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Welcome all of you. 

Forgiveness is hugely valuable to you. It’s one of the most empowering things you can do for yourself and for the world. It’s liberating, it frees you. 

Now, of course, you have heard people say, “I can never forgive this deed or that person.” And perhaps on occasion you’ve been in that situation yourself or close to it. You felt that something has happened, that maybe it’s not quite you can never see yourself forgiving it, but it’s hard for you to see how you possibly could. There’s a rawness, a pain, a depth of pain perhaps, that really feels as if it could prohibit any kind of forgiveness. So I’ll talk about the process of forgiveness shortly, but first of all, to continue with this encouragement to recognise that forgiveness is one of the most useful things that you can do. 

You, as humanity, are emerging from quite a prolonged period in which it is as if you’ve been wading through quite dense energies. It’s not been easy for humans. Much of the density comes about through misunderstanding. When you’re in a dense environment, it’s not easy to see far, and so you have tended, collectively, to see your experiences through a comparatively narrow keyhole. It’s been difficult to see the wider picture, and that’s part of the reason why unforgiveness arises. There’s a feeling that there are people getting away with, metaphorically or indeed literally, murder, and something within you says well, I need to hold this person to justice and the only way available to me is to lock myself into a mode of unforgiveness, hitch myself to this person with the shackles of unforgiveness and I will follow them through eternity, shackled in this way, so that somehow or other, someplace or other, justice will be served, a more absolute justice than this world seems to offer me: doing me that kind of an emotional motivation, very strong, not always easy to release. 

But, as you can tell from the words that I’m using about this connection of unforgiving, you are locking yourself into a fixed relationship with another being. You’re curtailing your freedom. You’re limiting your freedom of movement. And some part of you may come back and say, “Well, that’s worth it if, it curtails the freedom of this wicked person’s movement as well, I don’t mind.” So here’s another misunderstanding. Don’t try and do the Universe’s job. If justice needs to be served, understand that that person you’re having difficulty forgiving will absolutely ensure that she or he brings the world back into balance, that there is an appropriate action or reaction for the action that was taken that you have found hard to forgive. There will be a balancing. You may not see it. It may not be within this lifetime. It may look to you as though this person has got away with it, whatever it is. Just looks that way. 

Understand that you all come from the Source of All. You have built into the fabric of your being an the absolute understanding of what we might call balance In this Universe it’s often called karma, the law of cause and effect. You come into this world to explore it. It’s there with you all the time through every day. In terms of the physical interpretation of the world, Newton addressed it beautifully when he said ‘to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction’. The person who has wronged you or someone you love, or whoever, will sooner or later address that, at what is the perfect time for you and for the Universe. And that perfect time is none of your business. Learn to trust. 

Every time you experience difficulty in forgiving another, you are locking yourself into the energies that you’re in the process of leaving behind. So you’ve been moving through time, through dense, dense energies: that is to say, energies where there is less flow than you are capable of experiencing, and forgiveness is a very good way of freeing up those energies to a greater state of flow. And so that, in terms of moving out of the old way of knowing yourself, the old world that you’re leaving behind, one of the most powerful tools that you have is simply forgiveness. 

Now, so far I’ve spoken of forgiveness as being about you and relationship to another or others in relationship to others. But of course, surprise, surprise, what applies to your relationship with others is absolutely there in your relationship with yourself. You are not as yet, as you know yourselves, fully integrated beings. That’s to say, you are a tapestry, a patchwork. You’re made up of many strands woven together, and that’s beautiful. And part of the job, you might say, that you took on in coming to be human was to find ways of getting all of these different strands, these patterns, these colours that make up the being you are, into harmony with one another. And anything you can’t forgive within yourself – you are delaying that process. You are locking two parts or more parts of yourself into a fixed relationship with each other. They want to get in harmony. That’s their underlying wish. You’re blocking it. You’re saying, “No, I can’t forgive myself for that, that terrible mistake I made years ago, or that awful thing I said to my neighbour yesterday. I can’t forgive myself.” Get on with it. Forgive yourself just as quickly as you can. 

As I say, I’ll come on to how in a moment. So see this, first of all, structurally. It’s not about bad things, bad deeds. It is about locked relationships. Locked relationships don’t serve you. They hinder you and, as I mentioned earlier, sometimes it might feel, “Well, I’ll pay the price if it means that the other person who I can’t forgive suffers a bit.” But what happens if that other person learns to forgive themselves? That’s like you’ve been holding them tight by their collar. You know, you’ve got them by the collar, “You’re going to suffer for what you did.” That person, he, she forgives themselves. They slip out of the coat, they’re free. You’re left weighed down by this heavy, empty coat. They’re gone. You’re stuck. So it doesn’t work. And that might be the simplest way of telling yourself the value of forgiveness: that unforgiveness doesn’t work. It doesn’t do what it says on the tin. It promises abiding suffering for the person who’s hurt you. It doesn’t do it. 

Okay. So let’s say now you’re choosing to forgive. How? As I’ve said, it’s not necessarily easy when you’ve felt great pain, either directly yourself, on behalf of another, perhaps. First thing here I would say about forgiveness is: you can’t really fake it and therefore it’s really useful to be patient with yourself. You may find that there have been some events in your life that it’s just hard to come to terms with, that perhaps happened decades ago and you still find yourself coming back with a feeling of anger or distress or ‘I can’t forgive that’. If so, understand that that situation still has something for you to learn. So you may find that some of the most difficult situations you’ve endured in your life, that you’ve experienced, that you’ve been through – some of the most difficult are packed with gifts in fact, but that you can only come to those layer by layer by layer by layer, a little bit like sucking a gobstopper with many colours, you know. Each layer you lick off reveals another colour, another potential, another discovery; and it’s too hard to just crunch through it, But with patience, observing each colour as you lick the colour above away, eventually it dissolves. Nothing left. Your gob is free again. So patience, very, very valuable, along with what I’ve just been mentioning this sense that anything that you find hard to forgive has got a gift in it for you. It’s showing you something about yourself. 

And so, if we look from another level, briefly, what’s been going on? Why has this situation happened in the first place? Co-creation. Whether you like it or not, you and the other person or the other people involved co-created this situation and one way of understanding why is that there is something in it that is teaching you something that you have chosen to discover more about. If you use the useful idea of yourselves being on some kind of journey home, or journey into a oneness, or journey of reconnection with Source, or journey into a fuller realisation of yourself – there are so many different ways of talking about this – but if you consider it as that kind of a journey that you’re engaged in, how far are you going to get without forgiveness? It stalls you. You can’t experience oneness with a being you can’t forgive, so that you might therefore say that any situation that you co-create in which there is an element of unforgiveness – something has happened, something has been done that you’re having difficulty forgiving – then, that’s showing you where there is a rigidity within you, an inability to accept. You’ve created a boundary. You can’t enter oneness if you’ve got boundaries. 

So, you may find it useful to look at it from this kind of viewpoint. This thing, this person, I find so hard to forgive, this is a kind of co-creation we have made, something we’ve done together. “What is it teaching me? What can I learn from it? Where is there a hardness in my heart that this can help me to soften?” And you are likely to find that that hardness in your heart this situation is giving you an opportunity to soften is a place where there is something about you that you don’t like, that you really don’t like. And again because of the limitations of this reality in which you’re living, the sense of a fog or a sickness of the energy, it may be quite difficult for you to decipher what it is you don’t like. If we speak in terms of previous incarnations, you may find that what you don’t like in yourself is a legacy from long ago, some other lifetime entirely. You don’t actually carry with you right now the details of what it was. There’s just this lurking feeling, which will be a self-accusation, “I did something that I can’t forgive and therefore I have manufactured, I’ve co-created with another, a mirroring situation. Something similar, that helps me to learn how to forgive myself for that. 

I mentioned karma. It’s very precise. It doesn’t mean that what you do to another is exactly replicated mirrorwise back to you. It’s more subtle than that, but it’s very precise. Karma actually gives you many, many opportunities, and one of the reasons I counsel you to leave other people’s karma to them. Deal with your own stuff, never mind other people’s. They’ll deal with it when they’re ready. One of the reasons I counsel that is that you don’t at the moment have (this is no criticism: it’s the nature of the reality in which you find yourselves or have been in), you don’t have the breadth of vision to be able to tell whether a particular karma has been balanced or not, and so if you begin to take that on into your own hands, what you can get (and this has been a complexity of the earth plane and one of the reasons why I encourage forgiveness so much), what you can get is a kind of echo chamber. Someone has done you wrong, so you want “I’m not forgiving that, I want my revenge”, not appreciating that it may be that what was done to you that you hated was actually already your karma for something you did before. So you’re setting up an echo chamber, karma ricocheting back and forth, making the energies of the earth plane denser and denser. Liberate yourself from that. Forgive at the first opportunity. Don’t fake it. You can’t. So be kind to yourself. If it takes a while, it takes a while. 

Let’s look in a little bit more detail at how you said about it. Be kind to yourself. That’s going to help. Appreciate that in any given situation where you’ve had difficulty forgiving (as I say, it’s a co-creation) and in that situation, actually, there’s a simple rule of thumb, a really fundamental truth: appreciate that everyone, including you, was doing the best they could at that time. That’s an important clause: at that time. There are many things that you can look back on in your life that you may well regret, perhaps even to the extent of finding it hard to forgive yourself. But remind yourself that at that time, in that moment, you were doing the best that you could. Sure, you would do differently now, because you’ve learnt, you’ve grown. That’s great. Well done. At least some of the lessons of that event you’ve taken on board. 

And do your best to move away from the notion of good and bad. It’s quite tempting, this good and bad idea. You want to be the good guy, you want the other one to be the bad guy if it’s a question of having difficulty forgiving them It can be some comfort, a sort of reassurance. Something bad has happened, something bad has been done to you or someone you love, and you can say well, at least I’m better than that person. No, you’re just another person, just another one come forth from the Source of All to explore what being is. 

The behaviours that you find hard to forgive are those you find most, in a sense, distasteful. You know, they don’t match how you wish to be, and so I think it can be helpful, as you look at forgiving yourself, or indeed another, but certainly when forgiving yourself, to remind yourself that, potentially at least, you may be really capable of the very worst things you can imagine, and not to be frightened of that. Just to know you could doesn’t mean that you will. On the contrary, sometimes it can be the case that those who are most frightened of the terror of their potential are sucked into living it out. It’s the only way they can get to come to some kind of terms with it. Some poor small child within screams with horror as it observes what they’re doing, but somehow out of that comes a realisation ultimately that, “Okay, I don’t need to do that, I don’t need to live in that kind of world.” 

You’re not only yourselves, you are a collective consciousness. So this can be another way of understanding that you’re capable, really, of anything that you see in another, because you are part of that collective consciousness. You’re not separate from those you have difficulty forgiving. 

Your compassion is hugely powerful. When you don’t forgive, you lock the other person in. It makes it much slower for them to learn what they need to learn. And you’re in this together. This process of evolution you’re engaged in is not (whatever people say), is not about some of you elevating yourselves beautifully into a higher state of consciousness and leaving the rest behind. You’re all one. As you grow, you may spread out, just as people running a race spread out. If it’s a marathon, big spread perhaps, but even those who are walking, they’re going to get there. Don’t try and leave your sisters and brothers behind. They’re with you, they’re one with you. And when you can feel compassion for someone who’s wronged you or wronged someone you love, or wronged people you care about, or done deeds in the world that you consider terrible, your compassion liberates you first of all, and it helps them to move on from those patterns of behaviour. Unforgiveness locks them into those patterns. So in forgiving, you benefit enormously yourself, and part of the deal of forgiving is you learn that you are willing to let the other benefit too. You’re not going to try and hitch yourself over the wall by trampling the villain underfoot. “I’m better than you. It’s fine for me to tread on you in order to reach the Promised Land.” No, it isn’t. Don’t do it. And of course it’s tempting. Don’t be hard on yourself, if a flash of anger or rage arrives as you witness an action or hear spoken things that you consider insanely detrimental to the human condition. You’re all in it together. You’re all just doing the best you can. 

So you benefit when you forgive – the forgiver. And forgiving the unforgiven benefits them, but in benefiting them you’re benefiting yourself also, because you’re helping all of this stuck energy to move. You’re liberating yourself from wading through mud. You just don’t need to do it anymore. 

The nature of time in your world is changing, and forgiveness is part of how that happens. Unforgiveness is all about stretching time out. It’s getting hooked up with a deed that belongs in the past and keeping a rigid connection to that in the present, with the intention of keeping it on into the future. You’re locking time down. When you forgive, you’re gathering that energy that you’ve thrown away into the past and are throwing forward into the future. You’re giving it back to yourself in the present. You’re giving yourself a present of the present. Do it, so you liberate huge amounts of your energy when you forgive. You become empowered and you’re releasing yourself from the drama of the world. 

The drama of the world is highly addictive, quite hypnotic. Mesmerizing, watching the world and feeling somehow that you’re powerless to address, beyond the most superficial ways, the problems of the world. You are not powerless. You are never powerless. You never have been, you never will be. It’s an illusion, if you tell yourself you’re powerless. It is true that as yet you do not fully know the nature of your power, but that’s a different thing altogether and, as I’ve said, forgiveness is one of the finest ways of bringing your power back to yourself, and as you do so, you discover more of what it is. It comes into the present moment and says hello to you, and it becomes so much easier for you to then send a loving, compassionate, benign energy out into the world that helps all those who are stuck in harmful patterns of behaviour. They choose;  they have free will. But you’re offering. You’re offering them help, instead of tying them with fetters of steel. You’re reaching out a hand and you’re , “I can help if you like. I’m here.” You’re not forcing anything. Relationship stays fluid, but the offer is there. Good. Thank you very much for listening. Goodbye for now. Go well.