Emotional Pain To Heal It You Need to Acknowledge It

Acknowledging emotional pain may seem like an obvious step in the healing process that everyone is already doing. If youre in pain, you already know it, right? Not always. Many of us have a surprising amount of emotional trauma in our energy field that lies below our conscious awareness. In some cases we might be aware of some of the symptoms of an energetic wound within us, but we are unconscious of its deeper CAUSE a core place of constriction where Life Force is blocked. The effects of this blockage can range from uncomfortable feelings of mild emotional pain at one end of the spectrum to severely debilitating physical and/or mental dis-ease at the more serious end of the spectrum. It is common for us to become practiced at denial of emotional pain in order to function in our lives. Unconsciously we have learned how to keep the pain at bay so we can do our daily lives with some kind of balance. Often, the energetic imbalance within us actually causes us to create more imbalance as an attempt to gain equilibrium. And our only awareness of this might be a sense of feeling off or living our lives with limited inner resources, constantly looking for something outside ourselves to fix us. In order to heal emotional pain, we need to invite it up into our conscious awareness. We need to care enough about ourselves to spend time with ourselves, looking within and truly BEING with ourselves. Doing this we find an infinite Source of emotional support and wellbeing that is always available to us from within. Shame Is At the Core Of All Wounds Emotional pain is a gateway into an energy wound. So-called negative emotions are flags to let us know when something needs to be healed and/or released from within. Our feelings give us our most direct access into the center of an energy constriction. Zeroing in on our feelings help us consciously get right to the core, the root cause of all pains/wounds physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, or psychic. At the core of all wounds is a thought / belief that we are not good enough, that we are bad, that weve done something wrong. This thought seed usually gets planted in us as children when our energy fields are wide open and we are scolded for doing something or being a certain way. This generally comes about from innocently rocking the boat of a caregiver and unconsciously triggering their unhealed wounds, which then gets projected out onto us. (See The Superego Breaking Free of a False God.)

Most of us were conditioned to believe that it isnt okay to feel our feelings, especially the really strong emotions that threatened our caregivers world when we expressed them. So, sometimes unconsciously and with good intentions, they did whatever they could to influence us to bury the feelings.

Then, as young children we carried this belief seed of not good enough / bad / did something wrong and usually another reprimanding event occurred that caused the belief seed to take root and grow.

Each time we were reprimanded and made wrong for being who we were, the I am bad thought was rethought and eventually became a belief.

The Core Wound In Emotional Pain Becomes Unconscious

As we moved through childhood, adolescence and into adulthood, a self-preservation component of our psyche pushed this debilitating belief down into the subconscious. This part of us was driven by the instinct to do whatever we could to survive as best we could under challenging circumstances, including turning away from the emotional pain and denying even to ourselves that it existed. Unfortunately, even though the I am bad belief may now be unconscious, the energy of it still operates in our lives, sabotaging our self-empowerment, fulfillment, joy and wellbeing.

Some of us have had the experience of feeling emotionally frozen or cut off from our feelings. We know we feel SOMETHING but the feelings themselves are murky and indefinable. Again, this is the act of a part of us that tries to take care of us in the only way it knows how to freeze up the emotions in order to protect us from the intolerable emotional pain of the shame and powerlessness we feel when we think we are bad at the core. In the whole spectrum of human emotions, this is the feeling that is absolutely the most painful. Consequently, as we go about our lives, we may be aware of a vague feeling in the background that ranges anywhere from uncomfortable to intolerable emotional pain and suffering, without even having a word to describe or define it. In this case, it takes practice to allow ourselves to actually feel what is really going on inside to give PERMISSION to ourselves to feel it.

The Core Belief Needs To Be Seen As False

The essential realization that we all eventually come to in our healing is that the core belief of being inherently bad and having done something wrong is COMPLETELY untrue. Here is the truth: Youve never been bad. Neither has anyone else. We all carry all the attributes of pure divinity of Source itself! In our essence we are the highest vibration of light and love.

Likewise, youve never done anything wrong. Neither has anyone else. Everything that anyone has ever done has always been an attempt to take care of themselves with whatever inner resources they had at the time.

This might be hard to take in because we are conditioned to make ourselves and each other wrong. To heal, we must learn to see ourselves and each other from the eyes of Source.

And how does Source see us? With unlimited, unconditional love. It sees us as sparks of Itself who have come to this plane to go through experiences, make mistakes and learn from them. In each experience we have the choice to let go into love and learn to trust it or to contract and cause ourselves misery. Depending on how we do in each circumstance, we create the next set of circumstances. ALL of it is part of the larger curriculum of our Evolution to awaken to our Divinity.And there is no judgment in any of it. There is only learning and love, learning and love Retracing Our Steps And Bringing Truth To The Untruth Emotional wounds are the energetic cause of all other wounds and dis-eases. To heal ANY wound, we need to retrace our steps back into ourselves. We need to become CONSCIOUS of the belief that we are bad that is running the whole show of suffering, and the immense shame and feelings of powerlessness that result from that false belief. It is very important to not make ourselves wrong for having this bad belief, which only adds another layer of shame. The more you check this out, youll see the subtle ways this belief can show itself. It can even try to co-opt the healing process by making you wrong or bad for not healing fast enough! Or not doing it the right way, etc. Once we acknowledge and are conscious of emotional pain, the next step is to call in love from Source. We can also use self-inquiry (See questions below) to ask to be shown the truth so we can see for ourselves that we are inherently good. As we become conscious and aware of the falseness of the belief we've held about being "bad," we start to see and EXPERIENCE for the very first time! the truth of our goodness. At this point, emotional pain begins to unwind organically, automatically. When we experience the reality of our goodness, a change in consciousness happens and miracles of healing occur. We see that the core belief of being bad was just a misunderstanding that grew out of an untrue thought that we believed as a result of the things that happened to us.and then the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.Anais Nin Emerging Into A Larger Energy Field As the untruth is met by the truth consciously within you, your energy field begins to vibrate at a higher frequency of love and wellbeing. You extend out and beyond the vibration of the old emotional pain. This is very much like the metaphor of thinking outside the box. If you think of the problem as being contained within a box, you cant solve the problem by only looking within the box. You need to expand out beyond the box of the problem to find the solution.In the same way, we need to expand out beyond the limited energy field of our wounds in order to lift our vibrations to a higher field and heal the emotional trauma.

The only way to do this is to consciously call in and align ourselves with a larger, higher vibration of energy Source, God, Love, Higher Power (Insert the word you know It by.). This acts like a vibrational tuning fork, tuning us into higher, purer frequencies of energy. The old wounds and emotional pain are out of sync with this higher vibration of energy and fall away. This can immensely shorten the grief process that is sometimes involved in healing emotional pain. Without Conscious Acknowledgment Of Emotional Pain Only Symptoms Are Treated To recap, the first step for healing emotional pain is awareness, then consciously bringing a higher energy to the wound the truth of unconditional love, compassion and forgiveness to the untruth of being separate and bad. Then the natural outcome is a change in consciousness, a broadening and deepening of awareness, and the wound organically begins to release by itself. Until we become conscious of the wound, we can use all kinds of healing practices that can help us get relief from the symptoms of the emotional pain, but until we acknowledge the core emotional trauma, the symptoms will spring up again. The core seed of the emotional pain needs to be gently exposed with loving compassion, and then touched by the realization of the truth that we are good and have always been good. THEN the wound is totally released roots and all from our energy field. Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart. Love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. The point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps, someday, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. Rilke, from Letters To A Young Poet When Youve Had Enough It takes courage to turn inward and get investigatively honest about what you are really feeling and acknowledge your emotional pain. Usually this doesnt happen to us until we finally decide weve suffered enough. If you have found yourself here and are reading this, then you are at that point the threshold into healing. I greet you with love and understanding. I acknowledge and celebrate your courage the part of you that has said Enough suffering. Im ready to heal now.

How Can We Learn To Feel What We Really Feel?

First of all, call in the larger energy field of your Source, of Higher Power. If youre not able to feel that yet, thats okay. Just call on love. Invite love to join you in your emotional pain healing. You dont need to know what love is or where it comes from, or even be able to feel it yet in order to access it. All you need to do is to sincerely call on it and it will be here for you. When you become aware that you feel off emotionally, allow yourself time and space to investigate your feelings. Take some quiet, undistracted time to open your awareness to this part of yourself, and shine a light into the corners of your being that have been shielded by denial.

Use the power of your words. Your words, whether aloud or silent, focus and align your energy in specific directions. Asking inner questions focuses your attention on the answers and calls forth the corresponding material up and out of the unconscious. Below are some examples of questions that are helpful to ask. You can use them if they feel right for you. If not, experiment and find just the right words that are effective for you in investigating your emotional pain. O *Love+, I pray that you break my heart so wide open that the whole world falls in. Mother Theresa Be patient with this process of becoming aware of your feelings. If you dont get immediate results, pick just one question and carry it with you as your companion for a day, gently asking it inside whenever you think of it. Your willingness to do this consistently will gently open your consciousness to aspects of yourself youve never been aware of before. It might also be helpful to write out the answers to these questions. Sometimes writing frees up parts of your consciousness in ways that speaking cant get to. You can also ask a trusted friend or counselor to meet with you for an hour or two. Ask for an uninterrupted span of their attention where you can explore your answers to these questions aloud, with them simply listening. If you decide to do this, it is important that you choose someone who will not judge you in any way. You can trade time and reverse roles with them on another occasion. Get curious about your feelings. Ask yourself questions. Remember to first ask Source for a cushion of love and courage to face areas that have been protected by denial. Take one question at a time and let the energy of the question sink in and do its work in helping you become aware of emotional pain. What am I feeling? Why am I angry / upset / sad? Why am I feeling the need to defend myself? What am I afraid of? What do I feel guilty about? What part of me most needs my compassion, love and attention right now? Why have I denied what I feel? What have I not been willing to see?

Invite and watch for responses to your questions. We all have unique predispositions. Some of us are more physically oriented, while others are more mentally or emotionally oriented. You may experience your first awareness of emotional pain as an uncomfortable physical sensation, such as tightness. Or it could be mental confusion and obsession about a subject. Or you could feel emotionally overwhelmed, like being pulled into a tidal wave that has you spinning and not knowing which end is up. You may be able to determine the quality of the feeling as rage, sadness, despair, etc. If not, thats okay. Give the feeling / sensation permission to be here within you fully, whether you can describe or define it or not. Make no judgments about yourself or your process. You cant do this wrong. Just go with whatever you are aware of and congratulate yourself for your courage and determination to heal. Look for even the tiniest sensation of discomfort. Often this is a mild awareness of tightness. If you keep bringing your attention back to the tightness and give it permission to show itself, your awareness of it will increase. In some cases the beginning signs of tightness are later experienced as sharp pain or as a tight constriction as you stay with this process. Remember to stay with yourself as you do this. Talk to yourself: Show me where emotional pain is located in my being. I open all channels to love here, right now. I am willing to feel this, to heal it. Remind yourself that anything that youre feeling is here for a valid, real reason. As you begin to experience your emotional pain, remind yourself that there is nothing wrong with you for having this wound. Even if your current experience was triggered by something in present time, the root of it is there because there was something that happened to you in the past that caused real, genuine pain. Therefore, it is normal, natural and HEALTHY for you to feel whatever it is that you feel. Because there wasnt enough love and emotional support present at the time of the original wounding, it remained unhealed and the energy curled in around itself, like a fist. There is no judgment in this. Your psyche did the best it could with the resources it had at the time. As a young child you depended entirely on your caregivers and didnt have the maturity to discern that their upset was about THEM and not you. All this emotional trauma needs is loving attention and self forgiveness to be touched with loving compassion without trying to fix or change it. In the original situation where you were wounded, the tendency was to make a conclusion from it I was punished because I was bad. I did something wrong. There is something wrong with me and that is why Mom is so upset. That part of you needs to know that you didnt do anything wrong, you werent bad, and there was / is nothing wrong with you. I cant say these words enough. They need to be repeated to all of us until we actually hear them and take them to heart, literally.

Whatever you did, if anything at all, was the best you could do at the time, given where you were in your spiritual evolution and the intensity of the circumstances you found yourself in.Keep talking to and encouraging yourself. Practice being a source of your own emotional support. I acknowledge that this emotional pain is here. I admit that it is here. I am not wrong for feeling this, for having this feeling. I forgive myself for having this wound. I breathe in loving compassion and forgiveness. I open all doors to love. I am willing to feel this because I know Love / God / Source / Higher Power is here with me. The key to getting inside your Vibrational Vortex of Creation; of experiencing the absolute absence of resistance; of achieving complete alignment with all that you have become and all that you desire, and f bringing to your physical experience everything that you desire is being in the state of appreciation and there is no more important object of attention to which you must flow your appreciation than that of self.Abraham Hicks, Excerpted from The Vortex, Where the Law of Attraction Assembles All Cooperative Relationships Dont try to interpret or judge the feeling. You dont need to figure out or decide what something means, whether it is something someone said or did or something you said or did, or a feeling youre becoming aware of. Mental analysis diverts you off track and into the mind, which wont be useful in acknowledging the emotional pain. Remember, our intention here is to acknowledge and feel the FEELING. Just be with the feeling itself and give up fixing yourself. In order to do this, you need to be willing to BE with yourself, to turn your attention inward. This is about being with yourself and loving and accepting yourself, AS YOU ARE. As you go about your daily life, notice what triggers you emotionally. When you notice you feel off, trace it back. Look back in your memory for the moment you first started feeling off. Perhaps there was an event or something someone else said or did that caused an uncomfortable response within you. That event is mirroring a wound in your energy field. Once you pinpoint the event then ask the questions above to get at what youre feeling. Notice the tendency to resist what youre feeling and / or to make someone else responsible for it. If you notice yourself doing this, first of all forgive yourself. Most of our conditioning tells us to resist and blame, and it takes practice to become aware of that tendency and decline to follow it. Once we are able to forgive ourselves, it is much easier to forgive someone else. It also helps to realize that other people in our lives are just mirroring whatever we have in our own energy fields.No need to get hung up on the past.No matter what arises, allow and encourage it to come forth. As best you can, stay with the

feelings and not the story of what happened in the past. The story will divert you into the mind and remember, your access to the core wound is via the FEELINGS. Just gently bring your attention back to the above questions. More ways to become aware of pain: Make a list of experiences you feel shame about and ask the questions above. Use your words to bring the memories up from the subconscious: What events in my life do I feel shame about? Look through family picture albums and notice what you feel. Pretend you are about to die Who do you have unfinished business with? What do you feel when you think of this person? Your Rewards Once youve consciously acknowledged your pain and suffering you have taken a big step toward healing it. Remember to keep your channel to Source open as you experiment with the suggestions above. The unconditional love and the wound coming together, simultaneously occupying the same space at the same time, is what creates the alchemy of healing. Ive seen some amazing miracles happen from this simple process! Keep calling in Love to this place inside you and gently talk to this part of yourself. Let yourself know you SEE you. Let yourself know that you see that you never did anything wrong and that you know that you always did the best you could with what you had to work with at the time. Bring patience, sensitivity and kindness to this part of yourself. You will release your emotional pain and develop a sweet intimacy with yourself as well as with your Higher Power the Source of all healing!

HOW TO OVERCOME FEAR One of the biggest questions Ive had in this lifetime is how to overcome fear. Also, in working with people in WellBeing Alignment Sessions this subject comes up again and again. Recently, during a week of absolute terror, Life gave me an up-close and personal "tutorial" in what causes fear and what our deepest fear comes from. Most Fear Is Not Caused By Outer Circumstances One of the things that challenges us as we begin to learn how to overcome fear, is the fact that we are conditioned to think that we are victims of circumstances. We must realize that this is simply not true. The only real outer cause for fear that we experience is when the body produces a cellular fear, like when you hear a loud noise, are in danger of falling, or a locomotive is rushing its way toward you.

Our Deepest Fear Is Caused By The Thoughts We Think If we are facing fear and it isnt the cellular fear described above, we are holding a judgment, opinion or a label about someone else, ourselves, or a situation. We are holding a fixed thought in mind about a subject that we accept as reality and then react to. And this we can change! Stay with me here and well talk about how to do that. When We Hold Onto Opinions Or Judgments We Edge God Out When we have a judgmental thought and believe it, we become the god of our universe. We are right and decide the truth of how things are or should be. Consequently, weve edged God / Source out of the picture. "Ego" is an acronym for edging God out. In effect, we have seemingly separated ourselves from God. It is actually impossible to separate from God, but ego has been convincing us to believe we are a separate ego for eons. What is the natural result of edging God out? Fear. Terror. Suspicion. Resentment. Vengeance. The ego thinks it has messed with God, big time, and is terrified its going to be punished. Then it mobilizes its defenses and prepares to defend itself against attack, which is only happening within the illusion of ego mind. The result is that we are flooded with emotional and physical negativity. Until we decide to learn how to overcome fear, we usually dont connect the cause (our judgments and opinions) with the effects (fear and negative emotions) in our conscious mind; it is all happening beneath our conscious awareness. As Long As We Think We Are A Body, We Suffer In the process of learning how to overcome fear, if we believe that our reality is that we are a separate body, interacting with other separate bodies, and that this dream we all seem to be living in is our one true reality, we will still be facing fear and the whole gamut of negative emotions. This is because weve chosen to live our lives as a separate ego, edging God out.Ego is just an illusion that believes it is real, but separate from God, and is therefore miserable! Consequently, when the ego continues to run unchecked by our conscious awareness, it fosters negative energies that range anywhere from suspicious to vicious. To Learn How To Overcome Fear, Switch Allegiance From The Problem To The Solution Not only fear, but any negative emotion, is caused by holding judgments, opinions, grievances, resentments, expectations and the like. The uncomfortable emotion we feel is a signal to us that our thinking is out of alignment with Source and wellbeing. It is actually helping us to learn how to overcome fear. If we continue to stay out of alignment, the emotional distress trickles down into our physical body and eventually becomes physical dis-ease and suffering. All thought produces form, either as outer circumstances or as physical ailments. As were learning how to overcome fear, at those times when negative emotions come up so strongly and so uncontrollably, we need to be willing to stop the train of thought. Yes, decide to just stop it. At

the first thought, before the thought train builds, You can declare to yourself: Stop! Im not interested in my opinions, judgments and labels anymore. Im much more interested in peace and harmony. We need to decide that our peace is more important to us than being right. We need to turn our attention back to love and remember that we are with God / Source, right now, in this very moment, and have never been separate from God. We are a thought within our Source and therefore we live IN Source, now and forever. Source Cant Remove Fear From Us Until We Release The Cause When we choose to live life from ego, edging God out, we are locked into its thought system of separation and pain. Since there is a cause and effect relationship (judgments being the cause and fear being the effect), unless we release our judgments, and thereby leave the world of ego and enter consciously into our true Reality with Source, we just keep creating more fear whether we realize it or not. So even though we may be praying to God to show us how to overcome fear, if were holding onto any kind of a judgment, label or negative opinion about a situation, we keep ourselves locked in fear. Most Of Our Judgments And Resistance Are In Our Subconscious Mind As we learn how to overcome fear, on the surface we may be aware of feeling off or at odds with ourselves or the world, but without a clear sense of why that is. This is because most of the beliefs and thoughts that seem to separate us from love and Source exist within our subconscious mind. It is the subconscious mind that projects all of its un-healed energies out into the dream of the world, which creates the circumstances of our lives. As Gary Renard (A Course In Miracles Teacher) said in a recent talk: The whole universe isnt being done TO you, its being done BY you. If The Cause Of Most Fear Is Unconscious, How Can We Heal It? During my week of terror, I was highly motivated to learn how to overcome fear and get back into alignment with Source and wellbeing. I focused my attention on searching out opinions, judgments, expectations, and labels about myself, others and circumstances. And wow, was I ever amazed at how much there was! I had such a habit of letting negative thoughts creep in and take root, that I realized I needed to make a daily commitment to peace. And then I discovered that that wasnt enough. I need to commit to releasing negative thoughts all day long, literally hundreds of times. Learning how to overcome fear is an ongoing process. And, it works! I began to feel relief the first day I got serious about coming back into alignment with Source and wellbeing. Not only that, the first day I devoted myself to taking responsibility for my thoughts and letting go of judgment, the outer circumstances that I THOUGHT were creating my terror changed. Form always follows thought. Peaceful thoughts bring peaceful circumstances.

As I continue to do this practice, Im experiencing a greater expansion of light than I ever have before. Now, when fear arises, I search to see what judgment or opinion Im hanging onto and I stop edging God out and release the judgment. The fear is released right along with it. I highly recommend this practice! Daily Commitment Is Essential For Overcoming Fear And Negative Emotions To learn how to overcome fear, every day we can make a commitment to At any moment, you have a choice, that either leads you closer to your spirit or further away from it. Thich Nhat Hanh be a loving, compassionate Presence. Even if we dont know how to do this, we can commit to it, which opens up a channel to the Divine Mind we share with God and each other, enabling us to access the infinite light and love that is here. be willing to take responsibility for all of our thoughts. The key here is willingness. After lifetimes of unconscious habits of negative thinking, we wont do this perfectly, especially at first. But our willingness aligns our energy with the Divine and IT does the healing for us. When we experience the resulting love and light, our willingness to continue taking responsibility for our thoughts automatically increases. release all our judgments, opinions, resentments, grievances, expectations, and labels, and offer them to Spirit for healing. Let them go. Choose peace for yourself and everyone else. Remember, we all share the same mind. If Im indulging a negative thought storm, it will affect ALL of us. say Stop! Im not interested in my opinions any more. Im much more interested in peace, at the first sight of a thought whose goal is separation rather than peace and unity. This way we can catch it before the negative thoughts multiply and drench us with negativity. take a few moments each hour of the day to look inside for a negative judgment or opinion about someone or something and offer it up to Spirit for healing. be compassionate with ourselves and each other when we fail to do these things. We can just keep coming back to our willingness and let Source do the rest. Every moment is a new opportunity! Willingness Is Really All It Takes When weve edged God out and ego has set up shop as the authority in our lives, anything that busts open the illusion of ego and brings the truth and light in can be met with a lot of resistance from ego. As we're learning to overcome fear, there really are only two choices that we have in every moment. We can choose fear, which is the realm of the ego, or we can choose love, which is our true Reality with Source.

Deciding what we really want fear or love is the first step in dealing with our egoic resistance. Then once weve chosen, we need to keep reaffirming our willingness to end suffering once and for all. We need to devote ourselves to peace to develop a new habit of becoming aware of our thoughts and aligning them with Source. When we are willing to change our thinking, the infinite power of Source joins us with Its love and strength, and corrects our thinking for us, bringing us closer to our Reality, our True Home in love and light. We All Share Mind There is another really cool thing about learning how to overcome fear and negative emotion. As each of us is willing to choose love and let go of our resentments, judgments, expectations and opinions, thereby allowing Source to heal our unconscious stuff, the easier and faster it is for EVERYONE to do it! Here is the reason. From the perspective of this dream life, we operate with a split mind God Mind and ego mind, although ego mind is actually an illusion. God Mind is our Reality, where we are joined with God and each other in love, peace and harmony. This is our true Reality which has always been and will always be. We have never been separate from Source. And, interestingly, even in the illusory ego mind, we are still joined in one mind. There is actually only one ego, which appears to be split off into many separate egos that appear to live in many separate bodies.Consequently, we all share the same stuff in the illusion of ego mind and we all share the same love, compassion, harmony and unity within God Mind. The more we all focus on our shared God Mind, the easier it is for EVERYONE to focus there. One in-light-ened thought uplifts our whole shared mind.As more and more light-filled thoughts fill our shared mind, a tipping point occurs. At that point the light increases exponentially and we ALL are uplifted into a higher state of light and love. So any love-filled thought that you focus on makes it easier and faster for ALL of us to learn how to overcome fear and find our way back to the realization that were living within Source, and have never left Source. Weve only dreamed (nightmared!) that we did.

Put Your Future In Sources Hands

Ill finish here with one more way to learn how to overcome fear. At the beginning of every day and all through the day you can affirm I place this day and my future in the hands of God / Source. If you focus sincerely on this thought for a few minutes, you will immediately feel a burden being lifted for you. Then, while God is taking care of the future (and believe me Hell do a much better job than ego!), He also heals the past and present, because they all exist simultaneously.

Together we can learn how to overcome fear, and together we can heal ALL of us and go Home!

Personal Accountability Reclaiming Our Judgments, Projections And Ourselves

Personal accountability for what we are feeling unlocks the door to our healing and wellbeing. This practice is so very important because it opens the door to our pent-up trauma and wounding. Until we do this, our suffering cannot be directly accessed, released and healed. What Is Projection? Before we get into personal accountability and talk about what projection is, lets define what personal boundaries are. I like Paul Ferrinis definition best: Everything I think, feel, say or do belongs to me. I am responsible for all of it. (The Power of Love, page 46, by Paul Ferrini) Now, with this understanding of personal boundaries, basically projection is this: If I am feeling negative (or positive) emotion and try to blame you for what Im feeling, thinking, saying or doing, then I am projecting my stuff onto you. Generally, when we don't accept personal accountability for our feelings we judge others for doing things that we were shamed for doing in our childhood. We project our feelings of shame onto the other person and try to identify THEM as bad or wrong in a futile attempt to shield ourselves from our own shame and pain.

Sometimes We Project Our Good Feelings Too Another way we commonly project is to mistakenly believe that another person is the source of love and wellbeing for us, not taking personal accountability for our own connection with the Source of wellbeing. This happens quite frequently in the honeymoon phase of a romantic relationship. We meet someone who sees us and they shine their attention on us and it feels great! We feel special and desirable. This can produce a high like no other drug on earth. However, what goes up eventually comes down. Another person cant keep that kind of attention going for us 24/7 and then we feel withdrawal from the drug when they withdraw it.

The only way we can receive ongoing, deep and true love is to take personal accountability for our own connection to Source, our root of happiness. And the only place we can connect with Source is within our own being. Once we do that we feel and see It reflected everywhere and in everyone, whether someone else is directing attention toward us or not.

How We Hurt Ourselves When We Give Up Personal Accountability For Our Feelings If I don't accept personal accountability for my own feelings and project them onto you, I deny myself access to a precious opportunity for healing my shame that is covered up by the projection. (More about this below.) You may have TRIGGERED an emotional response from me, but I am responsible for owning and healing the place in me that was triggered by what you said or did. So, personal accountability sounds pretty clear and straightforward, right? It is, until we are triggered. Then, when our hurts and wounds are running the show it is really easy to lose sight of this and blame another person for what we feel. When we decline personal accountability and project we not only miss an opportunity for our own healing, but we wreak all kinds of havoc with our relationships. Understanding how you project can be very helpful, if you have the courage to look at it. But all forms of projection can be boiled down to one simple message: Its not about me. Its about you. Thats the content. I am refusing to look at my stuff and trying to hand it to you. Paul Ferrini, from The Laws of Love, pg 37 How Do We Project? We give up personal accountability and play the blame game of projection in very creative ways, by: Attacking the other person. When our wounds are triggered, WE feel attacked and it can feel like attacking back is justified. Pretending to not be angry and trying to convince the other person that THEY are the one who is angry. Admitting to the other person we are angry but blaming them as the CAUSE of our anger. Trying to fix or change the other person so that we wont have to feel the pain of our own wound. Shaming the other person so we dont have to feel our own shame that was originally projected onto us. Withdrawing from the other person while blaming them for our upset. Depending on another person for our own wellbeing and attributing our experience of love to them.

Sound familiar? Dont feel bad if it does! We all unconsciously give up personal accountability and practice various forms of projection at one time or another. The only way to stop doing it is to bring awareness and love to our inner wounds.

Why Do We Project?

It is what most of us have been trained to do. Generally, it was what was modeled for us as acceptable behavior when we were children.

At the core of all projection is an intense fear that we are unconsciously or consciously trying to avoid. As children, many of us were ridiculed, ostracized, shamed or sometimes punished for whatever our caregivers labeled as wrong. Therefore, instinctively we think we are wrong or bad when negative feelings arise. And because there is a conscious or unconscious fear of being punished, this part of our psyche gives up personal accountability and says, No way Im going to admit to having a problem over here. Quick Lets blame it on the other guy! Projection is a mechanism of denial. When we focus outwardly on the other person, it is a (usually unconscious) attempt to keep us from feeling the intensity of our own wounds. Healing Can Only Happen When We Take Individual Responsibility For Our Feelings

If we decline to follow the ingrained blame game habit to fix, judge, blame or attack someone else and consciously take personal accountability for what we're experiencing, it brings our energy back to ourselves, where we most need it. This is very important to us for a number of reasons.

Not taking individual responsibility for our feelings and denying them by projecting them out onto others:

Leaks out our Life Force, projecting it outward in blame, fixing, etc. That is a sure-fire way to disempower ourselves. Until we are in personal accountability for what we are feeling, we are truly powerless. When we try to make someone else responsible for our feelings, we abdicate our own

power. We make THEM responsible but we cant CHANGE them! This is a no-win set-up for emotional pain and keeps us in the victim role. Keeps us recreating the same painful scenario over and over again. Until we accept personal accountability, the unresolved feelings stay in our energy field and gather even MORE energy each time we go through yet another playing out of the same old dance. Each time more emotional angst is added to it. Then by the Law of Attraction, we continue to create more of the same kinds of experiences. We keep a lid on a part of ourselves that is literally screaming for our attention, love and healing. It is only when we take personal accountability for what we are feeling that our wounds are unveiled and become consciously accessible to us. When we distract ourselves and focus outward on the other person we throw a layer of denial over our wounds, giving up our access to them. What we most need to do when we are triggered in this way is to acknowledge and OPEN to the wound the part of us that is desperate for our own attention, acceptance and love. You are always living a reflection of whatever you are outputting. And so, if you get into a little pocket where a lot of people are being rude, it's probably because you are being rude or because you have been aware of people being rude. Nothing ever happens to you that is not part of your vibration!

Abraham - Hicks, excerpted from a workshop in Chicago, IL, April 25th, 1999

What Happens When We Accept Personal Accountability And Decline To Project

When we are emotionally triggered and we take personal accountability and stay with the feelings rather than projecting them out, we immediately feel emotional heat, burning, and discomfort. The more intense the knee jerk reaction is to attack or change the other person, the more intense is the pain around the emotional wound weve learned to deny. Likewise, the more intense the burning feeling will be.

As you practice personal accountability for what you are experiencing, you may feel a tremendous force trying to pull you into the old conditioning. But when our desire to heal is strong, it motivates us to start experimenting with ways to heal the pain. When we dont project this pain outwardly, a window into the pain opens and we feel it in a way we havent felt since the original wounding. It is the undenied, unveiled energy itself. This is an awesome place we now stand in. From here, we now have the POWER to heal and release this energy.

If we call in love from Source / God (whatever name you know it by) and stay with this part of ourselves in the same tender way that we would be with a small child who is hurting, the pain will unwind and release on its own. This is absolutely magical! More about this in the steps below.

Want Self-Empowerment? Unwind the Illusion of Victimhood

Because of things that happened to us as children, many of us carry the unconscious (or semi-conscious) belief that we are victims of life, people and circumstances. Along with this is the belief (again, usually unconscious or semi-conscious) that we deserved to be treated poorly and still do because we are bad, flawed and unlovable. We may have a subconscious belief that things will never get better because WE will never get better.

It is very helpful to remember this fact:

All our thoughts of unworthiness come from the fact that we believed a story about ourselves that simply was not true. In doing this emotional healing work, I encourage you to look back at your childhood and see that somewhere you made a CHOICE to take on the belief that you were unlovable. You may not have a memory of the actual moment this occurred but you can still look back and realize you perceived yourself in an unkind way because of what was INSTILLED in you, not because of who you actually are.

For example, like many of us, as a child I received negative feedback and shaming from extremely wounded parents. They projected their feelings of worthlessness onto me. Like all small children, I wasnt mature enough to see the truth that their perceptions of me had nothing to do with the truth. I wasnt stupid, ugly, clutzy or unimportant. They felt that way about THEMSELVES! They had never been

exposed to this type of work that you and I are doing right now. Accepting personal accountability wasn't a concept they were even aware of. They unconsciously projected their own shame onto me and my brothers.

Dont try to love other people before you learn to love yourself. You wont be able to do it. When someone comes into your life who pushes all your buttons, dont try to love that person. Just dont blame him or make him an enemy. Simply acknowledge that he pushes your buttons and ask for time to be with your feelings.

Paul Ferrini, Love Without Conditions, page 56

Really check this out in your own life. The point is true for all of us. It is an important realization that is pivotal in climbing out of victimhood and reclaiming your dignity and power as a worthy, equal human being. Here it is again Realizing You Have Choice Awakens Your Place of Power

In practicing personal accountability and feeling my feelings, I've realized that as a child I made a CHOICE to interpret the way that I was treated to mean that I was being punished because I was bad, ugly, stupid and unlovable. It was the best my infant mind could do with the facts at hand. Had I been an adult when those things happened I would have had the maturity and discernment to see that my caregivers were speaking and acting out of their own wounds and their response to me had nothing to do with me. I made the best choice of interpretation I had at the time with the limited amount of maturity I had at the time.

This is true for all of us. As children we were psychic sponges, soaking up everything around us as reality. We didnt know anything different of the world other than what the people around us taught us, either directly or indirectly. We formed beliefs about ourselves based on the ways our caregivers responded to us, no matter how dysfunctional they were.

The important thing is to see that CHOICE is the place of power. I chose to see it that way then. I can NOW choose to see the truth and unwind the story of being an unlovable victim. Now YOU have the power to see it differently. This is where you take back your power by taking personal accountability for any feelings that get triggered for you now and then taking responsibility for your choice of accepting

the negative feedback you may have received as a child, which created your present-day reactions. This releases you from the trap of victimhood.

You were perfectly lovable just as you were then. You are totally lovable just as you are now. Your past programming was about those around you, not you. But how you feel about yourself NOW is your responsibility. THAT you can change and heal. When we step into personal accountability for our own feelings and beliefs, the traumatic energy begins to unwrap itself and release.

As we accept personal accountability for our feelings, at some point we all come to a place where we love ourselves enough to see the truth of this. Once you get this and see you are not a victim, you still have to care about yourself enough to do the work it takes to keep reminding yourself of this truth and to keep affirming the reality of your equality with all other human beings. Personal accountability takes courage, practice and patience, but you WILL unwind the psychological pain. The self-reminding of our loveliness is needed because sometimes it takes awhile to release the years of negative conditioning.

I highly recommend getting support for practicing personal accountability for your healing, whether it is in a 12 Step Group or through your church, with a supportive friend, a therapist, pastor, etc. It is important to have others around you who can reflect and affirm your own beauty back to you without judging you.

Personal Boundaries And Processing

Remember the previous description of personal boundaries: I am responsible for my thoughts, feelings, words, and actions, and you are responsible for your thoughts, feelings, words, and actions.

When were triggered by an experience with another person, our healing and wellbeing doesnt lie in processing with the other person about their behavior and our reaction to it. Whatever were feeling is our individual responsibility. We must accept personal accountability for all of it. This is a powerful truth to let in and work with one that stretches me and teaches me on a daily basis. This could quite possibly be a lifelong learning for us all.

When your emotional pain is triggered by someone else, what would be most valuable to you is to FIRST be with yourself, make space within for what you are feeling and start the emotional healing process for personal accountability outlined below. In order to do that we must decline to play the blame game with the other person. Their personal work is their responsibility and our personal work is ours.

Once weve committed to personal accountability and gotten in touch with our fear and etc. (see below) that caused our trigger, THEN we can talk with the other person with a better chance of being in our power and taking care of ourselves, as well as not projecting and blaming them. This keeps us from forming another energetic layer of hurt within our own psyche or within the combined energy field of the relationship.

All Relationships Are Mirrors

As we practice personal accountability for our own feelings and healing, we discover that we love others exactly the way we love ourselves. If Im judging, blaming and attacking you, it is because Im judging, blaming and attacking myself. If Im struggling to love you, then Im having a hard time loving the part of me that you reflect to me.

Furthermore, if Im judging and blaming myself, Im also doing that to God / Source. No matter who it looks like were relating with an other person, ourselves, or Source all of it is Us being reflected back to Us, mirroring to us how we feel about and treat ourselves. The purpose of relationships is to show us where we need to heal and bring love to ourselves. Basically, we all live in a world of mirrors!

Watching The Blame Game In Action

The following is a demonstration of projection in action. The more aware of it we are, the closer we are to personal accountability for our own emotional healing.

Lets say that Barbara tends to be compulsively early for her appointments. She has a dinner date with Fred, who is compulsively late. Im sure you can see where this is going already! :-)

The date was set for 7:30 pm. Barbara arrives at 7:15 and settles herself in at the restaurant. As the time creeps along to 7:30, then 7:45, then 8 pm (Where IS he?) she is agitated (and hungry!).

By the time Fred finally arrives at 8:20, Barbara has a tangle of judgments about him writhing inside her. When it was 7:45 she had planned to stuff her irritation/anger and put a smile on her face when he arrived. After all, she LIKES Fred and was looking forward to getting to know him more.

But by the time Fred arrives at 8:20, her core wound of not being important is too deeply triggered to suppress it anymore. She is no longer a 35-year-old adult. She is a 4-year-old girl who was ignored by her parents and never fully seen or appreciated.

As soon as Fred sits down and tries to explain why he is late, Barbara lashes out at him, telling him he is inconsiderate and disorganized. Her hurt has been quickly (and unconsciously) covered up with anger and self-defensiveness, because she sincerely feels that Fred did something to her.

At this point Barbara is too agitated to be able to listen to Freds explanation or accept personal accountability for her own feelings. She grabs her purse and storms out of the restaurant. Now, on top of the massive amount of not good enough hurt she was already carrying in her core wound, she is adding another layer of self-judgment that we naturally feel when we've not taken personal accountability for our own experience.

She is confused by the intensity of her own response. She vacillates between judging Fred and judging herself. Neither one feels good but she doesnt know how to stop her thoughts spinning in negative directions. She doesnt know what to do or where to turn. She feels powerless, vulnerable and small.

If you do not conquer self, you will be conquered by self.

Napoleon Hill

What We Need To Do To Heal

In this example, what is needed is for Barbara to bring awareness to the act of projection and to take individual responsibility for the shame and powerlessness she is feeling. Then the next step is to bring love to her inner hurt that was masked by projecting it onto Fred. She also needs to bring love to herself, and to understand, accept and bring compassion to her wounded aspect that reacted in the situation with Fred. She needs to see and accept that with a hurt that big inside, it was bound to come out in whatever way it could.

As Barbara accepts personal accountability for her own feelings, unconditional love will unwind the wound. As she stays with the process described below, she will see that she was NOT a victim in this situation. That realization will bring her back into her personal power. She will see that she had choices. For instance, she could have left the restaurant at any point along the way in order to honor and take care of herself. Once she goes through the personal accountability process below shell be able to call Fred, be honest with him and apologize to him for attacking him. Shell be able to do this without making either herself or Fred bad or wrong.

Unwinding The Blame Game By Personal Accountability For Our Emotional Healing

The following information is based on my experience and realizations from studying Paul Ferrinis personal accountability guidelines, particularly the books The Power of Love, chapters 2 and 3, and Love Without Conditions.

Well continue using the scenario with Barbara and Fred as an example.

Step 1. When you notice youre feeling off, identify your judgments of the other person.

Be present as the watcher of your mind of your thoughts and emotions as well as your reactions in various situations. Be at least as interested in your reactions as in the situation or person that causes you to react. Notice also how often your attention is in the past or future. Don't judge or analyze what you observe. Watch the thought, feel the emotion, observe the reaction. Don't make a personal problem out of them. You will then feel something more powerful than any of those things that you observe: the still, observing presence itself behind the content of your mind, the silent watcher.

Eckhart Tolle, from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

Ask yourself How am I judging Fred? As you begin this personal accountability process, dont censor yourself by trying to be nice. Be honest with how you see this person, even if you know it is an exaggeration. Give permission for all of it to come out, without stifling yourself

Wow, he is really inconsiderate! He hasnt even called to tell me why he is late. He must be so disorganized if he cant make it to an appointment on time. What a jerk! Step 2. Forgive yourself for

having the judgment.

We ALL have judgments about each other, either positive or negative. I dont know if it is humanly possible to make them go away entirely since all judgments about other people are judgments about ourselves in areas where we were shamed as children. In our humanness, we are all works in progress. We need to practice forgiving ourselves as well as each other, which ends up being the same thing.

In learning personal accountability, our goal at this point is not to remove judgments. We wont be able to until we do the healing work inside ourselves that they cover up. Out goal is just to bring awareness to our judgments and projections. That in itself begins the healing process.

When you see that you have a judgment, dont make yourself wrong for having them. If youre breathing, you have judgments. Bring love to this hurt part of you that is doing the judging. Step 3. Realize that ALL judgments are inaccurate and subjective.

If 5 other people went through the same exact experience as Barbara in the example above, they would have all had a different experience. One person might not have been annoyed at all and would have kept themselves occupied talking with the waiters and not even noticed the time. Another would have judged him in a positive light as a busy man and would praise him for going with the flow. The other three would have their own unique perspective of their experience, depending on their own particular wounding and conscious or unconscious expectations. None of these would be the truth. They are simply viewpoints or perspectives.

We tend to see what we want to see, which is usually what we are ready to see, based on our own wounding and what we carry in our energy field that colors the lens we see things through.

Step 4. Take responsibility for the judgment by realizing it is about yourself,

not the other person. In other words, take the other person off the hook.

You might be saying

What do you mean? Barbara showed up on time. She was organized and considerate of Freds time. How could Barbaras judgment about Fred being unorganized and inconsiderate be about her when she is clearly just the opposite? Okay, heres where it gets really interesting. Sincerely wanting to heal this hurt part of herself and take personal accountability for her feelings, Barbara asks inside:

What dont I like about Fred? What is upsetting me about him? Who from my childhood does he remind me of? How do I judge myself in the way that Im judging him? Does he remind me of a part of myself I dont accept or like? Have I ever been shamed for doing something like he just did? Slowly and gently, Barbara asks these questions inside. An answer begins to come in images and feelings. She feels a tense, tight place in her chest.

She sees herself as a little girl in school, desperate to get all her schoolwork finished. No, not just finished. Finished to PERFECTION. And why? Because the only place she received positive, sincere feedback about herself in her young life was from a few teachers she had along the way. Those gifts of love and attention they gave her created a willingness to do ANYTHING to earn more of that kind of loving attention. They were oases of love within an otherwise painful and scary life.

Barbara sees how she got into the habit of trying to do everything perfectly in the hopes that her family would somehow notice and that she could earn their love too.

As a child Barbara was also terrified of getting hit if she didnt do things right. Sometimes when she was at home a hand would seem to come out of nowhere and she would get slapped.

Young Barbara kept trying harder in the hopes that she could one day be perfect enough to earn love, even though the abuse still continued when she was doing everything she could to do things right. She began to judge herself whenever something wasnt done perfectly and then shed scramble to fix it so that it was.

As adult Barbara takes personal accountability for her feelings and goes inside herself by asking questions, she finds a tense and terrified little girl who is desperate to do everything perfectly because she is starving for the love and positive affirmation she didnt get as a child.

As she opens her awareness to this shamed and wounded aspect of herself, Barbara feels the tense place in her heart begin to ease up. She feels a warm flow of love for this little girl who has lived inside her with her pain for so long.

If you find yourself condemning your brother, you can be sure it is not him you condemn. It is some shamed part of yourself you have not acknowledged. Perceiving inadequacy in your brother cannot make you feel better, for it merely aggravates your own sense of unworthiness.

Paul Ferrini, from Love Without Conditions, pg 28

Barbara becomes aware that not only does she judge herself for not being perfect, she also judges other people whose actions dont fit her picture of perfect behavior, like Fred. Continuing to take personal accountability, she also realizes that whenever she feels not considered she feels disrespected and not important. As she keeps her awareness focused inward, she once again feels a tightness in her chest, this time on the right side of her heart. A whole kaleidoscope of images and feelings arise painful snapshots of experiences with her family where she felt unimportant, not heard or truly seen, disrespected, and unacceptable as she was.

Since Barbara carried this energy of feeling unimportant within her energy field, she attracted situations that reflected that dynamic, like the restaurant scene with Fred. By the Law of Attraction, it couldnt be any other way.

Barbara also sees that sometimes she treats other people as unimportant unless they are making HER feel important in some way. Whew! Hard to look at, but there it is. Then, because Barbara judges this as imperfect behavior, she judges herself for treating others as unimportant.

See how this works? Barbaras experience with Fred was extremely painful for her because it triggered several layers of her own pain that existed long before Fred ever came into the picture.

Like I said before, we are all actually living in a world of mirrors! It is a very powerful process to bring awareness to this and begin taking responsibility for healing our part in it. Sometimes this process can be really uncomfortable, to say the least! However, it is nowhere near as painful as continuing the old habits and layering more hurt and shame within ourselves as well as attracting and perpetuating painful relationships. Finally facing the pain of the wound is the only way to heal the blame game.

Step 5. Realize that your judgment about yourself isnt true either, just as it wasnt true about the other person.

To repeat, negative perceptions and beliefs about ourselves as young children were born from the energy of our primary caregivers unhealed wounds that were projected onto us. For a lot of us, much of the feedback we received about ourselves was negative, shaming and simply not true. Even if you feel you had a great childhood and dont remember any trauma, chances are you still took on some negative ideas about yourself from childhood.

And remember, at the time we were too young to discriminate between what was true and what wasnt and so we BELIEVED this negative self-image was real! The truth was / is: We were never bad or wrong.

Step 6. Feel the core fear behind the self-judgment.

As we practice personal accountability we discover that projection is a mechanism of denial. It keeps us focusing outward in an unconscious attempt to avoid feeling the intensity of our own inner shame and wounding. To own our projections and heal the wounds beneath them, we have to be willing to acknowledge and be with our fear.

All judgment reveals itself to be self-judgment in the end, and when this is understood a larger comprehension of the nature of life takes its place.

David R. Hawkins

Although were usually conditioned to think of fear as a thing that we must find a way to get rid of, actually it isnt a thing at all. It is the ABSENCE of something. Fear is the absence of love. Fear is a flag being raised inside to tell us, Hey! We need to bring some love over here, and right NOW! In order to bring love to our fear, we need to first uncover it and allow it to be here fully.

After doing the previous steps for personal accountability, we now know the specific ways we are judging the other person. Now we can turn that around and use it as a tool to help us get in touch with our core wound.

To find the fear beneath the projection, here are some questions you can ask inside:

What if Im not perfect? What if I make mistakes? How does that make me feel? Why am I angry?

Why am I feeling the need to defend myself? What am I afraid of? What is the original source of this fear? In this situation, what do I feel guilty or shameful about? As Barbara practices personal accountability and asks the questions above, once again she feels a tightness in her chest and a panic so intense that she feels she is about to die. When she asks What am I afraid of? She FEELS the terror of being hit and then left alone if she makes a mistake. Then looking even deeper, she feels that if she doesnt find a way to be perfect she will be unlovable because shell be bad at the core. This keeps her frantically trying to constantly do everything right.

She also fears she doesnt really know how to truly love other people, which, she fears will also insure that no one will love her.

Okay, now were at the core of the wound. We are now at the place of the vulnerable, tender, unveiled truth. We are at the heart of the wounded being inside. This hurt and terrified little being is the one who is at the root of what has been going on, which means we are now at the place of empowerment and healing. At this level we are no longer dealing with the symptoms or effects of the issue. Instead, we are present at the level of CAUSE. Now we are ready to bring love to this part of ourselves. See Step 7 below.

When we stop being afraid of our fear, when we turn into it and not away from it, we begin to get comfortable with it. As we get more comfortable with it, we accept and love ourselves more. Fear then loses its power over us. We begin to see that we can still function well in our lives, even with fear as an occasional companion. Step 7. Bring love, compassion, understanding and forgiveness to the fear / hurt child within yourself.

In my own personal work and as I work with people doing Wellbeing Alignment Sessions, I often see this aspect as a young, overwhelmed, hurt, shocked, bewildered and terrorized child who feels alone, abandoned, unimportant, unloved and has given up hope of ever being truly seen and loved. I think we

all have some version of this little being inside us. This is the core wound. Sometimes the fear around this wound is very intense.

Remember, fear is the absence of love. What do all children need to learn about themselves in order to be equipped for a healthy, happy life? They need to know that they are important, valuable, perfect and powerful. They need to know they are loved exactly as they are.

No matter how old you are, its not too late to take personal accountability and give this love to yourself now. The young you still lives inside you. This young being needs to hear from YOU that s/he is loved, and for many of us, s/he needs to hear it often, daily. Because many of us didnt receive loving feedback about ourselves as children, we have felt dis-empowered, hurt, and angry, usually without even knowing why. Its time to bring love and forgiveness to this wounded child within you. Its time to tell her/him the truth.

I see you as you are. I love you as you are. You are not bad. Youve done nothing wrong. Im here with you. You can be as you are. You are beautiful as you are. Exactly as you are. Ill just be here with you and love you. It is safe to feel everything that youre feeling. I see you and I understand now. All of your feelings are here for a reason. Youre not wrong in having them. Youve been hurt. I see that and Im here to love you. Ill just stay here with you and love you. Sometimes clients tell me they fear this will feed the ego and many of us have had spiritual programming that makes us wary of that. My experience of the ego is that it is just the part of us that feels unloved and separate. By taking personal accountability and finally going to this abandoned part of yourself and bringing love to it, you create a unity/harmony in the psyche. It allows our spiritual and human aspects to work together in a beautiful, flowing dance.

This step produces a magical healing alchemy when the wound and love are brought together at the same time and the wound releases. All we must do is to look at this part of ourselves through the eyes of compassion. We begin to see this little one inside of us and respond the way we would naturally respond if we saw any child in pain wed bring love to him/her.

Not only must we bring our personal love to this wound, we must also align ourselves with and call in the healing Love in the Universe, God, Source, or whatever name you know it by. Even if you dont feel a conscious connection with this Source of Love, it is still here. You can use the word Love.

I call in all of Gods Love. I ask for Love to heal this hurt place inside. I open to receive the Highest Love and Light right here in this place. This love is already here for us, but calling it in opens up our awareness of it. In this way we bring the truth (that we are not alone and that we are deeply loved in every cell of our being) to the untruth (that we are bad, separate from love and unlovable.) It is only love that can heal our wounds. Calling it in and aligning ourselves with it brings about the change in perspective that is required for full and permanent healing.

Dear Source, I am wiling to see this differently, from your eyes. Please direct my thinking and attention to what you want me to see, learn, release and heal. I ask for your strength to bring love and forgiveness to all aspects of this situation, to myself, and to all people involved.

Having accepted personal accountability for her feelings, now Barbara is aware of this hurt little being inside her. Now she can gently talk to her and tell her the truth:

I see you. Now I understand that youve been in pain. I love you.

I love you exactly as you are. You dont have to do anything to earn that. Love is already yours. Source loves you exactly as you are. Youve never been bad or broken. You are perfect and beautiful as you are. Step 8. Thank the other person (either face-to-face or silently within) for bringing your wound to your attention so that you can heal it. Be willing to forgive them.

Tell everyone you know: My happiness depends on me, so youre off the hook. And then demonstrate it. Be happy, no matter what theyre doing. Practice feeling good, no matter what. And before you know it, you will not give anyone else responsibility for the way you feel and then, youll love them all. Because the only reason you dont love them, is because youre using them as your excuse to not feel good.

Abraham - Hicks, excerpted from a workshop in Asheville, NC, April 30th, 2005

To fully accept personal accountability for your healing, this step helps clean up the energy between you and the other person, so that neither of you are stuck in a polarity. It begins the forgiveness process. The best teaching I know for that is A Course In Miracles. I also recommend this easy, yet powerful Forgiveness Meditation. This webpage on how to forgive might be helpful also. Be Patient With Yourself!

Remember that by practicing personal accountability for what youre feeling and bowing out of the blame game, youre undoing a lifetime of conditioning, maybe several lifetimes. Youll make mistakes. We all do. I see accepting personal accountability for our feelings and our healing as a lifelong learning. When you get pulled in by your triggers or your judgments, forgive yourself. Make amends to the other person as needed. Call in the love and support from Source and align yourself with it. At first, just

becoming AWARE of when you are blaming or projecting is a HUGE step. Eventually youll catch it sooner and be able to bring love and emotional healing to yourself right away. If not, forgive yourself again

The Gifts Of This Practice

As we practice personal accountability and commit to ending the blame game, we begin to

experience ourselves and other people as equals become aware of and release childhood wounds free up our Life Force for creativity, joy, wellbeing and love know ourselves as love from the core of our being trust that this love is bigger than any wound we discover within us, and that it will flow into and through all our wounds and release them Although the practice of personal accountability can be extremely uncomfortable at times, it is far more comfortable than continuing to suppress our emotional wounds and enduring the havoc that creates in our lives. We simply cannot heal ourselves until we take individual responsibility.

Self-Compassion Opens The Door To Self-Healing

Until we learn self-compassion, we arent loving ourselves. Being out of love with ourselves is the cause of all our spiritual / emotional / mental / physical wounds. When we arent loving ourselves, we feel disconnected from our Source, which is Love Itself. Once weve opened up our end of the conversation with our Source, have acknowledged our wound, and have become willing to take responsibility for our lives, then awakening compassion for ourselves is the next essential step in our healing and wellbeing. Like most of us, you were probably taught that you should have compassion for others, but were you ever taught that you need to have compassion for yourself first? Most of us werent. And the truth is, until you have compassion for yourself, you wont be able to bring it to others. Then when we try to be compassionate with others and fail, the inevitable result is we add yet another layer of self-judgment upon ourselves. When Your Inner Being Calls For Self-Compassion When something happens and we feel strong negative emotions, often there is an old wound from childhood that has been triggered. A door to the unconscious opens and stands ready for us to enter

and BE with ourselves to heal the wound. Our conditioning often tells us to ignore the door and distract ourselves in some way by reaching for an addictive substance or behavior. A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures [including ourselves!] and the whole of nature in its beauty. Albert Einstein However, when the pain gets so great, eventually we find ourselves at a site like this one, or looking into the pages of a book, willing to do what it takes to heal and find our way to wellbeing. All of our wounds stem from a false belief that we are separate from our Source. Ultimately, it is Source that does ALL healing. Therefore, the first step in any effective healing practice is to align ourselves with That. However, we still need to work WITH the Divine, to partner in our own healing. The human, psychological part required of you is to bring compassion for yourself, FROM yourself (more about this below), which unravels the core wound. Until then it stands unresolved in your energy field. For permanent healing we need to become conscious of our wound and be willing to bring love to this vulnerable part of ourselves, starting with self-compassion. What Does Showing Compassion For Yourself Look Like? Self-compassion means to fully BE with yourself in a deeply aware and non-judging way as a loyal and trustworthy friend. It is a willingness to be with yourself as a loving companion to your own pain. Selfcompassion includes care, concern, solicitude, sensitivity, warmth, unconditional love, tenderness, acceptance, mercy, leniency, kindness, and charity for ourselves. Compassion for yourself is a softness that flows within you and permeates your emotional / energy wound with acceptance, unconditional love and intimate understanding.

No one in the world knows your feelings and hurts as well as you do. You know all the intricacies and tendrils of them, firsthand and up close. Because of this you are the one most qualified to bring love to this part of yourself.

Self-compassion is seeing your most tender wounds without judgment. Showing compassion to yourself is being willing to see / feel the reality of your pain without covering it up or trying to fix it. Once this level of self-love occurs, a door opens to the understanding of why the pain is there. As we lovingly befriend ourselves, awareness reveals the cause / effect dynamic that created the wound in the first

place a set of circumstances we experienced from which we formulated a negative belief about ourselves. The power of compassion is seeing ourselves as Source sees us. Compassion is a God quality and when we tap into it, we have access to a very high energy field of healing and wellbeing. We get to intimately experience Sources unconditional love for us. We discover what it is like to be loved totally, in every cell of our being, exactly as we are. Why Do We Need Self-Compassion? Until we consciously attend to our own psychological healing and wellbeing, energetic wounds or constrictions that stem from a feeling of being separate from Love remain in our energy field. Others can love us and show compassion toward us, and yes, this does help. It helps us learn to open and receive. However, the compassion that does the transformational healing comes from within us. At the core of every wound is a thought / belief that we are separate from God, from Love a fear that we are unworthy of love. It is a belief that we have accepted about ourselves. And you are the only one who can change that belief for yourself by experiencing the absolute truth of your Loveliness. This is what self-compassion does for you. Although others may tell us that were good, beautiful, smart, etc., and that feels good, the wounded part of our psyche will still hold onto beliefs of not being good, smart or beautiful enough until we hear it from OURSELVES. All the affirmations in the world wont work until we undo the core belief of being separate from Love with the experience of the truth that we are loved infinitely. This completes a psychological loop that is essential for permanent healing, so that the energetic wound inside us doesnt keep recreating itself. Until we heal the CAUSE of the wound (the belief of being separate from Source, from Love) with the Truth (that weve never been separate from Source and are totally worthy of Love, including our own) it stays in our energy field and keeps drawing the same painful scenarios into our experience. As we make ourselves and our healing priority, we begin to see WHY weve done or said things were not proud of. We see that our reactions to situations arent because were bad. We see that we reacted because we were in pain and didnt believe we had any other options. This realization itself opens the door to self-compassion and wellbeing. Be compassionate with yourself. Take small steps. Begin healing your own thoughts and feelings. Every time you heal a judgmental thought or feeling of separation, it is felt by every mind and heart in the universe. Your healing belongs not just to you, but to all beings. When you come to peace, world peace becomes immanent. If you have a responsibility to others it is only this one: that you come to peace in your own heart and mind. Paul Ferrini, from Love Without Conditions, pg 57

How Do We Do It? Where Do We Start? For many of us, self-compassion is a brand new concept. It is not something that is usually modeled or taught in our childhood or even in our adult lives. Each circumstance in our present-day life that triggers emotional pain is an opportunity to practice selfcompassion and be with ourselves on a deep and intimate level. If we stay with this introspection, we uncover the core shame that lurks in the depths of each of us, giving us the opportunity to heal it. The next time you are triggered by an event or a person Ask for help from your Higher Guidance.Dear Source, help me to heal this wounded part of myself. Please help me learn to love myself here, where I am hurting. Fully accept whatever happened when you were triggered. Fully accept ALL that youre feeling, as well as all that you did, said or thought. Also, fully accept whatever the other person did, said, felt or thought. Accept all the circumstances that happened. Mentally rehashing it all, wishing it hadnt happened, hanging onto thoughts that it shouldnt have happened, or resisting the fact that it DID happen is a waste of your precious energy that could be focused toward your healing. The fact is that whatever happened HAPPENED. When we accept that we can move on and progress in our healing. Remove your attention from the other person and open your inner awareness. We are responsible for everything that were feeling, thinking, saying, or doing not the other person. Later in the healing process you can address your connection with the other person(s) involved and bring compassion to them as well. For now, turn your attention 180 degrees from the usual outwardly focused perspective. Remove it from the outside world and the appearance of other people and bring your attention inside. Open your awareness. Your awareness is the perspective or eyes inside you who sees everything neutrally and non-judgmentally. It observes everything but is not engaged in any of it. This is The Watcher. Find the willingness to BE with yourself. Make yourself priority, especially your hurt child inside, your core wound.As you let go of the movie of the outside world and other people, at least for now, focus on being just with YOU. Look at the circumstance that triggered your reactions and negative feelings, and Ask inside What am I feeling? Invite and acknowledge all of your feelings, whatever they are anger, sadness, fear, resentment, envy. Dont judge any of it. It is simply energy moving through you. It is neither bad nor good. It is just energy.

As youre feeling in to what is going on inside you, notice the familiarity of the feelings. Look back to a younger time in your life when you felt these feelings. At some point, you will feel yourself as a young child who still lives within you today. Notice that the feelings this young you is experiencing is because of certain events that happened. You are not wrong for having these feelings. They are the natural result of things that happened Now, be a friend to this little one inside you. Experience the part of you who is a loyal, compassionate friend who loves you unconditionally. It may take some patience to find this aspect of yourself, but I assure you, it is there. If you think there isnt love there, then gently release that thought and view your Heart from the perspective of The Watcher the neutral observer within you. At first you may just feel a sensation of warmth. Keep your attention in your Heart, let go of thoughts and just observe. Gradually youll feel tenderness, light, and space as well as warmth. With this love from your Heart, imagine yourself sitting down beside this little one, letting them know you are here just to BE with them. Hello little one. Im here with you. Im just going to be here with you as you feel this. Im not going to leave you. I will stay with you as long as you want me to. We can feel these feelings together. You are not alone.Im not here to try to fix or change you. I just want to be with you as you are. I love you as you are. I have no expectations of you. Im just happy to be with you as your friend. You are very important to me and I love you very much. Bring your hurt child into your Heart. Literally. S/he is suffering because she thinks she is outside of YOUR heart. We may think that we suffer because of lack of love from others, but that is never the case. Our suffering actually comes from thinking / feeling we are outside of our OWN love. Nothing is more painful than that. That is the place of absolute powerless. Again, bringing attention to your Heart, gently enfold your inner little one into this reservoir of Love inside you. The more that you are with your inner child and get to know them; it wont take any effort to love them. You will absolutely fall in love with this part of yourself when you allow yourself to experience the depth of her / his tender, beautiful being. After all, this is YOU! Our natural state is to love ourselves. We just need to allow ourselves the space to look and really see the wondrous beauty and purity of this little one to become aware of how much love and compassion we already feel for ourselves. Soak Up Your Own Love Fear grows out of the things we think; it lives in our minds. Compassion grows out of the things we are, and lives in our hearts.Barbara Garrison

For most of us, self-compassion is like food for the starving. As you begin to feel your OWN love, you will realize how much energy youve put into trying to get love and compassion on the outside and how no matter how much of that youve received from someone else, its never been enough. Thats because it doesnt change your inner beliefs. If another person says youre wonderful and on a core level (perhaps unconsciously) you say to yourself no Im not, their love will only be a temporary band aid. It wont be long until youre looking for more from them or someone else. And then, when/if you get more loving attention from them, it STILL wont be enough. Only self-compassion and self-love will fill up that inner hole that stems from a false belief of being unlovable. Showing compassion for yourself allows you to consciously and directly experience, FOR yourself and ABOUT yourself, that you TRULY are loveable and you truly are Loved. This direct experience will change your old false belief on an energetic level spiritually, emotionally and psychologically. The resulting shift in your energy vibration also changes your cells on a physical level, releasing the energy of lack and dis-ease. Patience After a lifetime of practicing self-judgment, watch for the inevitable arising of self-judgment if you dont understand this process or if youre not able to do the whole thing in one sitting (no one does it in one sitting!). Just start where you are. Sometimes when weve experienced severe trauma, any talk about self-compassion can sound like a foreign language. Thats okay. Just take one piece of it, one step that you resonate with and do that one step. That one step will guide you to the next and then the next As you practice these suggestions for awakening compassion for yourself, dont be surprised if it takes some time. We generally heal step by step. For some of the more intense memories from your past it may take longer to sit with and accept the feelings and bring compassion to yourself there. Dont make yourself wrong for any of it. Bring self-compassion to yourself wherever you are in the process. Be where you are and work from there. Be kind and gentle with yourself WHATEVER is going on inside you and then voila! you are already practicing self-compassion! What Are The Results Of This Practice? All of the coping behaviors weve adapted withdrawing, projecting our feelings onto other people, acting out, etc. were devised by a part of our psyche that is trying to protect the hurt little one inside in the only way it knows how. As we bring the power of compassion to ourselves, a psychological healing occurs. Our psyche no longer feels the need to take defensive measures to protect the inner vulnerable child once it sees that were finally taking care of the little one in an appropriate way. As you practice self-compassion you will discover more space and wellbeing from within. You will feel more freedom to show up as you are. As you get to know your inner child more and bring love to them, you will know true self-empowerment and trust yourself more to take care of yourself. Therefore, you will have healthier boundaries with other people and not depend on them to take care of you. As you feel more love for yourself your energy field will vibrate on a lighter level and you will therefore attract to yourself more uplifting circumstances in your life that bring you joy!

Another beautiful outcome of practicing self-compassion is your compassion for others will flow automatically and effortlessly. Once youve experienced compassion intimately for yourself you will have it to share with others. How To Love Yourself Knowing how to love yourself is extremely important. Self love is at the very core of wellbeing, joy, selfempowerment, and your ability to create and enjoy the kind of life you want. You cannot enjoy happiness if you are not at peace with yourself. Your relationship with yourself is the most important one youll ever have. From the spiritual perspective, it is by turning your attention inward to your Self that you are able to experience your connection with Life, with God, with All That Is. From the human perspective, every relationship you ever have with someone else exactly mirrors one or more aspects of the relationship you have with yourself. What Are The Effects Of Not Loving Yourself? My primary relationship is with myself - all others are mirrors of it. As I learn to love myself, I automatically receive the love and appreciation that I desire from others. If I am committed to myself and to living my truth, I will attract others with equal commitment. Shakti Gawain, Reflections in the Light Not knowing how to love yourself can be severely debilitating. At the very least, youre plagued by indecision and self doubt. In more intense cases there is depression and self hatred, which cripples you in every area of your life. The self-focused negativity cuts you off from your connection to your Life ForceUntil you know how to love yourself there will be an inner war going on that divides your energy and sabotages your efforts to move toward happiness. Besides that, if you lack your own love you attract people and circumstances that mirror your negative beliefs and feelings about yourself. By the Law of Attraction it couldnt be any other way. We draw to us the manifestations of what we FEEL. So, in order for you to draw in loving people and circumstances, you need to know how to love yourself first. Your Self-Dialogue Is Key I think most of us would be shocked if we could hear a tape recording of our inner dialogue. We would see just how many times a day we judge or criticize ourselves harshly. Sometimes we treat ourselves far worse than we could imagine treating someone else. To start building self esteem, first listen to how you talk to yourself. You first have to be aware of a situation before you can change it. Do any of these thoughts sound familiar?

"There is something wrong with me. Im really messed up." "Im bad." "Its all my fault." "Im incompetent. I dont know what Im doing." "Im not (good, smart, attractive, rich, etc.) enough." "I should have (fill in the blank)." "Im not as (good, smart, attractive, successful, etc.) as that person." "Ill never get that job." "Ill never be able to do this. I dont have what it takes." At a deeper level, you might hear: "I dont deserve to be happy. I dont deserve to be loved. I dont deserve to have what I want." "I deserve to be punished. I dont deserve to be forgiven." Lack of self love can also get projected out as: "That person doesnt like me. No one likes me." My imperfections and failures are as much a blessing from God as my successes and my talents and I lay them both at his feet. Mahatma Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi Until you learn how to love yourself, this is how you cripple yourself so that you cant move forward or go after the things you want. Underlying this negative self talk can be long-held beliefs about yourself that arent even based on reality. They are hangovers from other peoples energy being projected onto you. This usually comes from your parents, siblings, and other people around you during your early years. The Power Of Words Famous research by Dr. Masaru Emoto shows the powerful effect that our thoughts and words have on us. In his research he attached written words to containers of water, such as Thank you, I love you, and You fool! Then he froze the water and took photos of the water crystals with a microscopic camera. In addition to using written words, he varied his experiments with thoughts, music and pictures.In order to keep the tests using written words pure, they did it blind. After the words were written, they covered them up so that no one knew which words were written on which containers until

the end of the experiment. That way the test wasnt influenced by the thoughts of the people involved in it. You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection. Siddhartha Guatama Buddha The results were amazing! You can view them in his books Messages From Water, Vols. 1 and 2. In every case when there was a positive energy used, whether it was a written word, a verbal statement, or a picture, the photos of the frozen crystals were exquisitely beautiful. The water crystals formed into intricate symmetrical patterns, all harmonically woven together. Some of them look like shimmering diamonds.On the other hand, in every case where the stimulus was negative, the crystals were small, misshapen and deformed! This so clearly demonstrates the effects of the negativity hurled at oneself until you learn how to love yourself. Remember, our bodies are about 60% water (it varies, depending on the individual), and this is just revealing what happens to the part of us that is water when we are hit with negativity. My sense is that it has the same debilitating effect on ALL parts of ALL our cells. No wonder there is mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual illness in the world! Also, remember that these experiments show what happens when the negativity comes from the OUTSIDE. Im sure that the effects of negativity is even more extreme if the negativity is SELF generated. This is a powerful demonstration of the crippling effects of not knowing how to love yourself. Then, with the Law of Attraction as those cells vibrate with negativity, that vibration draws in more of the same. As you can see, this is just not a pretty picture. Whew! Okay, enough about the horror story So What Can You Do? A good first step in learning how to love yourself is to periodically check in with yourself through the day and notice how youre feeling happy, alive and open? Closed and contracted? Neutral? If you are feeling negative, trace back to when you first started feeling that way. Chances are really good that somewhere at that juncture you told yourself something negative about yourself. What might first come to your awareness is a negative attitude or thought about someone else. However, if you look closer youll find that somewhere along the way the part that really got you feeling bad was a negative thought about yourself. It might have been guilt about the negative thought about someone else, or feelings of inadequacy. This negative self-talk is a symptom that shows up chronically until you learn how to love yourself.Lets take a slight detour here for just a moment Heres an interesting question

Which do you prefer: guilt or blame? Neither feels good, but I think youll agree that between the two, guilt is the most painful and the most debilitating. Why? Blame at least has some energy mobilization. There is SOME degree of taking charge of the situation and having control. Guilt, on the other hand, is pure powerlessness just heart-wrenching inadequacy and selfcondemnation. Blame is focused on other; guilt is focused on self. On the emotional spectrum, what we do to ourselves is MUCH more painful and destructive than anything anyone else could do to us. Selffocused negativity cuts off our connection with Life Force. So, getting back to what you can do Voice Dialogue Years ago I studied the Voice Dialogue work of Drs. Hal and Sidra Stone. It was extremely powerful for me at the time. I still use a modified version of their techniques today. Voice Dialogue works with the many selves or sub-personalities that we all have within our psyche. Each of these different aspects of yourself has different wants, need and beliefs than the other aspects. In the Stones Voice Dialogue work you learn to identify these sub personalities and then let them dialogue and find agreements with each other. This process is a great way to get started in learning how to love yourself, creating more self-understanding, acceptance, and harmony.Lets use this information to support YOU in building self esteem and self love. Changing Your Self-Dialogue Getting back to our process of learning how to love yourself, earlier in this article we talked about becoming aware of when you feel negativity. Then you trace back to find the point where you started feeling that way. Look for the judgment thought you had about yourself. For example you might hear something like the ever-popular, Im a bad person. People often say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I say that the most liberating thing about beauty is realizing that you are the beholder. This empowers us to find beauty in places where others have not dared to look, including inside ourselves. Salma Hayek As you hear those words within, see if a picture comes to mind, or use your imagination to make one up. Can you see this aspect of yourself in your inner vision? You may get an indistinct glimpse of yourself at a younger age. Maybe as a toddler? A teenager? Dont worry if you dont get a visual picture. Some people are visually oriented and some are more feeling, sensing, or hearing oriented. You might feel a specific feeling sensation in your body or an emotion that floods in. There is no right or wrong way to do this. Just notice whatever arises when you hear whatever the negative phrase is that youre working on, which in this example is Im a bad person.

Now, find another aspect of yourself who feels like a best friend to this self-judging aspect and who is eager to come forward. If he/she isnt eager, thats okay. Just ask inside for the best friend to come forward and if you are patient and sincere, that aspect will come into your awareness. This aspect of yourself already knows how to love yourself. Dont get discouraged if you don't become immediately aware of this part of yourself the first time you do this. For some of us, the flame of self love is so low that the positive voice inside is all but snuffed out. If this describes you, please be gentle with yourself. Dont use this exercise to beat yourself up even more.And, dont give up. If you cant find the aspect that already knows how to love yourself, then make one up. The imagination is a powerful tool that can be used for great healing. Just imagine a kind being who loves you unconditionally. Imagine or make up what that person would say to you if they heard you saying Im a bad person to yourself. You might hear something like I love you. You are wonderful, exactly as you are right now in this moment. You are a good and wonderful person. I know your beautiful heart. It is challenging for you right now because you are coming up against a growth area for you. Just remember how beautiful you are. You will get through this. Your evolution and growth are assured. I will help you learn how to love yourself. Stay with this dialogue for as long as you can. It may feel strange and uncomfortable at first because it is new. Thats okay, just stay with it. Really hear the response from the best friend aspect. Let the aspect of you who uttered Im a bad person soak up the love and support. If you stay with it, you will find a noticeable increase in your self love.Try doing the dialogue in writing. For some people that is easier. You can also do a mini version of this as you go about your day and you become aware of slipping into negative self talk. Once youve identified the best friend aspect of yourself the first time it gets much easier to call it up again. Learning how to love yourself is like exercising a muscle you didnt know you had. The more you do it, the stronger it gets. Listen to your best friend aspects words of love and encouragement. Drink it in and indulge in the good feelings. I dont like myself Im crazy about myself! Mae West The goal is to derail any kind of negative self talk as quickly as possible by bringing in your best friend aspect. By learning how to love yourself in this way you will train yourself into much greater harmony and wellbeing than youve ever known before! If the multiple sub-personality idea bothers you, dont worry. We ALL have a multitude of these aspects

within us that have developed out of our early life experiences. This process is a healthy and natural way to learn how to love yourself. Just try this for one day and youll be amazed at what you discover. Maybe pick a day when you have some leisure time so youre not distracted by work and other obligations. The Steps In Brief Be on alert for inner negativity. Scan back to when you first started feeling that way. Zero in on what you told yourself about yourself at that point the thought that triggered the negativity. Call up your best friend aspect and let him/her love you. Drink in the love, encouragement and support from this aspect of yourself. More Support On This Site To Learn How To Love Yourself Practice compassion for yourself. This is a key step in learning how to love yourself. Until we learn selfcompassion, we stand outside our own love and feel separate from Source, God, The Divine (insert the word you know It by). This feeling of separation from Source is at the core of all our discomfort and disease, on all levels of our being. First, forgive yourself, then forgive others, and free yourself (This is easier than you think). Use the Gratitude List exercise to list things you appreciate about yourself. This is a powerful way to switch your feelings about yourself from negative to loving. Practice Energy Healing Therapy exercises to release negative energies. Identify and break free of old beliefs that could be holding you back. Use your power of choice to choose happiness. Tap into the root of happiness inside you. Your creative gifts are a doorway into wellbeing and the fulfillment of your life path. Open to them and they will help you know and appreciate the unique and beautiful being you are.

Experience your vulnerability as true strength.

Watch Out For The Comparison Trap

One of the common potholes of life that you may fall into on the road to learning how to love yourself is the old comparison trap. You know the one. Sheesh, that person is way better than me. Or it could flip into what appears to be high self esteem: Im much better than that person. This is just the other side of the same coin. It can flip in either direction. Either way, staying with this stream of thought causes self-suffering. No person is better or worse than another. We all came with different growth assignments for this lifetime. Consequently, we all have different areas of mastery as well as different areas that are steep learning curves. As you learn how to love yourself, don't be fooled by how someone else appears. So, while Betty Sue may have already mastered personal relationships (I hope shell give a workshop for the rest of us!), she hasnt quite figured out how to open up to receiving abundance yet. And Bobby Lee is a multi-millionaire but cant seem to get it together in his personal relationships. If you find yourself falling into the comparison trap frequently, it would be a good idea to do a Voice Dialogue session on the subject. If it is chronically about not being as good as other people in some way, find the aspect within who feels that way and let them talk. Then find your best friend aspect and hear their loving response. You can use this same technique if you find yourself chronically on the other side of the coin: Im better than that person. What you will find is that the aspect who feels better than others is the same aspect as the one who feels less than others. The stance of feeling better than someone else is just a buffer to protect you from the wrenching feelings of not good enough. What appears to be high self esteem is a cover up for low self esteem. How To Love Yourself Even More Say YES When you find yourself feeling negativity, say YES to the whole situation that evoked it. The word YES carries a powerful energy that can unlock the flow of wellbeing inside you. From within, say YES to everything youre feeling and to all people involved, past and present. This doesnt mean that you need to agree with what someone else is doing. This is not at all about them. It is just an exercise for YOU to release resistance, for your own wellbeing. Resisting anything feeds it energy and keeps recreating the same scenario. Saying YES to it opens the flow of love and gives space for the situation to release and transform.

Self Nurturing Do as many things you can to nurture yourself on all levels physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. See what draws you and evokes positive feelings Yoga? Joining a gym? Or you might want

to learn to dance, change your eating habits, or listen to music you love more often. Decide to do at least one activity each day that is exclusively for your own self-nurturing. See Yourself This exercise is a powerful way to learn how to love yourself. Go to a mirror and look into your eyes. Ignore whatever critical thoughts that may arise, and just focus on your eyes. Really look inside that person you see reflected there. Keep looking until you can see your tender beautiful heart. We must give to ourselves until we are so full and overflowing that when we give to another, we give pure joy, we give pure love, we give pure benevolence, and we give pure compassion. Alana, channeled by Sandy Breckenridge What Changes Can You Expect? As you take steps in learning how to love yourself, the wars within will diminish and your wellbeing will expand. You will begin to trust yourself more as your self-appreciation increases, and doubt yourself less. Youll feel more self-empowered and grounded. Youll feel more confident and competent.Areas where you previously felt stuck in your life will begin to open up, as if the locks are being removed.You will feel more energy to move forward in your life, as a more complete being. As you learn how to love yourself, your energy field will begin to change. Your expanding infusion of self love will have a positive effect on others around you, without them even knowing what you are up to. Also, as you judge yourself less, youll find that youll judge others less as well. As you treat yourself more kindly, your energy field will continue to transform. As you learn how to love yourself, you will attract people who treat you the same loving way you are learning to treat yourself. The circumstances of your life will change to a more positive state as well, mirroring this new perspective of yourself. Your Self Love Uplifts Us All Besides the many personal benefits YOU will experience from learning how to love yourself, there is a gift youll be giving to all of your fellow beings: you will be uplifting all of us. Self-love is not opposed to the love of other people. You cannot really love yourself and do yourself a favor without doing people a favor, and vice versa.Karl Augustus Menninger Although we look like separate beings running around doing our individual things, we are far from separate. If you could look at this plane of reality from an energy or quantum physics perspective, you would see one continuous, contiguous energy field that includes our planet and everything on it, and the whole universe.In other words, if someone saw you right now from that perspective, theyd see your body, the space between you and your computer, your computer, and everything else around you as one big ocean of energy. The area of energy perceived as you would be vibrating in a different way than your computer, but all of it would be one mass of energy.

So what is my point? As you learn how to love yourself, your energy begins to vibrate in an uplifting way and, since we are all part of one big energy field, ALL of us are infused and uplifted by you as you learn self love. So ... thank you! Self Forgiveness Is Essential For Healing Once we experience compassion for ourselves, self forgiveness is the next natural step in emotional healing. Until we bring forgiveness to ourselves, we THINK we are cut off from The Divine, Source, God (Insert the name you know It by.). This false belief of being separate from our Creator is at the core of all suffering and dis-ease. The only way to heal this false belief of being unlovable is to first bring enough love and self forgiveness to ourselves that we can then open to the Divine and feel the wellbeing that is always available to us when we align ourselves with it. Withholding Forgiveness From Ourselves Is Actually Motivated By Love Many of us feel weve done things that make us unforgivable. When we look deeply enough inside we see that keepings ourselves unforgiven is actually motivated by love. We hold ourselves as unforgivable in hopes that we never do that thing again because we dont want to hurt anyone else or ourselves. This is usually unconscious. Although at the core this is a loving act, unfortunately, withholding self love and self forgiveness causes us to feel separate from Source. Consequently we feel cut off from love, which causes us to do things that are off balance, which generally have off-balance results for ourselves as well as our Brothers and Sisters. In other words, we end up acting in the very ways that we held ourselves unforgivable in the first place.This is not because we are bad and shouldnt be forgiven. It is because we carry the energy of I BELIEVE I am bad in our energy field. By the Law of Attraction, we draw to us circumstances that reflect our assessment of ourselves. Youve Done Nothing Wrong To begin this self forgiveness process, I invite you to look back on any experience in your past where you are carrying guilt or shame. Look at what your true intention was when you did what you did. If you look deep enough you will discover that your truest intention was to take care of yourself in the best way you knew at the time. You may have had a limited awareness of options and perhaps made choices that brought yourself and others undesirable results, but you did the best you could at the time. You need to see the truth of this for yourself that all of your actions came from a basic human survival instinct, which in essence is loving yourself.

ource loves you just as you are, just as you ever were before, and just as youll ever be. And, since your Creator loves you unconditionally, you have full permission to love yourself unconditionally too.

From this perspective you can see into your heart and become aware of the reasons why youve done what youve done. Do you see the purity of your heart? In our growth process we can all look back and see how, given what we know now, we could have done things differently in the past. However, it is important to see WHY you did what you did and to apply self forgiveness. It is time to let go of the burden of the past, to stop beating yourself up. Once you do this, the power of forgiveness will transform your energy field to a higher vibration and you will attract much more loving circumstances and wellbeing into your life.

Even Extreme Acts Are Motivated By An Attempt At Self-Love

What Im about to say may be shocking to hear, but I invite you to keep an open mind and stay with me for a moment: Even when someone commits as extreme an act as murder, if they are able to look back and see deeply into their motives at the time, they will see that at the time the act was committed, they honestly believed it would make their situation better. It was an attempt to take care of (love) themselves the only way that they could see at the time. This is true for all of us, for all of our actions. Really check this out for yourself. Im not encouraging or condoning any act that causes suffering for another being or ourselves. Im just bringing awareness to the fact that anything that weve done is forgivable when we truly look deeply and honestly into our hearts, and see that at our core our actions are innately motivated by the desire to love ourselves as best we can.

Forgiveness Isnt Even An Issue From The Perspective Of Our Creator Until you learn how to forgive yourself, it can feel like God hasnt forgiven you. However, this feeling of separation is actually an illusion. The division only occurs in our own mind. We unconsciously separate ourselves from Source because WE think we are unlovable, not because It has pronounced us so.

To experience self forgiveness, I invite you to see yourself through the unconditionally loving eyes of your Creator. There is nothing you can do that would keep you out of Gods heart. In fact, from the perspective of Source, forgiveness isnt even an issue because youve done nothing wrong. We are all learning and growing and we act in accordance with whatever stage of growth we are on at the time.

The only reason we even have the concept of forgiveness is because WE think weve done something wrong. Therefore it is only US that needs to forgive ourselves. Source is like a sun, shining on all. We need to see ourselves and love ourselves as our Creator sees us and loves us: unconditionally. See the thing that you did, see your motivations at the time, find the place at the core where you were acting from what you thought was best at the time, given your awareness at the time. See that, love yourself, and forgive yourself. The Door To The Divine Opens Once We Open The Door To Ourselves Once we use self forgiveness, our inner door to love opens. Its really quite magical. We are now able to feel the Universal love and wellbeing that has been waiting beyond the door that we had kept closed within ourselves for so long. In truth, weve always had access to this healing love, but holding ourselves hostage by our self judgment kept us from FEELING it. It is quite a delicious relief to feel the warmth washing in as we open to our own compassion and self forgiveness.

Start Where You Feel Shame Or Guilt

In learning how to forgive yourself, first work on the obvious areas in your life, experiences that youve had in your past which bring up feelings of shame or guilt. As you work on those, youll become aware of other, more subtle ways that you withhold love from yourself, judge yourself, and keep yourself separate from God.

As children, many of us were judged when we rocked the boat of our caregivers. Their own self judgments were projected onto us. This is very common. However, these judgments had nothing to do with who we are.

We tend to form ideas about ourselves from the way that other people respond to us. This is true whether their response actually had anything to do with us or not. As young children we were too young to question the validity of these assumptions we made about ourselves based on the responses of those around us. Eventually we began to feel that we were bad, wrong, or somehow messed up at the core. This is the core wound.

Now that youre aware of this dynamic, watch for the signs of it in your daily life. Become aware of times when something happens that triggers you into feeling bad, wrong, not good enough, not smart

enough, powerless, etc. Watch the things you tell yourself about yourself. Our work is to bring awareness, love, and self forgiveness to all of these places inside ourselves. We need to travel to the place of the original wounding in our feeling memory and see that the negative ideas we adopted about ourselves are simply not true. We are unique, wonderful, and entirely loveable just as we are now and just as we were then.

You have only one person to forgive in your journey and that is yourself. You are the judge. You are the jury. And you are the prisoner. An unholy trinity, to be sure! Loosen up, my friend. Everything you think you did to others is just a form of self-punishment.

Paul Ferrini, Love Without Conditions, page 142

More Subtle Layers Present Themselves For Self Forgiveness

As these judgments and negative beliefs about yourself come up, check into your heart and see the truth: the validity of the purity of your heart and your core intention to bring love to yourself. Apply self understanding and self forgiveness for:

All the things you were judged for as a child and still judge yourself for now. Having so-called negative feelings such as fear, anger, hurt. All negative feelings are the direct result of things that happened to you. You are not bad or wrong for having them. Feelings are the natural, healthy response to events. What ISNT healthy is suppressing and judging them and yourself for having them. Not fitting someone elses idea of how you should be. Being exactly as you are physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually in your wonderfully unique way. Punishment and other traumas you experienced. Receiving punishment and experiencing other challenging events does not mean you made a mistake or that you are bad. Making mistakes as you learn, increase in awareness and evolve.

There are no mistakes from the viewpoint of your Creator. There are only learning events. Self Forgiveness Opens The Door To Abundance

As we open the door to receive forgiveness from ourselves, we open the door to all forms of abundance and wellbeing. It all comes through the same doorway. This includes not only a love for ourselves, but loving connections and appreciation from other people, fulfilling experiences, avenues of expression for your unique gifts, money, etc.

Self forgiveness completely changes your energy field. As you begin practicing it, you align yourself with a higher, more loving Source of energy. Then, by the Law of Attraction, as you are more loving toward yourself, you draw in circumstances and people who are ALSO more loving toward you. The outer reflects the inner.

The Only One Youll Ever Have To Forgive Is Yourself

We cant give what we dont have. If we withhold love from others, it is because we are withholding it from ourselves. If we are withholding it from ourselves, it is because we havent fully forgiven ourselves yet. This step is absolutely essential before we can truly forgive and love anyone else.

Self forgiveness completely changes your outer reality. Whatever is in our internal reality gets projected into our outer life. Whenever I have a conflict with someone, that conflict is really only with me. The other person is playing the role of a voice in my head.

When you notice that you are withholding love from someone else, notice why. Then see how you withhold love from yourself for the very same reason. Whenever I judge someone, Im only judging the part of me that they are reflecting.

You are not guilty of any sin, my brother. But you believe that you are. And while you believe this, you will need forgiveness. It is the only way out of your self-imposed illusion.

Paul Ferrini, Love Without Conditions, page 143

Usually what Im judging is a part of myself that was shamed when I was a child. For instance, if you showed self-expression or power as a child and it was threatening to your parents, then chances are you got shamed for it and have issues about self-empowerment as an adult. Consequently, when youre around people who stand fully in their power in a healthy way and/or use their power in an unhealed way to coerce others, there is a good chance you will judge them because you were shamed for having ANY power. See how this works?

So, when you bring love and self forgiveness to the place in you that was shamed as a child for being powerful, your dynamic with other people in power changes. You will feel much less threatened by them and therefore less inclined to judge them. Forgiving them comes as a natural result of forgiving yourself.

Choosing The Power Of Forgiveness Is An Ongoing Practice

Self love and self forgiveness doesnt just happen once and then we are healed finally and permanently. We have to choose it again and again in our lives as new layers of our being become unveiled for our healing. We have to keep doing our part. Each time we choose love, we open our inner door to our Creator and feel our alignment with the vast, unlimited energy field of light, love, compassion, forgiveness, healing and wellbeing that is always here and available to us, and in fact, IS us! How to Forgive Others With Love And Compassion

Learning how to forgive and extend love and compassion to others is one of the most important things we can learn. Holding grievances hurts ourselves far more than anything anyone else has ever appeared

to do to us. It puts a veil over the Light that shines within us, cutting us off from our experience of being connected with God, and therefore, love. Prerequisites For Forgiveness

In learning how to forgive, we first have to arrive at a place where our personal peace and happiness is more important to us than the desire to be right and make someone else wrong. Even though arriving at that point can take longer in some situations than others, eventually the discomfort of holding someone out of our heart just becomes too painful. In doing that we hold a part of ourselves away from our own love and there is nothing more painful than that.

Before we can learn how to forgive others, we generally have to do some self-healing first. The first step is to acknowledge where we are in pain. We can't heal something until we admit to ourselves that it is there and take responsibility for our own feelings. Then we can bring loving compassion, acceptance and forgiveness to ourselves. After that, it is easier to extend compassion, love and forgiveness to others.

Another reason why it helps to do our own personal forgiveness work first before learning how to forgive others is that it helps us to see our own underlying wounds and how they cause us to act in "off balance" ways toward others. This makes it much easier to see that others' actions are motivated by THEIR wounds. With this understanding, we begin to open, soften, and move toward letting go of our grievances toward them.

We learn how to forgive "others" for our own healing because actually there is only One Being here, and it is Us. Whether we appear to forgive someone "out there" or ourselves, it is all Us.

After years of holding onto some large grievances, I finally generated enough desire to learn how to forgive because I was tired of suffering over the negativity I was choosing to hold onto. It was just too debilitating. At that point my strong desire attracted the introduction of a very clear path to learn how to forgive and heal anything, finally and completely.

My forgiveness path opened up in two steps: Ho'oponopono opened the door to the realization that forgiveness was POSSIBLE, and then studying The Disappearance Of The Universe and A Course In Miracles helped me to walk THROUGH the door of forgiveness, and into the Light of the Truth of who we all are.

First, I'll tell you about Hooponopono.

Opening The Door To Forgiveness Hooponopono

I had the great honor to attend a weekend workshop with an amazing Hawaiian shaman named Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len. He teaches an ancient Hawaiian tradition of forgiveness named Hooponopono. That weekend was life-changing for me.

Let me first give you a little background on the Hooponopono perspective then Ill show you how it can be valuable in learning how to forgive.

Hooponopono is born out of the fact that all life is interconnected, and is all made of the very same Essence. Further, we create every single thing that occurs in our life, big or small, by the vibrations that are dominant within our own being. We are like a human projector. The vibrations within us project out and create images and dramas that are reflections of the energies within us. If it is in our life, it came from within us, otherwise it could not be here. This includes so called other people as well as every single thing we experience.

For instance, 10 people could attend the same party and have 10 very unique experiences, meet different people, have different conversations, and come away from the experience with 10 different sets of perceptions. Each of those 10 people will experience parts of themselves at that party, which will be different from the other 9 people, who are all uniquely experiencing parts of themselves as well.

Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len

Ihaleakala Hew Len, PhD, is famous for curing a complete ward of criminally insane patients at the Hawaii State Hospital, but without ever treating any of them. He didnt even meet with them, except to occasionally play tennis or other recreational activities. At the workshop I attended with him, I met the woman who was the director of the ward at the time and she verified the following facts.

Instead of the usual psychological treatments, Dr. Len practiced Hooponopono. Without meeting in person with the inmates, he studied each persons chart. From the perspective that there is really only one Being and it is Us, he looked within himself to see how he created that person's mental illness. He then healed the part of himself that created their distress, by focusing love on that condition. He took total responsibility for whatever he saw that needed healing. From this perspective, he ignored the boundaries we are all conditioned to falsely believe, that there is some boundary between me and you.

As he focused on each person he said Thank you, Im sorry, and I love you, to them over and over again, day after day after day. This is the essence of Hooponopono and this is ALL he did.

Thank you for bringing this part of myself into my awareness so that I can take responsibility for it and release it.

Im sorry for harboring separating thoughts that have created suffering for Us.

I love you. You and I are One with God and each other.

Total Responsibility

Learning how to forgive is really about taking responsibility for our life in a far deeper and broader way than most of us have ever even considered. Total responsibility means that everything in our life is our responsibility. Everything. This means every person that comes into our life experience as well as their actions, everything we see or hear or experience, is here because they are a reflection of something within us.

By the Law of Attraction, nothing could be in our life unless we resonated with it in some way. It couldnt be in our life unless it was a vibrational match to something inside us, whether we are conscious of it or not. What we dominantly put our attention on manifests in our life. The kind of thoughts that we think create reflections of that same vibration all around us. So, in a sense, we CREATE them. Each of us creates the world that we live in.

This means that when we see a politician or even a terrorist and we dont like what we see, what we are actually seeing is a part of our self and it is being shown to us to give us an opportunity to heal it. These others don't exist, in a manner of speaking, except as projections from inside us. The problem isn't with them because there is no them that is separate from us. In order to change them we have to change our self. This is learning how to forgive.

Yes, this seems hard to grasp at first because it is so different from how we are conditioned to believe. It is an ongoing process to fully accept and actually live from this perspective. Basically, it comes down to loving yourself as the You that is everything you see and experience. As you love everything you experience, your world begins to change, because your outer world is a projection of your inner world. In order to improve your own life, you have to heal your life and your life is you and everything IN your life. As we learn how to forgive, our life automatically shifts into a more loving realm.

The Results Of Hooponopono

As Dr. Len took responsibility for everything that was happening with each of his patients, they each improved! Basically he worked on himself and they changed because they are a reflection of him. He worked on how to forgive them as himself.

Before Dr. Len joined the Hawaii State Hospital, staff turnover was outrageously high because it was such a dreary place to live, work in, or visit. The heavy pull of the negative burdens the patients carried was far too overwhelming for any of the staff to endure long term. They couldnt even keep any potted plants on the ward because the energy was so toxic the plants died.

However, in the four years Dr. Len was there, big changes happened. As patients that had to be shackled began to heal, gradually their shackles were removed because they were no longer a threat. Medications were gradually reduced, then eliminated. The inmates got better and better and the staff stabilized and began to enjoy their jobs. Eventually they closed the ward because all the patients were released! All of this came as a result of one man who was dedicated to learning how to forgive.

For a beautiful and inspiring account of how one woman used Ho'oponopono for healing, please read her letter in the right column of this page.

A Personal Example On How To Forgive

After I began writing this article something happened that provided me an opportunity to practice what Im sharing here. It demonstrates the power of forgiveness, using the Hooponopono technique.

A few months ago some new neighbors moved in next door. I met them early on and liked them immediately. They also have two large dogs in their family. Recently there were a number of occasions when the dogs were outside and one of them barked for hours, only a few feet from my office window.

Irritation developed into anger and alas, I didnt fully take care of it energetically inside me. I did some Hooponopono with it, but not consistent enough or long enough so it didnt fully clear. I was caught up in the events of my life at the time, and put aside the fact that I know how to forgive.

A few weeks later the barking went on for hours once again. I spoke to the woman on the phone and all the unhealed energy in me came to the fore as anger. Understandably, she became very defensive. It was extremely uncomfortable for both of us.

I felt sick for a couple of days over it. I amaze myself sometimes at how long Ill hold onto something that causes me intense pain. Actually, the part that was the most painful was the judgment I aimed at myself for losing my temper. After the second day of feeling miserable, dysfunctional and inept, I had had enough. I knew how to forgive it was time to finally do it!

I sat down, closed my eyes and blazed all the love and light I could visualize into me, my home, them, their home, their dogs, our yards, and the space around us. I repeated again and again, Thank you, Im sorry, and I love you.

At first I could feel myself resisting my own words, still wanting to make them wrong. But at that point my desire for peace was much stronger than my desire to be right. I kept on until it was about 50% love and 50% wanting to be right. Then it was about 60% love and 40% wanting to be right. I kept at it, for about an hour, until I was so flooded with love I wanted to run over to their house and apologize.

I bought them a package of chocolates, then wrote up a card for them, apologizing and showing my willingness to come to peace with them. Then I knocked on their door, with my peace offering. The man answered the door with so much love in his eyes and immediately began apologizing to me for the dogs, before I could even say anything.

While we talked, I saw the love in their small childrens eyes, and I even felt love for the dogs wagging their tails at me through the sliding glass door on the back porch. I felt absolutely high with joy, relief, and love.

The next day the woman called me and thanked me and then the following day she left a package of cookies and a hand-made heart shaped card, expressing how sorry she was, and wishes for a harmonious New Year together in our beautiful neighborhood that we share.

Whew! I still feel tremendous love for them. Whenever I hear sounds coming from their house, I feel warmth and comfort just knowing they are there. And, ever since that meditation I have not heard their dogs, except for one quick bark, then silence. In learning how to forgive myself and them, I healed the place in me that held that particular pocket of chaos. I am no longer projecting that particular energy out into the world and recreating the same negative scenario.

It is really quite miraculous how this works! We just have to remember that we DO know how to forgive. We just have to be willing to do it.

It is important to remember that sometimes long-standing issues need to be healed in layers. We need to be kind and forgiving with ourselves as we keep at this process, not expecting to heal deep wounds all at once.

Even If You Don't Mean It At First Still Do It And Your Willingness Will Increase

A wonderful thing Ive discovered in learning how to forgive is that this Ho'oponopono technique works even if I resist doing it at first. When I first learned this technique I began using it with someone who I had a long-standing grudge against. It was very painful to continue to carry the negative energy toward them. Even so, I couldnt seem to let go of the Im right and youre wrong energy. I began saying thank you, Im sorry, and I love you to them over and over again, during my meditations, and at idle times during the day.

Gradually, over the course of a few days I noticed that even though I still felt a fair amount of negativity toward them, I was now willing to let go of the grudge. I continued on with the process and after a month or so I had a healing experience in meditation:

I was a hand on a huge body. I traveled all over the body and came upon the hand on the other side of the body and that hand was this person I had been wanting healing with. I experienced myself globally, as being the whole body, yet at the same time I could feel myself as the person called Kai as well as the person who was the other hand. We were quite literally all the same thing.

With continuing to forgive this person, eventually I was able to completely release all my negativity toward them.

Forgiveness Disengages The Ego

As you begin practicing Ho'oponopono, you'll probably notice that your investment in being right and separating from the other person gets dismantled. Barriers seem to melt and the underlying truth of connection with the person shows itself. I think this is the reason this works. At the core, there is no separation between any of us, no matter what any of us has done. Holding back love creates the illusion of separation. Then saying Thank you, Im sorry, I love you, melts that illusion.

Releasing Negative Bonds

After my workshop on Hooponopono, I did some healing work with a medical intuitive who taught me another aspect of Hooponopono about how to forgive. During that session I learned that there were was an energetic chord that connected me to a person I was in conflict with. In this case it was belly-tobelly because it was a power struggle.

I became aware of it in my body then pulled it out using an energy cleansing technique. As I was doing this I said to the person I was releasing the chord from:

I release you to your wholeness. I forgive you.

I forgive myself. I give you permission to forgive me. I give you permission to forgive yourself.

Whew! Repeating these words released the negativity on a much deeper level and I saw light in my inner vision.

As you're learning how to forgive, In some cases a negative bond may be quite strong and youll need to repeat this process more than once. In other cases, there may be more than one chord to pull out. In still other situations, the persons energy may be entwined with yours and youll need to roll them out of you. In all of these cases, I recommend saying the forgiveness words (in the paragraph with the rainbows above) as youre doing this. It is very effective.

As stated before, as you begin the words, its okay if your heart isnt totally into forgiving someone at first. I guarantee you that if you stay with repeating the words anyway, it will be. If you feel moved to do the exercise at all, it means that your heart really is wanting to learn how to forgive, but since the negative energy is there, it will color your thoughts. Just keep at it and youll release the energy.

Self-Forgiveness Is Critical

I mentioned before that learning to forgive and love yourself is as important as forgiving another person. Actually it ends up being the same thing. If we hold a negative judgment against ourselves it is like trying to live in a strait jacket. It stifles joy and love. When we remember that this Hooponopono tool is available to us, we can say Thank you, Im sorry, I love you, directly to ourselves to the thought form of self-judgment itself. This releases self-judgment, revealing the love that is always underneath as we learn more about how to forgive. Doing this unlocks chains that guard and constrict our own hearts, our own love.

How To Forgive And Bring Harmony To Groups

A powerful way to bring a group into harmony is to practice Hooponopono at a gathering. Just look around the room, focusing on each person at a time and silently say Thank you, Im sorry, I love you, repeating it until you feel love for that person.

If you are a group facilitator, you can also do this before your meeting. Go down your list of registered participants, focusing on them individually and saying the words until you feel love. It will clear whatever is on the surface of the group, so that by the time you meet together, you can more quickly get down to the purpose of your meeting. Ive used this technique before potentially sticky meetings and have been delighted to see how smoothly things went.

We can also practice this when we see a politician on TV, or anyone to whom we feel resistance. It reminds us that they are not separate from me and that our resistance is our own responsibility to heal.

This is a powerful thing we can do together for our planet and all of us beings on it as a whole. Just envision the planet and say Thank you, Im sorry, I love you. Keep repeating it until you feel love permeating your being. Ive noticed that after I do this I see much more evidence of love in the world. I hear reports of selfless people working for harmony. I firmly believe that THIS is a way to heal our planet. By healing ourselves, by learning how to forgive, we heal our world.

A Course In Miracles Happiness Only Comes From Releasing Grievances and Learning How To Forgive

After learning how to forgive with the Ho'oponopono technique, I was able to unwind a lot of trauma in my life. However, it wasn't until I started reading and practicing what I learned from The Disappearance Of The Universe and A Course In Miracles that I was able to release the deeper grievances that I didn't even fully realize were there.

A Course In Miracles thoroughly, clearly and lovingly explains the fact that the only way it is possible for us to be happy is to learn how to forgive. What keeps us creating suffering for ourselves is that we decline to take responsibility for our own lives and then try to project blame onto someone else. The fact is there isnt a someone else. It is all us. If we hold negativity for someone else, WE are the ones who hurt from it. Everything that happens to us is a reflection of our own mind. Therefore, we create

and design everything that has happened to us, usually unconsciously. Once we realize this, we cant blame someone else for our lives. This realization is essential before we can fully learn how to forgive.

For more information about this, and to give you an experience of the truth of the power of learning how to forgive, I invite you to try this easy, yet powerful Forgiveness Meditation.