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Medical Intuitive Looks at Cancer - Part 3: Forgiveness

Healing and forgiveness work together. When you forgive yourself or someone else, you end the pattern of energy that binds you to the injured aspect of your self. Then the wound can heal, and you stop losing energy.

Forgiveness is about having more energy. When there is forgiveness, someone’s behavior or a painful memory no longer has the power to cause your awareness to collapse into it. For example, say that your father drank too much or was withdrawn and unavailable during your childhood, causing you to feel angry, abandoned and unloved. Forgiveness exists when your heart no longer closes and your energy doesn’t contract when you are around him. You have "given away in advance" or fore-given the emotional reaction that usually leads you into anger, or a victim stance. The energy is released before it has even become a reaction.

This freedom is not detachment or indifference; it’s not immunity to feelings. You may feel the feelings and they can still hurt, but it passes through you because you’re no longer identified with your wounded persona. This takes real self-knowledge; you have to work on understanding your own reactions. Forgiveness means you have become grounded in a deeper recognition of who you really are. And the moment the reaction ends in you, something changes in the other person, whether it’s your father, mother, spouse—these are the people who can hurt you the most, and who you can hurt the most—but as you forgive, they begin to have more freedom too. So there is more energy, more relationship to your true self, and then healing begins at every level. When forgiving someone close to you, the whole pattern of who you are radically changes.

The first step toward forgiveness begins by recognizing that you are much larger than just your wounded persona. You have the power to stop giving yourself away to emotional contraction—the sinking or exploding feeling, the tightening in the body, collapsing into anger or worthlessness. When you contract, and then react like this, you are already the victim. However, when you begin to take conscious responsibility for your own suffering instead of contracting and reacting—you meet this suffering consciously, instead of blaming anyone else—and this conscious suffering gradually leads you to disengage from the whole structure of victimhood and woundedness.

You can try to make yourself forgive through an act of will. But when forgiveness starts as an idea, it may seem noble and wise, but it is still a defense against the painful feelings. And forgiveness is not a defense; it is a kind of enlightenment. When something is truly forgiven, there is no longer a trace inside your psyche that hooks you back into the pain and reaction. When that happens, those around you heal too. Energetic patterns link us to one another in relationships- especially in families. When a pattern no longer has any place inside you, it ceases to have energy in others, and they begin to change in response. This is one of the ways that love truly heals.

© 2005 Christopher Stewart

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