This is the first pillar of the heart – the emotional center of our bodies. Forgiveness is not an easy thing to do and if you’re tempted to bypass this episode, please stop and consider I might talk about forgiveness differently than you are expecting me to.
Any emotion we experience is something we should pay attention to. Emotions are the truth-tellers in our bodies and when we take the time to learn from them, we become more grounded and confident in our own lives – we are more likely to be able to find the Joy we are seeking.
Takeaway #1
Forgiveness is a gift you give to yourself it’s an inside job. And everything that is given to us in the form of a commandment is a gift from loving heavenly parents who want you to grow and mature and forgiving yourself and others is a vital part of that growth and maturity.
Takeaway #2
Allowing yourself to learn from the hurt you experienced will help you move forward. Use each and every experience in your life to be a learning and growing experience.
Challenge
Here’s your challenge for today. And this is something that I took from another book by Desmond Tutu called the Book of forgiveness. And I think this can be really powerful if you’re willing to take this challenge. So he said, Get a stone, not a pebble and not a boulder, something that you can hold in your hand, that has some weight to it. So something that is going to not be super easy to hold on to, because you’re going to hold on to it for six hours, in your non-dominant hand.
Now, for six hours, do not put the stone down for any reason. For the entire six hours, you could even go longer than six hours, if you want to really lean into this challenge this week.
That is the challenge is to hold on to that stone for six hours.
And then after, after you’ve done this, get out your journal, and write about the experience. Ask yourself these questions:
- What did I notice about carrying this stone?
- When did I notice it the most?
- Did it hinder any of my activities? Was it ever useful?
- In what ways was carrying this stone like carrying around this unforgiving hurt?
- And then make a list of the people that you need to forgive in your life?
- And then make another list of all those who you want to have forgive you?
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Full Transcript
00:54
Welcome back, friends, I’m glad to have you here with me in the podcast, I hope you’ve been enjoying this Finding Joy series. I think when we realize that we’re here to find joy on this earth. It feels so elusive to us. Like I don’t know how to find joy in the middle of these hard things that I’m going through. But that’s actually the point. That’s actually why we’re here we’re supposed to find joy, when things are not working out the way that we want them to.
Joy is not just something that we find when everything goes the way that we thought it was going to or the way that feels good to us. It’s actually the purpose that we came to this earth, one of the big reasons was to be able to find the joy in the middle of things not going the way that we wanted them to.
01:44
As I mentioned, last week, I’ve been re-listening re-participating in a course that I took a couple of years ago called Transformations of Faith. It was a course by Thomas McConkie. And in that course, he also has some discussions with Adam Miller. And if you’ve listened to my podcast very long, you know that I am an Adam Miller fan. And Adam said something. They were talking about the atonement.
And he said something that really stood out to me. And he said, I used to think that the atonement was about getting God to forgive me. But now it feels more like me learning how to forgive the world. And I paraphrase that it’s not a direct quote. But that was the idea that Adam gave, and that has actually stuck with me since the first time I did this course a couple of years ago. I’ve never forgotten that particular idea, presented to me by Adam Miller.
02:46
But how often do we consider that we are here to forgive the world.
02:55
Today, this finding joy podcast is focused on forgiveness. And remember, this is based on the Book of Joy by the Dalai Lama, and the Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and their eight pillars of joy.
And forgiveness, I think is a tough one. Because I know a lot of people don’t want to even hear about forgiveness. And if that’s you, then you can skip past this episode, you can stop right now and not listen to it anymore. But I do want to invite you to continue to listen, because I think that this episode is going to take a different road than you expect that it’s going to now so I want you to think about how you are progressing on your own timeline.
And you should not be comparing yourself with anyone else except you. You are not in competition with anyone else. You do not need to be looking around and comparing where am I in regards to with somebody else’s development? what somebody else is ready for? Just look at yourself, what am I ready for? How am I developing? Let’s stay in our lane own lanes here. And there’s really been quite a shift in recent years in the public perception of what forgiveness is.
And really the tide has been turning towards putting the burden of forgiveness on the victim. And many times in our lives, the things that we need to forgive other people for we’re not truly a victim. But there are people in this world that are truly victims, and these are the ones that the media tends to highlight. And the burden is put on them to forgive. And that doesn’t benefit anyone except the perpetrator. So, no wonder it’s really easy these days to have mixed feelings about this word forgiveness and about embracing forgiveness. As a part of finding joy in our own lives.
I want you to think about forgiveness as a gift you give to yourself. Because that’s how I view it. First and foremost, if you’re ready to be more kind and compassionate towards yourself, I want you to keep listening.
05:14
So far in this series, we’ve covered the pillars of the mind. These were: perspective, humility, humor, and acceptance. These are all things that we access through just changing our thoughts, opening up our minds, expanding our minds, questioning the thoughts that we’ve had, I think, you know, our minds are very, very strong. We live in a very cognitive society thinking is very rewarded, and celebrated in our society. And often we just consider that we can think our way to feeling better. And think our way into think our way out of a lot of the things that we struggled to get ourselves to do.
05:58
And that in a way is true. Part of that is true. Part of that is also not true. Because if we are thinking that we can only do that with our thoughts, and do that only in our mind, we are ignoring some very vital parts of ourselves of the whole complete a complete human being. Because we have emotions, as much as that’s sometimes seems like a four letter word to some people. We do we have emotions, we have hurts, and we have wounds that are keeping us stuck. And those wounds keep us recreating the same life that we’ve already created, over and over and over again. And that is often painful.
We replay these wounds over and over again inside of our heads. And the effects of them come out in the way that we see the world and in the way that we live our lives.
06:58
And as a society, we do not reward emotional people, which I think is too bad. But there’s a reason for that. I think that reason is because emotions are not something that we know how to deal with in a healthy way. We either shove them down and pretend like we don’t have them, or we numb them with food, or alcohol or drugs, or porn or staying super busy. Or just getting on our phones. There are countless ways that we can numb our emotions, and we’re so good at all of them. And all of the ways to do that are so accessible to us, numbing those emotions.
07:45
Or sometimes we just let them take control. You can see this when somebody is just acting crazy, they’ll get really angry, and they just start taking that anger out on everyone around them. Their emotions are in control. So if you look at those three things, how we’re just shoving them down, we’re numbing them, or we’re letting them control us.
08:09
We think, yeah, emotions are not a good thing. No wonder emotions are not something that we want to pay attention to. We think that they’re bad. But we don’t have to react to our emotions in any of those ways. What we need is for someone to teach us how to react, and a healthy way to relate to our emotions in a healthy way. Because emotions are super important. They are our teachers. They tell us the truth about ourselves about what’s important to us. They tell us the truth about other people.
They are what we should be paying attention to. They tell us what to pay attention to.
08:51
But we are told to not be emotional in so many different ways, especially women.
08:59
Because women tend to be more emotional than men and men will treat us as if our emotions are a weakness. I actually think that our emotions are a superpower, but only if you don’t stuff them down or let them take you on a crazy ride, which you do not have to do.
When I work with my clients. This is some of the most significant work that we do together. We work on incorporating the three major parts of the whole human being the whole complete person, the thinking mind, the feeling, emotional heart, and their reactive, wise body.
09:41
Now in order to feel really grounded and really confident and firmly planted in your life, and in your relationship with yourself, all three of these parts need to be addressed and they need to be viewed as equally important because any one of these three pieces of you can easily hijack you, and easily hijack the other two and squash them down and tell you that they’re not important.
10:11
So, we are not just looking at the pillars of the mind, today, we get to look into the pillars of the heart. And that is the emotional part of us. I’m so glad to be diving into this part of the pillars of joy. And these four pillars of the heart that we’ll be covering this week. And then the next three podcast episodes, forgiveness, gratitude, compassion, and generosity.
10:37
These pillars are just as important, if not more important, as the pillars of the mind. Even if you have been ignoring or villainizing your emotions, please keep an open mind. This is something that will be important to you. Now, thoughts happen inside your head, and emotions are felt inside your body. Think of a really strong emotion, something like anger or sadness, you feel that inside your body. The thoughts that cause that happen inside your head, but the emotion is felt in your body. And most people will confuse their thoughts for emotions.
Typically, when I start working with a client, and I ask them, so how do you feel? How does that make you feel? Most of the time, they’ll give me a thought about what’s happened. Something like, well, I don’t think that’s okay. Or I don’t like this.
11:30
Well, those are not actually feelings, those are still thoughts. And this is okay, if you think those are feelings because you just haven’t been in touch with your feelings and your emotions yet.
So if you’re new to my work, and you’re new to coaching, then it is totally okay to be describing your feelings that way. But we’re not going to leave you there.
11:50
The truth is, you’ve probably shut off your emotions for so long, or just wanted to step down that part of you that you didn’t allow yourself to, like, let them be there and to take a look at them. But that’s exactly what I’m going to focus this podcast on in this episode. And the next four episodes.
12:08
When you allow your emotions and you know how to process them, and you know how to learn from them, you start to heal those parts of you, that felt like they were big gaping wounds that felt like they were unhealable, maybe even wounds that you didn’t realize that you were carrying around. But they get triggered, and you get reactive, and they start coming up for you and you there are these times where you get really reactive. And you think, what is wrong with me that I can’t stop doing this?
12:40
Well, when we open ourselves up to this emotional piece of us and we start looking at it, and learning how to healthily relate to our emotions, we actually start allowing Jesus Christ to heal us. He is the source of our healing. And maybe you are blocking because you were blocking those emotions, you were blocking him from being able to heal that part of you. Because you didn’t realize how important that healing was, and how important it was to allow those emotions so that could be healed.
13:16
As we talk about forgiveness today, I want you to think about how can I heal? How can I allow Christ and allow these emotions to be there and to be an important part of me, so that I can allow him to begin healing me so that I can allow him to start that healing process within myself.
13:38
We do know from the scriptures that forgiveness is a commandment. I think sometimes that one of the hardest people to forgive is ourselves. We are so incredibly difficult on ourselves. But when we can learn how to do this better, we can learn how to forgive ourselves better. We can also learn how to forgive others more easily.
14:05
I’m amazed that the older I get and the more that I learn. And the more that I try to learn from all my life’s circumstances. The more I discover how every commandment is a gift to me from loving Heavenly Parents. Because forgiveness is a huge gift. It’s not a gift that is easy to embrace and to accept. I think it’s very hard to do that just because we say that’s hard, or I don’t I just can’t do that. I think maybe it’s because we don’t know how to do that because it seems impossible to be able to let go and to move on. We don’t even know what that looks like.
14:52
It’s very, very easy to fixate on our past and what we’ve done wrong and to judge ourselves harshly for the decision. Sins that we’ve made for our failings and missteps, and to not allow ourselves to forgive ourselves for our past. And often our brain wants to loop over and over and over again, about what we’ve done. In fact, have you ever had your brain pull up something, some little thing that you did back in junior high, and remind you of that some mistakes that you made back in when you were just a young teenager? That’s what our brains want to do.
15:28
And they want to remind us over and over again, and also tell us – Oh, yeah, you’re still making the same mistakes now. And by the way, you’ve hurt other people.
15:39
And the more that we allow our brains to do this, the more entrenched we get in the thoughts that there is something wrong with us. And then we think that the harder we are on ourselves, the less likely we are to make the same mistakes.
15:54
Did you know, what, studies have actually proven that the opposite is true. That the more compassion and forgiveness that we have for ourselves, the more likely we are able to let go and move on.This is contradictory to what most people believe.
16:14
But when we acknowledge that we are human, and we allow ourselves to not be perfect, we can begin to access that compassion.
Remember, last week, I shared something that you can say to yourself, it was something I learned from Kara Loewentheil. And she said, when she makes a mistake, she says, Oh, how human of me.
I think that’s awesome. How human of me, because humans are not perfect. And we need to allow ourselves to be human, we will have an easier time allowing other people to be human, when we allow ourselves to be human.
16:55
But when you have trouble forgiving yourself, this is what’s likely to happen with other people, your brain is going to do this, it’s going to be fixated on what someone else has done to hurt you. You don’t even usually realize that you are that you also aren’t forgiving yourself for many things in the past. But we get a very outward focus instead of an inward focus.
And our brain will start to loop situations over and over again. And every time it does that we get we feel that hurt all over again, every time we think about it. And the more entrenched we get in how hurt we are, and how justified we are in being hurt and being angry. And then this is also very common, we start to tell our story to whoever will listen.
We call this collecting allies, we tell our story to people who we think are going to agree with us in an attempt to get them to agree with us. And this just further, entrenches us in our own stories about how we’ve been mistreated, because now we’ve been validated by others who agree with us about all the hurt that we’ve been experiencing.
18:08
Well, all this is a lot of pain to carry around. It’s like we have this backpack full of pain. And every time we tell our story, we throw another rock in the backpack and we’re trying to hike up a mountain.
Forgiving somebody does not mean that we haven’t been wronged or mistreated. It also doesn’t mean that what happened was okay.
18:28
It doesn’t mean that you aren’t allowed to have strong emotions around what happened.
18:33
It doesn’t mean that the other person doesn’t have responsibility, or that they’re going to escape consequences.
18:41
It does not mean you have to allow this person to continue to mistreat you.
18:46
And forgiving also does not mean just because I say this it does not mean that it’s going to be easy to do.
18:54
What it does mean is that we allow ourselves to feel the pain, so we can own our own human experience. This is very difficult because we have been programmed to avoid pain.
19:13
And we have so many different ways that we can escape pain. And our primitive brain says I don’t want to experience pain, I want to be happy. So I’m going to go do this other thing over here so I don’t have to feel the pain.
19:24
It also means that the physical effects of not forgiving someone are something that you can let go of. You don’t have to allow this person to be your jailer anymore because that’s what we’re doing. When we refuse to forgive somebody. And we keep telling that story and keep that just forefront in our mind and let it control us. We are tethering ourselves to this person that has been hurting us. So, when we forgive them, we don’t keep ourselves tethered anymore. You could cut that line that’s been holding you bound to this person.
20:08
Think about being free, you are giving yourself a gift by not allowing that person to control any more of your thoughts or feelings, or your life experience.
We have this idea in our heads that in order for us to forgive someone that the other person who has wronged us needs to first of all acknowledge what they did, and admit that they did something wrong. They need to take responsibility. And then they need to apologize for us before we can forgive them. Well, how rarely does that happen? I can’t actually think of very many times ever, that that happens.
And so if we’re waiting for this, we stay stuck for a really long time. And then you know what it also does, is it perpetuates this idea in our own brains, that we’re a victim, and that we are at the mercy of this other person and their choices.
Real victims have no control in their life. Victims are powerless, it feels terrible to be powerless in your own life. But since forgiveness is a gift that we give ourselves, and we look inward for that forgiveness, we can forgive without anyone else being involved.
Forgiveness is an inside job, not an outside job.
21:35
This is emotional work, it’s going to take place in your body more than in your brain. And your brain is going to try to take over because our brains are super strong, we have leaned into that muscle for a long time. And we’ve let them just kind of rule our lives.
So it’s going to try to take over, it’s going to try it will keep you from being able to access really access parts in your body that can make this work effective for you. Try to be mindful of your body and what is happening inside your body. Remember, your thoughts take place in your brain and your feelings your emotions take place in your body. Be mindful of what is happening inside your body.
22:20
When you’re feeling a big emotion, locate the pain, name it, what is the emotion, describe what it feels like in your body as you breathe into it and allow it to be there. without resisting it.
22:36
There is a reason that you’re feeling hurt by what happened.
22:41
Emotions are truth tellers. Remember, they are telling us to pay attention to something. It’s saying, hey, Something here doesn’t align with one of your values, something that is important to you. Like maybe someone treated you with disrespect, maybe someone lied to you. Maybe someone betrayed your trust. No one wants to experience these things. But we all do.
And after you have allowed this feeling to be in your body, which is called feeling your feelings. Ask yourself what is it that was happening for me there that felt out of alignment? And identify why you were feeling what you were feeling? What is it that happened that does not align with who I am the way I want to be treated. The things that I think are important in my life, what is not in alignment here.
23:35
Now when the scriptures say that everything works together for our good, that includes these times when we feel very hurt and wounded.
23:47
And I think especially at these times, when we work through these really hard things that we want to numb, push away, or just go crazy about. These are the times that we get to healthily react to them and learn the most. They have the opportunities to work the most for our good if we are willing to lean into them and learn from them.
24:16
We don’t get often get a say in what happens to us. But we do have a say in what we do with what happens to us.
24:25
Here’s your takeaways for today.
Takeaway #1
Forgiveness is a gift you give to yourself it’s an inside job. And everything that is given to us in the form of a commandment is a gift from loving heavenly parents who want you to grow and mature and forgiving yourself and others is a vital part of that growth and maturity.
Takeaway #2
Allowing yourself to learn from the hurt you experienced will help you move forward. Use each and every experience in your life to be a learning and growing experience.
Challenge
Here’s your challenge for today. And this is something that I took from another book by Desmond Tutu called the Book of forgiveness. And I think this can be really powerful if you’re willing to take this challenge. So he said, Get a stone, not a pebble and not a boulder, something that you can hold in your hand, that has some weight to it. So something that is going to not be super easy to hold on to, because you’re going to hold on to it for six hours, in your non-dominant hand.
Now, for six hours, do not put the stone down for any reason. For the entire six hours, you could even go longer than six hours, if you want to really lean into this challenge this week.
That is the challenge is to hold on to that stone for six hours.
And then after, after you’ve done this, get out your journal, and write about the experience. Ask yourself these questions:
- What did I notice about carrying this stone?
- When did I notice it the most?
- Did it hinder any of my activities? Was it ever useful?
- In what ways was carrying this stone like carrying around this unforgiving hurt?
- And then make a list of the people that you need to forgive in your life?
- And then make another list of all those who you want to have forgive you?
Because for sure, forgiveness goes both ways.
26:53
I will never tell anyone that forgiveness is easy, because I don’t think it is. I think it’s actually one of the hardest things that we’re asked to do. And I think that sometimes the hardest people to forgive are the ones that are the closest to us, our family members. They’re also the most important ones to learn to forgive.
27:14
And what we get confused about with forgiveness is that we think it’s about the other person. It’s not. It’s about you.
It always was.
27:25
Thank you for being here with me today. I hope you have a great week. I would love to hear how this challenge goes for you. If you’re going to carry a stone for six hours, then you can send me an email and let me know how that went for you. Have a great week. I’ll see you next week for part six of the finding joy series, where we go into gratitude.
27:46
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Set up a one time coaching call with me to see if this is a good fit for you. The cost for this one time deep dive into your relationship problems is only $25. But space is limited. Let’s spend an hour together working on your hardest relationship problem. You’ll leave a call with some tools and some ideas of what your next best step is. Visit the link in the show notes to schedule your appointment.
