TRANSCRIPTION OF VIDEO
Today’s video is about an exceptionally powerful move that you need to make for life to move forward in a greater, bigger way. And, really, it’s a fundamental skill and also emotional quality that you need to have and engrain into your habit.
I mean, being able to forgive is something so important because there are people that are going to do things wrong by you. You’re going to have transgressions, people might rip you off, your business might go out, your partner might do something that violates your own morals or your values. Things are going to go wrong. And you… your ability to forgive is going to allow you the freedom to open up to new ways of feeling and living in life.
So there’s two objectives by the end of this video. The first is for you to be able to forgive yourself and the second is to be able to forgive others.
Now, what does forgiveness really mean? Forgiveness doesn’t mean you ignore and you just glaze over. Forgive means to let go of completely. But it doesn’t mean you have to have amnesia, but you do need to be willing to let go. But why do we need to forgive?
Well, for you to be a victor in your life and not a victim, you really do need to have an ability to be able to let go of past sins or transgressions of other people. The reason is, holding onto ideas, holding onto past events in a begrudging or resentful way is going to cripple your progress. You see, you can’t progress forward with things holding you back or holding you down.
And you need to remember, you’ve already paid for the past. You don’t need to pay for it twice. So when you’re looking at yourself and you’re examining your life, you may feel you’re at a point in your life where you don’t want to be. Or you’ve tried things before and it’s failed and hasn’t worked out or you compare yourself to other people, which is so dangerous. You compare yourself to where you should be relative to other people you see in your life or people you went to school with or your best friend or whatnot. That’s a dangerous game. You don’t want to compare. Comparison is not how you’re supposed to use your thinking ability.
You see, forgiving yourself means that you identify that everything in your life has been 100% necessary for you to become the person you are, to do the things you’re going to do. Let me say that again. Everything that’s happened in your life up until this point has been 100% necessary to create you as the person you are to prepare you for the things that you’re going to do.
That’s fundamentally the most important truth to realize about you and how life works. That’s why it’s no good resenting the past or harboring on facts that have gone before you. Those things have been there to shape you, but they only shape you if you look for the lesson in them. Otherwise, you know, you could say and prove to the world that those facts are the things that are holding you back. And everybody will agree and go, “Yes, yes, yes.” But you know what? Winners don’t do that. Successful people don’t do that.
They recognize whilst very bad things have happened to them, they’ve been needed as lessons in their life and they’ve seen the lessons and grown from them so they don’t happen again.
The other thing you need to know is that people are put in your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. Now, just as it’s important to make the right decisions about fostering good relationships in your own life, you also need to understand that people come in and out of your life and my life and their life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. And I love to look at life that way because that way you don’t feel bad if somebody’s journey continues on and it’s not attached to your own life. And you see the lesson in there, what did I learn from that person?
You know, if that person was going through their own struggles, their own trials, they were victims, they were just living really terrible, unproductive lives, well, there’s good lessons in that. First of all, you don’t want to live that way. Well, what’s creating it in their life and don’t do that. You see?
There’s always going to be a reason, but how long is that season? Is it going on for too long? Forgive yourself. If you’re in a situation right now where you have a spouse, a loved one, a friend, some sort of environment you’re in that is just not healthy, that’s ok. Remember, it’s there to shape you, to create you to the person you need to become to do the things you’re going to do. Without those challenges, you can’t grow.
So don’t wish for things to be easier, wish for you to be better. You see, fostering negative emotions, like resentment, is very much like drinking poison and then waiting for the other person to die. The truth is, most people don’t know how you feel. Now, you might broadcast it to the world, but that doesn’t change anything. It just harms you.
Get off the resentment bandwagon. Stop feeling so guilty about things. Let it go. Go to the higher part of your personality and your… the higher part of your spiritual being that is about the truth of life, which is nobody’s perfect. At some level we’re all broken.
So therefore it’s important to understand that forgiveness is an essential quality because if we’re all broken to begin with, that means we’re trying but we fail. We’re moving forward, but we get let down. That’s just part of the human experience.
Without going through those moments, we never recognize the good days. We don’t recognize the triumphs, the wins, the victories. Often what you’re holding onto has left the infectees or that person’s mind. They don’t remember, they don’t even know. But you might just be harboring on one idea or one sentence they said years ago.
You know what you need to say to yourself? You say your name. For example, Vaughan, I know you’ve been trying your best and you’ve let yourself down in the past, but that’s ok. I forgive me. I know that I’ve always been put in the right place at the right time despite how bad it’s been, and I’ve persevered and come through. I know that these challenges are there to grow me, not hinder me, and that next time I’ll do better. But I forgive myself.
You know, saying things like that is incredibly powerful. What I want you to do right now is just between you and yourself is to write down what you really are holding onto. Write down the negative things, write down all the stuff you feel like blaming for maybe the things that are happening in your life. And when you do that I want you to have a little ceremony.
I want you to take that little piece of paper outside after you’ve written that all out, and I want you to burn it. And as you do that, I want you to say to yourself, “I forgive this and I let it go. Go back to the universe.”
You know, there are rituals for a reason. They work. Go ahead, pause the video, and take care of that exercise right now. You’ll feel better for it.
Now, did you enjoy that exercise? You know, it’s so powerful when you give energy to releasing things back to where they should go. You see, when you try to hold onto ideas, when you try to hold on to things that aren’t serving you, it absolutely weighs you down. It blocks the good coming into your life. And for you to move into the second part of this exercise, which is forgiving others, you must have forgiven yourself. You must be willing to let go of the fact that you aren’t perfect, you’re going to make mistakes, you might’ve tried and failed. Everybody does. It’s all part of the process of reaching for perfection and striving for it, but understanding you’re not going to reach it. But that’s what’s going to push you to excel and build a beautiful life.
So now we need to forgive other people in our life. And this, this can be heavy and super hard for you. And I understand that, I get it. You know, I’ve had some terrible things happen in my own life, but when I relate it to maybe someone else’s, some people go through horrible situations. And yet, the power of forgiveness is what allows people to move forward.
See, what’s important to remember is what you feel towards somebody else is never going to change them. You can’t fix other people. They must be willing to fix themselves. You can’t do it for them. And how you feel that resentment, that guilt, that animosity towards that other person, it only comes back to you anyway. And that’s the life you have, you’ll reflect that.
So there’s no point having that feeling anyway, not to mention those negative feelings create problems in the body. You see, a body not at ease is in disease. That is not a natural way for you to actually live.
Now, the thing is about forgiving other people, is you need to stop harboring the idea to yourself. By doing that you give it power. You need to be able to articulate why you feel the way you feel. What happened in your life to make you feel this way? What is the situations that you’re holding onto? Was there something said when you were a child that’s affected you for 30 years, 20 years? Is it something that’s happening on a continual basis in your relationships? What is it in your life that’s going on right now that is making you feel the way you do? You have to be able to articulate it. If you can’t recognize it, you can’t let it go.
Now, please hear me right. This does not mean it’s ok for you to be mistreated. I’m not saying to be meek or weak or to sit back and just let it happen or be a martyr about life. I’m talking about recognize the situation, articulate it, see it for what it is, and then being willing to make the appropriate steps happen to not put yourself back in that situation and then being able to let it go and forgive it completely, to let go of it. But it doesn’t mean you have amnesia about the situation. Because pretending it didn’t happen, ignoring it isn’t realistic. It’s not the way you need to look at life.
Because depending on what it is that you need to forgive or let go, there might be some serious work you actually have to do on rebuilding yourself and rebuilding your own self image and your self esteem. You might even need professional guidance for it.
But the one thing you can do right now is heal yourself with the power of forgiving others. Now, here’s the other thing, you don’t necessarily need to reconcile with the other person to forgive either. You don’t need to confront them.
So if this happened with somebody who in the past may be dead now, you can still picture having a conversation with them and explaining how you feel and forgiving them anyway. There’s great power in that. Like I said, what you do in life affects you. So if you’re out there and you’re waiting for that person to come and say I forgive you, nuh uh. Even then, if you never got that apology, the fact that you have forgiven the situation, the person, or the event is actually going to make you feel better and heal you.
Now, if it helps, and it doesn’t hurt, confront the situation. There might be people in your life you actually do need to deal with. Get it done. Have the courage and faith. But, you know what? Always finish with saying, “You know what? We didn’t resolve this, but I forgive you and I love you.” And then you exercise all the stuff I outlined in the relationship video about distancing yourself and creating the environment around your life that’s going to produce the new results and to get the people in your life that are going to help you.
But please remember this, the more you start to serve the world, the greater your ability to forgive needs to be. Because you’re going to have people that will criticize you, they’re going to say things about you, they don’t even know you. Love them anyway and forgive them. Forgive them because they’re broken and they don’t know any better. But you do.
This is the real secret to having a real happy life. Now, another thing is too when it comes to looking at the transgressions or the problems that have happened in your life, sometimes you need to get a better perspective. And I say that with love. Because let’s face it, if you’re harboring on something that was said once or twice when you were a child, and I’m not talking about abusive things. I’m talking about something as simple as a family member or a parent putting you to the side for something else. And all of a sudden that moment you felt unloved. And now you’ve been carrying that with you for 30 years. You know that’s dumb. That’s very dumb.
And then to blame that on why you feel the way you are now, do you know you can forgive that situation, you have that ability. And by just giving the energy to forgiving it and realizing that in that moment my parents gave me what they have but they didn’t have enough, that’s ok. You know, there are things that I let people down on. That’s alright.
By forgiving that situation, you can get over it. But getting the right perspective is critically important. Because sometimes you might not be looking at things the right way either.
The bottom line is, you need to stop giving your power and energy to those negative emotions. And you need to start to forgive whatever the situation is, whether it was a friend, family member, a past event, or a circumstance. Forgiveness will bring you to a whole other level within your own life.
And always remember this, a life well lived is actually the best revenge you can ever get. But please don’t be taken advantage of. Stop being mistreated. Start setting expectations and boundaries for yourself and have the courage to act on them now. Create the environment you want, put systems in place for you to develop your own personal self, make sure you cut the ties of relationships that aren’t working, and that may be the hardest thing you ever have to do. Forgive any of the problems that have happened in your life, and you have a beautiful slate for you to write anything on for the remainder of your life.
And your life can be totally different. 5, 10 years from now you can look back and think, “I can’t even believe that was me.”
But it won’t happen by trying to drag the past into the future. You need to draw a line in the sand, forgive it, let it go, you don’t have to have amnesia, draw the lessons out of it, and then make sure whatever you do if you have to confront the people, get it done. Get it done with time, and then burn all the problems that you’ve had before. Write it down and burn them out. And by taking those necessary actions, you will feel so much better. And not only that, you’re ready for the next part of your life to be beautiful.
