How to Forgive

New pathways to forgiveness, justice, and settling energy debts

Forgiveness has been a significant teacher of mine. 

I had a father who was physically abusive and would dip in and out of my life and a mother who took out all her pain on me. I had a step-father who conned me and then pretended I didn’t exist and a family that stopped calling once I moved away. 

Yet, I learned to forgive them. 

I forgave them so much that I didn’t even begin to register the harm and abuse I experienced when I was younger and the impact it had on my nervous system and ability to trust others until I was well into my 20s. 

I remember telling my then-boyfriend on a casual walk in the park one day that my stepdad stole a check of mine, wrote it out to himself for all of my savings, disappeared, and I never saw or spoke to him again. My boyfriend, who was unsurprisingly a dead-beat low-level criminal himself, reflected shock and rage. That was the first time I understood how awful that action was and that I should be angrier—maybe even seek justice!

But I forgave my stepfather. Though I could have taken him to court for his actions, I didn’t want my much younger brothers, who were still protected by their innocence and thought their dad was God, to have to face the realities that I did. Protecting the innocence of the child-spirit within is one of my deepest motivations. I couldn’t bring myself to create more instability and conflict in the reality my brothers were in, so I just let it go.

This event was the least of my problems and not even the most money a family member would claim from me as their own. 

Because of my upbringing, my capacity for forgiving the wrongful actions of others became massive. Along with that, so did my capacity to receive other people’s harmful behaviors in the first place. I learned to see everyone as a hurt child reacting to their wounding and trauma and to remove myself from good/bad/right/wrong thinking, but I also took on some of these wounds instead of protecting my own inner child from them.

I have been alchemizing much relational healing in the last couple of years. In this season of life, I have had many impactful relational heartbreaks to help me ascend through the pattern of tolerating what is not healthy, supportive, or good for me and not holding myself in integrity with my light within certain relationships.

This deepened my practice of forgiving, but it also became much harder and required more heart-opening and devotion. On my journey, I’ve had to really work on forgiving my parents, especially my mother. But now, as a woman in her 30s with much more wisdom integrated and power reclaimed, I felt I was missing something to truly forgive and move on from the hurt I experienced with others. 

Creating my Odes project supported me—a seed of light and a playful experiment that flew in out of nowhere. By channeling the poems and making the first album, I could clear much of the stuck pain I was still holding onto in a relatively swift, deeply healing, and powerful way. Through this, I learned that expressing my own Truth and perspective was a big, missing part of this process, one that my soul was calling me to pay attention to. I knew that I held back my expression for the same reason I never called the police on my stepdad: to protect others from pain. But even when I created and birthed the first album of this project, I still felt I was missing a piece of the actual forgiveness puzzle.

Then, a friend texted me a YouTube video on forgiveness.

The video showed a priest discussing the difference between forgiveness, justice, and reconciliation. He said that true forgiveness could not be given until one recognizes what the other has taken from one. That simple statement blew my mind.

Here I was, endlessly forgiving people by recognizing the light, innocence, and purity within them, but never recognizing what was taken from me—my light, innocence, and purity I didn’t protect.

I got my journal and took myself through a practice. I wrote down the names of all the people who had significantly hurt me, especially ones that I still felt a twinge of pain or a trigger around or whom I had been more recently cultivating forgiveness for. Next to their names, I wrote down everything that was taken from me by whatever experience I had with each person. I added my family, ex-lovers, old friends, and even myself to the list. Some lists were longer than others, but a few common threads of what was taken were woven throughout them all. 

Those were the taking of my Truth, my time, and my resources. 

I repeated those exact words over and over through the list, which showed me exactly what I did not completely value in myself. 

Self-worth/value is one of the first imprints conditioned in us as very small children. And, of course, if we don’t see positive modeling of healthy self-worth, we collect reinforcement that we are not valuable, and we are shown what is valuable through our connection to our family unit. On a collective/cultural level, the reinforcement is even worse.