Radical Forgiveness

This week I started taking an ecourse on the works of the Dalai Lama.  You can find the course here. I got my first email Monday and chose two out of 10 saying by the Dalai Lama as my intention for the course.  They are:

"It is the enemy who can truly teach us to practice the virtues of compassion and tolerance."
— Oceans of Wisdom

"Help others and, if you cannot help them, at least do not harm them."
— The Path to Bliss

I find that changing the word "enemies" to "difficult people" helps. I don't think I have enemies.  But I do have a few difficult people in my life.  They are loved ones who trigger hurtful feelings, guilt, anger, frustration, and other negative reactions.  Therefore, my intention is to see them as my teachers and learn from them.  I've heard of doing this before when I first learned about Radical Forgiveness. 

Radical forgiveness is a concept that everything that happens to us is for some lesson which will help us grow spiritually, even if we don't  understand what the lesson is.  Each problem that we have or in which we continue to find ourselves has to do with a particular spiritual lesson we've set ourselves up to learn. Once we learn it, that problem doesn't return.  Or if it does, we no longer see it as a problem, but just as part of life.  You can get free work sheets on his site and use those. I've used them several times for various situations and found them quite effective. The other thing Tipping suggests, are these four steps:

1. Say to yourself: O my goodness, look what I created.
This is to realize that what happened was preordained before we where born.
It is also a recognition that we have had a hand in on a spiritual level although we don't know the reason.

2. Say: I  notice my judgments and my feelings  but I love myself anyway.
We are human and we will likely feel angry, guilty, frustrated, bewildered, etc. in some situations.  We then recognize our feelings and love ourselves for who we are.

3. Say: I am willing to see perfection in this situation.
The emphasis is on the word "willing" because it's not important to believe.

4. Say: I choose peace.
This will wrap it up and get on with doing that which needs to be done regarding the situation.

Once we've done these, then we can deal with the situation more calmly and level headed.

 Hope you can test this and see if it works for you like it did for me.


Forgiveness is the final form of love.

God speaks to us all a little differently, hoping we'll tell each other.