All suffering and sorrow feelings are due to un-forgiveness energy.  Where there is sorrow, there is  un-forgiveness energy.   The two exist together.  What can we do about sorrow and suffering energy?

Craig and Dana have been married 18 years.  They love each other, are happily employed, have two children and are healthy.  However their sex life by their own report has always been difficult.  They have a long history of missed opportunities, guilt feelings, sadness energy, failure and frustration energy with each other sexually.  Yet there is love on both sides for the other.  They have “tried everything” including therapy, changing techniques, weekend get-aways with support groups, videos, talking with trusted friends. They have yelled, accused, defended and attacked each other repeatedly through the years.  They have also tried calmly taking with each other about what is missing, wrong and not working.

After years of deep sorrow and frustration,  we talked about forgiveness.  Their work began with forgiveness of self for all their perceived failures, the years of unsuccessful attempts at loving intimacy and for their own judgments they held about their partners.

This is what it looked like.  Dana would sit in silence and ask to be shown places of un-forgiveness she carried about herself regarding her sexual relationship with Craig. She would sometimes get a snippet of a past conversation, a fragment of an argument or a memory of a specific weekend where she had sobbed in great anguish. She would focus on one of these images from the past and say, “I forgive myself totally and completely.” She might say this 20 or 30 times or more if the pain was especially raw.  Sometimes she cried so hard, she reported having to write out the forgiveness statements because she could not speak them aloud.  Sometimes the same situation or memory would surface again weeks later and she would have to forgive herself all over again.

Craig was following his own process as well.  He tended to remember specific times where he felt he had failed and worked through those scenarios at first.  As these receded in intensity, other memories presented themselves where he had been deeply sad, then others where he had been frustrated and eventually times of feeling guilty surfaced.  Both Dana and Craig were led in Silence to different processes for their individual work.

When they got to a place where no more need for self -forgiveness was coming up, they switched to forgiveness of each other.  Slowly, slowly compassion for self and for each other began to surface.  They were able to spend intimate time together in tiny steps with no expectations. The beginning steps made without the mantel of the  past led to more trust, more success, more expressed loving wholeness over time. They began to find their way together by retuning to forgiveness of self and each other when they hit more road blocks. They both reported success in their efforts to spend intimate time together.  They also reported that throughout their entire lives, they were seeing new evidence of this forgiveness energy working and smoothing out other challenges they faced.

Forgiveness work, whatever the topic is, has to begin with ourselves.  We have to forgive ourselves for what we see as our anger, sadness, mistakes, ignorance, etc.  This is the only way we can totally and completely forgive another person from the heart.  Both parts of this process, forgiveness of self and of another have to be taken together.  Forgiveness of self allows the forgiveness of another to fully manifest. If we do not see our own brokenness and sorrow and move to release it from our energy field, we will never be able to forgive another wholly and completely. Suffering and sorrow then remain with us in our energy field.

Karl was divorced by his wife after 22 years of marriage.  They were in counseling for a year before the divorce was final but his wife felt the situation was irreconcilable.  When I began working with Karl,  he was still very angry, deeply hurt, with feelings of abandonment, mistreatment and rage.  He could not feel any energy for a new relationship even 4 years after his divorce.  He felt betrayed through no fault of his own.

When we began talking about self-forgiveness, he was totally closed to this.  He was divorced by his wife after all.  Karl told me his wife was the one at fault and he had nothing to forgive himself about.   We continued to talk about his feelings around this divorce and eventually we tried a session in sacred space, where he simply said, “I forgive myself totally and completely”,  over and over until it felt complete for that day.  There was no image of what that forgiveness might be about specifically.  He worked with this for several weeks and eventually the dam broke and he was able to grieve the loss and forgive himself for all the things he was blaming himself for, which he could not see nor name at the time.

Divine Grace was present in these sessions working with his unseen energy, unseen by me and by him as well.  Nonetheless, the forgiveness progressed and in time he also did the needed work in forgiving his wife.   He eventually began to date other people and reported he was a different person completely from who he had been in his earlier marriage.  He tells me he still uses that process especially around things he does not understand  but knows are out of balance.

Steps to take when suffering and sorrow are present.

1. Create a sacred space by saying, I open a sacred space with my I AM Energy/Eternal Self/Spiritual Self and Divine Presence in the highest forms ( angels, ascended teachers, divine ancestors, nature intellegences, etc.)  to help me forgive myself.

2.  Sit quietly to settle into the sacred space.  Set the intention of your work by stating in your mind that the forgiveness work is around your marriage, your relationship with your mother, the loss of your child or spouse, the relationship with your boss, specific abuse or trauma you have experienced,  etc.

3. Begin silently to yourself saying,   “I forgive myself totally and completely“.  Repeat this until you feel this in your heart.  You might put your hands on your heart as you are saying this.

4.  If  you try this for 15 minutes and feel little or nothing, try this.  “Sacred Flame from within me, consume any blocked emotional, mental, self-protective ( thermal) energy, spiritual energy or curse energy I am manifesting which is keeping me from being able to forgive myself.  I command this stuck energy out of my field, now. Thanks be to God/All That is. ”  Wait 5 minutes in this energy.

5. Return to #3 again.  If  this is still not working, write this out in a journal, again and again.  However, remember to open a sacred space within which to work.  This is most important!

6. When you feel no more un-forgiveness of self is present, which could take days or months,  use this same process for others in your situations.  “I forgive ___________ totally and completely.” Even when you are working with the death of another, do this part of the work.  Often we are angry, sad and out of balance with a loved one for having left us here without them.

This process works because when we open Sacred Space we engage our Eternal, Spiritual Selves and all the Loving Presence of All That Is to help us heal.  When we surrender to loving forgiveness, we return to our natural state of balance which has left us due to experiences in the past.  We come into the present and thereby heal from the past.