Forgiveness
I am now going to touch on forgiveness, an essential part of your healing journey with Creative breathwork Training.
There isn’t any human-being on the planet who doesn’t have something to forgive another or themselves. Forgiveness exercises are an essential part of Level 1 Breathwork training.
What is Forgiveness?
Forgiveness is not about the other person who has wronged you, it is completely all about bringing to the surface what is in the way of you returning to your original state, of purity and innocence.
For-give – the word “Forgiveness” means to go back to the time before the pain or the trauma. It is never about the other person, or about giving them a free “get out of jail” card. It has nothing to do with the other person whatsoever, it is completely about you.
Forgiveness is grace. It only comes with grace. There is no expectation that you are going to feel any particular emotion in order to forgive another person.
It is an act. It is a decision that you make. You may feel relief, you may feel lighter and freer, but don’t have expectations around what you should feel during the process.
How to do the forgiveness exercise- The PDF is available below to download
You need to choose a person that you want to forgive: I suggest that you might want to start with your mother or father. Those who need to practice this forgiveness exercise for a parent will know they need to do this and which parent they want to work with first. Alternatively, you may have immediately had someone pop into your head just thinking about doing a forgiveness exercise. Someone who has deeply traumatised you, and you know that it would be beneficial to work on forgiveness with them.
It is best to start this exercise with someone outside of yourself, but you can certainly use it to help forgive yourself, once you have worked on another person first.Write this statement out 70 times for 7 consecutive days: “I <insert your first and family name>, now, totally and completely forgive, <insert the full name of the person you have chosen>”
This exercise in forgiveness is based on numerological principles. 70 x 7 are the magical numbers you will be working with.
You will be writing out a statement 70 times for 7 days and you will start on the next Monday from now and do the exercise every day until next Sunday night.
Choose how you are going to write the statement: There’s a bit of flexibility in how you would like to approach this. For example, you could write the statement 35 times, twice a day. You could write it out 70 times every evening before you go to bed. You just need to make sure that you have written the statement out 70 times by the end of each day – every day.
Don’t miss a day: If you miss a day, the rules of this exercise are that you have to start again, back to Day 1
Just allow the process: Don’t overthink it, don’t worry about getting any particular results or feelings while you are doing the exercise. Don’t have any expectations. This exercise just tends to work it’s magic itself.
Self-reflect on your experience and journal: While not having any expectations around what “should” happen. It is valuable to note when/if emotions, feelings and thoughts do come up. Particularly helpful for most people is to reflect on why you might be finding it hard to forgive this person. Forgiveness is hard. Why is it hard for you, to forgive, this particular person? Why is it hard to forgive the particular things that they did that were hurtful, damaging, traumatising? If you are experiencing big emotions you could do a CMR breathe (Put link here) or write it out in your journal.
Last note: The consecutive days are important and don’t forget that if you miss a day, you have to start over again, counting from Day 1.
