisms that normally allow us to distinguish between veridical and illusory events.’ Source: nature.com

Last year, my daughter confided in her younger brother that she had confided in me that she had been sexually abused by a close family member and that when she told me I did nothing.

In reality, she had confided this incident in my mother, and my mother did not tell me about it until after my daughter had cut off all communication with me. Had she confided it directly in me, all hell would have broken loose and the person responsible would have not been allowed in the house anymore.

Having been sexually abused myself by multiple family members and family friends I would have helped her process her emotions, taken measures for her to be safe, and confronted her abuser with what I would have been told. I wasn’t able to do any of that because she told it to my mother instead of me. Perhaps she had hoped that my mother would tell me for her because of who the person was within our family, but that didn’t happen. In the end, the person who had abused her confided in me what he had done and apologized for his behavior.

He not only felt guilty for what had happened but also wondered if he was the reason why she had cut all ties with everyone in our family. Although this incident certainly did not help, I don’t believe this is what caused my daughter to break with everyone in the family, until she reached out to her younger brother and stepfather a couple of years ago. But perhaps if she really believes her memory of the events then this could explain why she is so angry at me.

Initially, when I heard the list of false allegations against me by my daughter such as the above and other less egregious but still preposterous accusations such as always having her walk in tattered clothing according to her (fits the uncaring mother narrative) I was taken aback by how she could say these things. Especially how she could think that having been sexually abused myself I would allow anyone to hurt her like that, made me furious.

Understanding that the drug addiction that she developed since she left home has only amplified her skewed perception of reality has helped me understand how she cannot only say these things but believe them to be true. Her boyfriend who was already a drug addict when they met is very controlling like her father and I believe he has a role in the alienation from her family. He caused a rift between her and her younger brother recently as well when he visited them.

She confided in her brother that her boyfriend beats her and isolation is often an instrument that is used in such dynamics. ‘Isolation is a painful product of abuse and unhealthy relationships. Partners who behave abusively often intentionally separate their significant other from the people that care about them, because it offers them greater power and control over the relationship and survivor.’ Source: National Domestic Violence Hotline If her father had not been so driven to make me pay, he might have recognized what was happening and been able to help her. I was already cut off by then.

She has literally blocked out all the good memories, the hugs, and cuddles, the fun and laughter, the mommy-daughter dates we used to go on so she would have personal time with me doing girl stuff and things she enjoyed doing. Having had a son with a drug addiction starting at 13, a younger son, and a daughter who died, I was always very intentional in my parenting carving out individual time for each child so that as a single parent with two absent fathers, the one more than the other, I was able to give my children the individual attention they craved and need.

She doesn’t even remember the lioness moments when I stood up to school teachers and school bullies and immediately transferred her to a better-suited school when girls ganged up on her when they heard she would be able to skip a grade at her teacher’s request.

One of many moments that I stood up for her and didn’t back down even when the director who didn’t want to lose me as an active schoolboard parent tried to sabotage us leaving. I confronted the school director and told her that we were leaving whether she liked it or not because it was in the best interest of my children.

My daughter was the only caucasian child in a multi-ethnic school, which seemed a good fit because our family is multi-ethnic. Except that she became bullied for it, which I will not stand for. The day that she told me what happened which was directly when it happened, was the last day she attended school there. I kept her home until I found a new school and I would have paid a school fine rather than send her back to a school that she didn’t feel accepted at or where the older girls had told her that they were going to ensure that she would flunk school if she would skip a grade.

So, I could never wrap my head around why all of a sudden my daughter hated me and all the arguments coming out of her mouth were verbatim her father’s issues with me. Here she was, someone who had never lived with her father before the divorce telling me that none of the problems she was facing would have happened if I had stayed with her father! It was beyond absurd.

I have spent the past twenty years trying to fight and fix the effects of my two oldest children being poisoned against me and then I decided to let go. I gave their father the responsibility back for the mess he himself created through his anger and resentment and became at peace with the fact that I lost two of my children to his lies and how much that actually f*cking hurt.

An important part of my healing process with my first ex-husband and forgiving him was finally seeing that he struggled tremendously with taking responsibility and accountability for his own actions. This was his pattern not only with me but with everyone including his second wife with whom he was together for twenty-two years in which he did end up going into anger management therapy to save his second marriage.

Seeing his pattern changed my whole perspective, and although it did not undo the damage done it helped me understand where my first ex-husband was coming from and why he did what he did. He wasn’t capable of more, because he believed in his own version of reality.

In order for him to be able to not take responsibility and accountability for his own actions, he needed someone that he could make responsible in his mind. It wasn’t that he was deliberately lying about me, it was that he believed his own lies and cut all ties with people who challenged him on this. Everyone that didn’t take his side post-divorce was cut out of his life. Anyone who stood up for me became persona non grata.

He created a story in his mind that he stuck to and when he found out my second husband had cheated on me, he said at least I never cheated on you. He did much worse, but that is not the story he told himself. He was the victim, he had done nothing but take care of me, and then I left him was his version.

In reality, he had terrorized me, I wasn’t allowed to have my own opinion, I wasn’t allowed to say what I thought. I had to walk on eggshells to not set him off. I was raped, pushed, shoved, chased through the house, beaten, and told that I could never make it without him. I was too weak, too unstable, too whatever to make it on my own.

After thirteen years of this starting at age 15, I had no choice but to leave. I agreed to everything to get out alive with my child as he had always told me that if I would ever leave him he would burn everything to the ground and take my son from me. He kept the house, the car, the furniture, everything. I left with my clothes, my life, and my child (that he used to perpetuate his control and abuse). My daughter was his accidental parting gift, as I got out of that relationship as quickly as I could without setting him off while keeping myself and my children safe.

We cannot forgive what we don’t acknowledge or allow ourselves to feel. As long as I was fighting against his lies, fighting for the truth and for the relationships lost with my children, I couldn’t allow myself to feel how much this has hurt me.

Both of my children are adults now and although they couldn’t resist being brainwashed as a child because they wanted their father’s love so badly, which he couldn’t give to them anyway even with me out of the way. Both children were deeply disillusioned with their father by the time he died, but that did not undo the false narratives that they were conditioned to believe in.

However, now that they are adults it’s up to them to do their own healing work and take responsibility for their own lives including the dark roads that their drug addictions have led them on. I will no longer accept them putting the blame on me or on how I raised them.

Not wanting to let the other off the hook so easily (seeking revenge)

The other mistake we often make is to think that by forgiving the people who have hurt us we are letting them off the hook easily. This is because we subconsciously or consciously want to hurt them back, in our anger over what was done to us we seek revenge – in an attempt to get even.

But as the story of my first ex-husband illustrates we cannot seek revenge without hurting ourselves and the people we love. We can say that my ex-husband got me good, he made me pay and took away from me what mattered most to me, my children. He did what he promised he would do and when he was successful in turning my daughter against me he sneered at me that he hoped I would raise my youngest son better, otherwise he would grow up to hate me too.

In the process of seeking revenge, he made his children orphans even before he died and took away the one parent who had supported and loved them through every stage of their life. In the end, our daughter hated him and wished him dead while he was still alive, his grieving widow told me this when he passed away suddenly and unexpectedly while working out on an oil rig.

He died of a brain aneurysm. The spiritual root behind the weakening of the blood vessel walls leading to aneurysms is anger, rage, and resentment.

According to Dr. Elena M. Rivera ‘In the spiritual realm, an aneurysm is a sign of internal turmoil, suppressed emotions, and unresolved issues that have been neglected or ignored. Emotionally, an aneurysm symbolizes the need for release – a release of pent-up emotions, grudges, and unresolved conflicts. It serves as a spiritual prompt for the individual to let go of the past, heal the emotional wounds, and move forward with resilience and strength.’

Except, he didn’t survive his aneurysm as being far out in the ocean in Qatar, they couldn’t get him the medical attention he needed on time. His desire to make me pay and then feeling fueled in his anger all over again when he couldn’t build the strong bonds he wanted with his children, which of course he blamed on me again, fits the metaphysical cause of the very thing he died of.

The last time I spoke to him which was about our daughter, he told me that he hated me because I reminded him that he owed back child support that I asked him to pay directly to his daughter. The day she turned 18 he cut her off financially even though he owed a couple of thousand euros in child support that he had not paid me when I had a court order against him that said he should. He had begged me for time to get his finances in order, which I gave him and then when I couldn’t legally make him pay anymore he of course denied being behind in the first place.

It makes me wonder if things would have been different if he would have dealt with his negative emotions and could have been emotionally honest with himself about his responsibility in all the things he blamed me for and was so angry about. Would he still be alive today, if he had dealt with his pain? He died terribly young at the age of 56.

This is a real-life example of the Marianne Williamson’s quote “Unforgiveness is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” or the Buddha’s quote “Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.”

We can’t rush or bypass the necessity to forgive, but we also can’t allow ourselves to wallow in it or fan the flames of our anger and hatred without it inevitably backfiring on us, which can ultimately lead to paying the highest price – losing our lives whether mentally/emotionally or even physically.

Forgiveness & the Kundalini or Shakti energy

Forgiveness plays a crucial role in the Kundalini and spiritual enlightenment process, which is another reason why forgiveness can’t be faked. Energy doesn’t lie, you also can’t manipulate it to go quicker.

Those who have tried to use psychedelic drugs, yoga, meditation, or other methods to accelerate the process without doing the inner work have often found that they bit off more than they can chew mentally and emotionally when deeper layers of wounding were unearthed, that in some cases can even throw you completely off balance leading to severe mental health issues such as psychosis.

This is what happens when you try to take Heaven by force.

One does not have to fear Shakti-ma, the Divine Feminine which is what the Kundalini energy represents, but one has to respect her. The most secure way to reach self-actualization or self-realization is through working through our unresolved pain and trauma which is what blocks the Kundalini energy from rising through our chakras, to begin with.

When we remove these emotional and energetic blocks, the Kundalini can pass through unhindered. We also don’t lose our balance because we have pre-emptively cleared out our vibrational gunk and sludge that otherwise could turn around and bite us in the butt.

Next to our seven main chakras, there are also three locks or knots through which the Kundalini has to rise, each is symbolic of a higher level of consciousness and way of being in the world. This little excerpt is from one of my favorite books on the topic, explaining the second lock.

‘Betrayal concerns the lock between the third chakra and the fourth chakra, between the solar plexus and the heart. This lock is a complex knot right on the diaphragm. As we seek to raise the kundalini energy up into the heart chakra, it cannot pass easily through this knot because the core is very tightly veiled here. The energy dams up, circulating instead in the abdomen, unable to make it into the heart.

As we use this key and do the processing work, we are able to loosen and eventually untie this knot. In the East, it is known as the knot of Vishnu. When it opened for me, my guides called it “Heaven’s Gate.” Forgiveness will open it. The vibration of forgiveness actually dissolves the hard knot and releases the contraction, so the energy can get through to your heart. It takes more than a one-time forgiveness and is more like learning to live in a continuous state of forgiveness.’  Source: Returning to Oneness by Leslie Temple Thurston

Forgiveness is literally the gateway to opening the heart chakra, and it is through the heart chakra that we gain access to the higher chakras. The pathway to the Fifth dimension is through the heart. It’s like a portal. It’s in the heart chakra that we shift from the paradigm of fear into the paradigm of love, from 3D to 5D.

When we are being initiated into forgiveness, we are being guided to open our heart chakra and this is only possible to the extent that we are able to forgive those who have hurt us in the past because this is what made us close down and create energetic armor (our protection, defense, and survival mechanisms) to protect our spiritual heart. This heart armor has to be removed and forgiveness is the blazing sword with which we cut our bonds and armor free.

How to forgive the unforgivable

No one can decide for us what is unforgivable and this will be different for every individual depending on their unique story. In my experience, however, all of it is unforgivable to us from our own perspectives.

For example; a father who sexually abuses his child and allows his friends to abuse her as well. An ex-husband who weaponized his children against their mother, a husband who cheats on his pregnant wife, not once but twice, or the love of my life who lied about being single when he was involved with someone else.

What makes forgiveness so hard most of the time is that what has happened to us is almost too big to forgive. It’s too painful, too devastating, and often too much of a betrayal by someone we trusted and loved. It’s much easier to forgive the small stuff, that didn’t affect us so much or that involved people that weren’t that important to us. It is the level of it being so personal that hurts so much and which makes it almost seem unforgivable.

But as we have seen on a spiritual level you can run but you can’t hide, there will come a day when there is nowhere left to run because everything that you don’t deal with follows you around until you are ready to face it, even if it has to follow you into your next lifetime.

There is no escaping our unresolved pain and at one point or another we are all going to be initiated into forgiveness, which is when we are left with no choice but to forgive the unforgivable simply because we can’t get to the next level of our Soul evolution otherwise – which is the ultimate goal for every incarnated being.

The question you need to ask yourself is do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?

If you want to be happy then you need to let go of the painful stories that are making and keeping you unhappy. You are undoubtedly right in how you see things, but what does that bring you? It doesn’t undo the pain that was caused, it doesn’t bring back what was lost, and being right will also not make you happy.

Especially if holding on to being right, perpetuates the pain, the anger, and the hurt.

I pray that this teaching on forgiveness as a Soul initiation has helped you understand the concept of forgiveness more clearly and how complex the root causes of the things that have hurt us the most really are, they go much deeper than we often can imagine.

This is why in order to truly forgive we have to go really deep into the subconscious mind. It’s the difference between a superficial clean, just cleaning everything that is in the line of sight, or going in for a deep clean where you clean things whether they are in the line of sight or not because you want things to be really clean and not just appear to be clean. If you are someone who wants to deep clean I recommend looking into doing a session or package with me.

In this teaching, I have shared a large portion of very private personal experiences with the need to forgive. I have done this to make the material more recognizable and easier to absorb. Without real-life examples, spiritual teachings such as these remain too abstract and often misunderstood.

I ask that you handle this candid disclosure with respect. Undoubtedly there will be people who jump to various conclusions, I have seen and heard it all over the years. I have however chosen to be this open, to help others who are struggling with similar issues. When we are honest with ourselves, we can admit that we all have dramas such as the ones I have shared in our lives.

The question is not if we have skeletons in our closet, the question is how do we deal with them? What I have shared in this Soul teaching is meant to give you the hands-on tools to deal with them.

Have you struggled to forgive? What has helped you in the forgiveness process that others could benefit to know? I would love to hear your thoughts on forgiveness in the comment section below.

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