(Didn't post this properly the first time.  Also needed a re-edit.) 440. Summary: How To Forgive Anyone Who Hurt You - A Powerful Trauma Release Exercise “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” -Luke 23:24          Forgiveness is a very powerful tool that can help you heal and reach new levels of consciousness and fulfilment in life.  This exercise is a template for how to heal any situation in which anyone has ever wronged you or hurt you in some way.        1) Pick a person and a situation you want to work on forgiving. Probably an immediate family member.  It can be a major or minor event, as long as there’s hurt, emotional baggage or lingering injustice.        2) Don’t start with something super heavy or traumatic.  This exercise can stir up a lot of repressed emotion and memories.  You should see a therapist for super heavy, traumatic stuff.          Forgiveness Meditation        (Meditation Begins at 7:27)        ○ Replay the memory as you’re listening to the guided meditation.  If the situation is really painful, you can relive the situation from a third-person perspective to get some emotional distance.        ○ Notice your true feelings towards this person as a result of this situation. You might love this person, but deep down there may be some suppressed resentment that you tried to ignore or never fully aired out.        ○ Don't try to act tough or pretend like you're invincible.  Allow yourself to feel the hurt.        ○ Notice the judgments you have.  How did he or she fail you?  What did you want from them that they failed to give you in this situation?        ○ Now ask yourself, do I want to forgive this person for this situation: yes or no?  If you don’t, that’s okay, but let’s look a little deeper. (14:00)          What does forgiveness mean here?    What are you saying yes or no to? Are you willing to let go of what they did to you without holding it against them in anyway anymore? Are you willing to let go of the hurt, the sense of injustice and the need to get even? Are you willing to stop demonizing them?  To understand the situation from their point of view? Are you willing to extend your mercy to that person? Why would you say yes to forgiveness?          Notice that your hate, resentment and judgment weighs you down in life.  Forgiveness will make you stronger.  Replay the situation in your mind, considering all these extra factors: Do you want to be a strong person or a weak person? Do you want to be a hateful person or a loving person? Do you want to continue being traumatized? Do you want to clear the air and maybe rebuild that relationship? You can hold on to that resentment until your deathbed, but is that really what you want?          Keep looking at this situation until you realize that you want to be strong and not small, which means you want to forgive.  So if you're still resisting, keep looking deeper and deeper until your mind realizes that forgiveness is the wisest course of action.        If you're unsure, be courageous and take a gamble.  After all, if you think the forgiveness was a mistake you can pick your resentment back up later.          The Five Reasons People Hurt You        Now let's look at the other person's point of view (22:19).  Deeply contemplate: why did this person hurt you? Notice that they didn't want to hurt you.        Most of the evil stuff people do is just action out of ignorance, fear, selfishness, the need for and lack of love, and lack of consciousness.  These are universal truths about human behavior that cover many situations.        1. Ignorance.  They were doing their best to do good, but given their limited capabilities the result wasn't good for you.  They were ignorant, so their best wasn't very good.  If they're in a low state of consciousness what they think is best for you might be the exact opposite.        2. Weakness and Fear.  If they did something nasty to you, it's probably because they were weak in that moment.  They succumbed to some kind of fear or temptation, therefore they hurt you.        3. Selfishness.        4. Lack of Love and because of that, a desperate desire to get love.  Deep down they were lacking in love and they wanted love from you, but because they're ignorant, selfish and weak they didn't know how to properly get the love they wanted.  Usually when somebody does something “evil” it's because they want love, but don't know how to get it except through selfish actions.        5. Lack of Consciousness.  This was not a high consciousness person. At that time and situation, if the person was in a more developed state, they would have behaved very differently.          If you still can't see this, keep replaying and contemplating the situation deeper until you see that this is true.        All people are seeking love in one form or another (31:50).  Can you see how in this situation this person was not being evil, but actually this person was trying to be good?  This person was seeking love in ignorant ways.  It might be in the form of money, sex, a relationship, a favour, a business opportunity, fame, pleasure, etc.  These are all just different forms of love.        You can't just assume that the person is identical to you and should have acted the way you would have.  To say “they shouldn't have done that”  ignores their entire life history.        People are different, so how you handle a situation is very different from how someone else might.  People have different strengths, weaknesses, genetics, upbringing, personality, capabilities, talents, experiences, resources, more money, less money, more status, less status, different gender.          The Struggle for Love is Universal       Now, bring to mind all of the times when you have acted out of ignorance, weakness, fear, selfishness, unconsciousness and a need for love.  (36:00)  Draw that direct connection, that commonality, between this person and yourself.        You weren't hurt because somebody wanted to hurt you. They were just acting out universal dynamics of human behavior.  So it's really not personal, and likewise you've done the same thing.        It might seem like, “shouldn’t it be obvious that this person hurt me?”  Not to that person, because they have a different world view.  They're so preoccupied with fulfilling their need for love that they’re unaware of the collateral damage of their actions.  That is ignorance and lack of consciousness in a nutshell.          Notice how in your life you try to be good most of the time (40:05). Almost never do you intentionally try to hurt others.  If you do it's usually accidental, out of ignorance of some kind.  Now apply this principle to this person in this situation.        Notice that when you do something “bad” in your life, you’re still fundamentally good.  The bad that you do is a mistake.  It's a failure, an oversight due to your weakness, fear and ignorance.  All you ever want is to be good. The problem is it’s difficult to be good.          Notice that this person who hurt you is also fundamentally good.  They are trying to be good, but doing it through their worldview.  Just like you, all this person ever wanted from life was love.  If they lied, cheated, manipulated or bullied you, it’s because they wanted love.        What we all have in common is that we're all struggling for love. Try to find that common thread between your behaviors and this person's behaviors and really all human behaviors.          We all fear.  We're all ignorant, selfish and unconscious to various degrees (43:00).  Granted, some are less ignorant and selfish than others, but why?  It’s because they’re born in different circumstances.  Your parents were born in a different time where it might have been much more difficult to survive, requiring them to be more blunt in their approach.        You know these limitations intimately, so you should be able to draw a deep, existential, common link between your struggles and the struggles of this person.  Fundamentally, the struggle is the same.  It just manifests itself in different ways.        How can you hold a grudge against this person for being desperate for love when you have been that way your entire life?  Are you willing to be so merciful, so strong that you even drop the need to get even?  Can you forgive a human for being scared, ignorant, unconscious, wanting love and for trying to be good but failing along the way?        A selfish, hurt person wants to get even.  A generous, strong person can extend mercy without needing to get even. The highest strength you can possess is to be hurt by another and to not need to retaliate, because you're secure in yourself.          A Chain of Hurt        Hurt people hurt people (48:20).  Notice that if you were hurt, the person who hurt you was probably hurt by someone else.  It's a chain of hurt.  So, are you willing to be strong enough to break this chain of hurt?  Or, are you going to be a link in this toxic chain and pass the hurt on to somebody else?        The people closest to you will get hurt the most by the hurt that you refuse to let go of.  When you don't forgive, that hurt bubbles up in unconscious, ignorant ways.  It affects your behavior and inadvertently hurts others, like your children, spouse and friends.        Do you want to infect others like a virus, or do you want to be strong, cut the chain and save somebody else from incurring your hurt?          A Conscious Choice        You have the option to make a conscious choice, but look at your options (50:45).  Do you choose to keep judging this person who hurt you and not forgive them?  If so, notice that you're choosing that out of weakness, selfishness, fear and ignorance.        On the other hand, you could choose to be selfless and good, to heal yourself and let go of this resentment.  To break the chain of hurt, in which case you choose consciousness, wisdom and love over fear.        Now that you’re aware of the consequences of your choices, you can make a conscious decision.  Do you want to choose fear and selfishness, or do you choose selflessness and love?  Don't feel forced here.  This has to be a conscious free choice.        Are you loving and selfless enough to embrace the one who hurt you?  People act out of fear and a need for love, and sometimes they'll cause collateral damage towards you.  Will you let that debase you or will you rise above that?          Weak or Strong?        Are you strong enough to love even when others are too weak to love you, or are you so weak that you're going to wait for others to love you before you extend your love to them (54:00).  Are you strong enough to be able to love without requiring your love to be returned back to you immediately?        Recognize that if you don't forgive you are being less than your highest self.  You are being less than you are fully capable of because you are capable of love.  If you reject this forgiveness you're doing so out of fear, the fear of what would happen if you loved somebody who hurt you or somebody who was ignorant.  This is the very same cycle that led to you being hurt in the first place by this person.        Right now you can consciously break this cycle of ignorance, so make your choice.  Whatever choice you make is fine—no judgments. If you still decide not to forgive, then that's just where you're at.          Forgive Yourself First        Before you can fully forgive the other person you must first forgive yourself (56:20).  Forgive yourself for all the times that you have been ignorant, selfish, fearful, unconscious and needy for love.  Forgive yourself for all the times that you have inadvertently hurt others.        Now why would you forgive yourself for this?  Because that's life!  Because life has put you in this existential bind where you have to survive and where you start life from total ignorance.  Survival is complex, counterintuitive and it takes trial and error to learn how to navigate life.  So, are you gonna judge yourself for having been born in ignorance?        Others are doing the same thing and this generates the full gamut of life, the highs and the lows.  So are you willing to forgive yourself for being ignorant and selfish and fearful and needy for love?  Why would you not?        If you're able to forgive yourself then notice that you simultaneously forgive the other person as well.  There's no difference between forgiving self and forgiving other.  You’re not just forgiving a specific situation.        You’re forgiving the general universal principles of ignorance, selfishness, fear, unconsciousness and craving for love.        These are much easier things to forgive when you frame it in this universal way, because these are like forces of nature.  It's sort of like forgiving gravity. Gravity is just a force of nature.  It's not personal.          People are Different        You might know how to cope with a situation in a healthy way but don't assume that others do.  (ep: Why People Seem Crazy) eg: Don’t assume that your parents or people from a prior generation to you have that kind of knowledge and wisdom.  Your parents couldn't just google how to cope with depression, alcoholism, etc.       They weren’t lucky enough to come across personal development, spirituality or awakening.  Your parents probably had to suffer through that for 40 years until they had you and then they transferred the hurt onto you because they didn't know better.        So, keep replaying this situation with this person until you realize that anything short of total forgiveness in this situation would be beneath you. You are too good and too strong not to forgive this person.  If any hurt remains keep going through this process, like a cycle. Just keep contemplating it deeper and deeper and deeper.  You may need to do this a few times.          Awakening and Forgiveness        There's an even deeper version of this exercise for those of you who had some degree of awakening.  If you haven’t had that this section might not make much sense (1:03:10).        At the existential level, the boundary between self and other is not real.  You can do this exercise again, but notice that the person you were hurt by is literally you.  So, you hurt yourself.  You have been resenting yourself.  You were both the hurter and the one who was hurt and the hurt that was felt.        Existentially, this hurt happened because both parts of reality, of consciousness, was asleep, divided and fragmented.  You merge yourself with the other and notice that you and other are one.  You finally reunite the two.  You notice that everything is You with a capital y, or God with a capital g.        Also, if you've become highly conscious, you know that reality, self and God are completely inevitable.  There's no other way that this situation could be, so what happened to you couldn't have been otherwise.  It was perfect, because it was necessary for your awakening, and for you to have further and deeper awakenings.        You can recontextualize this situation as necessary to make you more compassionate, to overcome the situation, forgive, let go, be merciful and realize a deeper form of yourself as love.  If you've had an awakening you know that you are love.  So, forgiveness is nothing other than you being love.        Love is the expression of the entire universe, such that no matter what happens it is love. There's absolutely nothing to forgive, because everything that ever happened to you was love, and at this point you have accepted yourself completely as what you truly are, which is love!        When you realize this, you go full circle.  You’re completely whole, healed and nobody can hurt you.  You look back and realize that nothing really hurt you, because it was all just necessary for you to learn a deeper form of love.  So who got hurt?        This last part here is some advanced stuff.  If this doesn't resonate with you, just keep working on the psychological level, that’s powerful enough by itself.   Future Practice        1) Do this exercise multiple times until you get the hang of it (1:09:40).  You can do a simplified version of it.  Basically, you’re drawing a commonality between the one who hurt you and you who got hurt.  You're bringing the two closer and closer until they merge into a unity that nullifies and cancels itself out.  It heals itself in unity.        2) Practice this on multiple significant people in your life (mother, father, siblings, ex spouse, partner).  Like those you were closest to in childhood, those who caused the most pain.  You have more people to forgive than you think.        3) Practice this on individual traumatic events. What happened with your father when you were 5 years old, 10 years old, 15 years old, 20 years old, etc.        It's also going to depend on how traumatic your childhood was.  The more ignorant, unconscious, fearful and selfish your parents were, the more trauma and hurt they transferred on to you inadvertently.  Therefore, the more work you're gonna have to do to let it all go, but also the deeper your lessons will be.        Don't think that if you have all this trauma that somehow you're in some terrible situation.  No, the upside to having a very traumatic childhood is that, although it was terrible, if you're able to overcome and heal it all, you will be so powerful, so much more powerful than a person who had it easy.  If you work through everything on your plate you can become really strong.          Invest in Your Future        Make this investment in the future of your life (1:12:40).  Doing all this forgiveness work should be enough to cauterize a lot of those old wounds.  If you focus, this can take as little as a week or up to a month.        Think of how much this is going to free up your life going forward.  It’ll free up your family and intimate relationships.  It'll make you more loving, easy going and peaceful.        Otherwise this trauma accumulates and doesn't get processed fully.  It robs you of energy, making you bitter, petty, depressed and cynical.  You’ve been so hurt by life that you lash out and want to hurt others, and that cycle perpetuates itself.          The Power of Understanding        Notice the power of understanding (1:14:30).  Draw a connection between how a deep, proper understanding of a situation removes all the baggage and enables you to heal.        If you think that reality is this terrible awful thing, that's simply because you lack a high enough, existential understanding of life and other people.  If you did, it would heal you and you would be loving.        God is mercy because God has infinite self understanding.  There's nothing left to forgive, because you completely accept yourself as what you truly are.  Which is the Truth, the Absolute and Oneness with the Universe.  When you're Everything, what is there to judge?  Resentment only exists within duality.  Anything you resent would just be you shooting yourself in the foot.        Realize that forgiveness is nothing other than self-love, self-acceptance, unity, truth and consciousness.  You're so conscious that you have nothing left to hate.  To reject the absolute, to reject the inevitable is insanity.          A Warning about Forgiveness        Don’t use this technique to tolerate some jerk who is actively abusing, mistreating or not appreciating you (1:18:00).  To keep excusing and suffering his abuse is a misuse of forgiveness.  You being loving doesn't mean you have to be someone else’s slave.  That’s a common misunderstanding.        Leaving a toxic relationship is love.  Acknowledge first that you're in an abusive relationship that’s not going to work out.  Muster the courage to leave and then you can practice forgiveness all you want, from a safe distance away from the abuser.        You can forgive yourself for getting into this terrible relationship.  You can forgive this boyfriend or spouse, but first you must recognize that there’s such a thing as physical and emotional danger.  You don't want to use forgiveness to maintain a bad, objectively unhealthy situation.        If this person is just totally selfish, abusive, blaming, unwilling to work on himself and communicate with you, you need to leave.  The most loving action here is to realize that this person is not right for you and this won’t work out.             Psychedelics and Forgiveness        Try doing this exercise while doing psychedelics (1:21:25).  Psychedelics raise your consciousness and open your mind to God, Love, to the ignorance that others are in and that you’ve been in your whole life.          Non-Duality is Not Nihilistic        Non-duality is not some dry, cold, philosophical nihilism (1:25:00).  With awakening you don't awaken to some bleak, nihilistic reality.  You awaken to love.  Enlightenment is healing.  You become complete, you become God, you become Love.  You become whole again.  Your birth was like a fracture in universal mind.  It gets put back together with enlightenment, or with death.        Reality is not this neutral thing that materialists and scientists have taught you to believe.  Buddhists also talk about reality being emptiness.  Of course love is emptiness, love is nothingness, consciousness is nothingness.  It's just that “emptiness” has a lot of bad connotations to it.  It's often confused with nihilism.  People who've never fully, deeply experienced emptiness don't understand that it's love.            That's the miracle of awakening.  Awakening is so good that you die by drowning in an ocean of infinite goodness.  Then you become nothing.  You become God.  What kind of sick, twisted universe would this be if it wasn't pure love?        The twisted, sickness of it wasn't in the universe itself.  It was in your perception of it.  So, when you unravel your ego you see reality as it is: just pure love. (ep: The Structure of Reality)          Why Work So Hard To Awaken? “But Leo, if awakening and death are the same thing, why work so hard to awaken?  I'll just wait to die and it'll be the same thing as working really hard for enlightenment today.”        So you want to live a miserable life for the next 50, 60, 80 years where you never see the infinite love that is all around?  That’s your life strategy? (1:30:00)        Imagine you were born an orphan, but had a 100 billion dollar trust fund.  People told you to check your trust fund, but you said, “that’s bs.  I'm gonna keep struggling and going to a minimum wage job.”  Then on your deathbed you finally check your trust fund and realize it had 100 billion dollars in it.  Then you die.  That would be the most tragic situation, but that's exactly what you're doing when you're postponing your awakening.        Every minute that you're not awake you're living through an unnecessary hell, not realizing the love that is all around you.  You could do that if you're a masochist.        So, what do you do after awakening?  You appreciate the love and then you radiate the love and you participate in the love and that's how life should be.  The problem is humans are so scared of love that they spend their whole lives running away from it.        God can't force the love on you. God can nudge you, but denial is a very powerful force.  As long as you're in denial about truth and full of fear and selfishness, even God himself cannot make you realize that it's all love.  You have to open your mind and let go of fear, hurt, frustration, bitterness and forgive yourself and others.  Then you will make yourself whole and you'll realize love.  That's the point of awakening.