A powerful tool to aid self-forgiveness 5/23/2011 6:53:51 AM
Colin Tipping's new book “Radical Self-Forgiveness: The Direct Path to True Self-Acceptance”
is a powerful tool for gaining freedom from excessive inner criticism and self-sabotaging beliefs. Based on proven techniques from Tipping's world-renowned forgiveness workshops
he guides us through resolving our deepest inner wounds and invites us to heal and transform our lives. He says radical forgiveness is not about telling ourselves a new story about what happened. It's about creating a profound shift at the spiritual level.
Tipping's practical exercises help us discover that we are an amalgam of many selves and helps us get to know ourselves better. He says most of us have a huge amount of guilt and shame. Carl Jung called it the shadow. When the shadow is unrecognized we find enemies on whom to project our anger and self-loathing. When a person “pushes our buttons” we have the opportunity to recognize they are mirroring something in ourselves we have denied, repressed or projected onto them. When we drop our judgments we automatically reverse the projection and forgive ourselves. Self-forgiveness involves a compassionate embrace of ourselves as wrongdoers in spite of our natural feelings of guilt and shame.
Tipping's makes the distinction between ordinary forgiveness which appeals to our human self or ego and requires continued victim consciousness and radical forgiveness where forgiveness is automatic and immediate because it appeals to our higher self or Spiritual Intelligence. Our Higher Self is also call the I AM Self. The I AM Self knows that nothing wrong took place and everything is in Divine Order. The I Am Self is the part of us that remains connected to the Divine. It's also the “Observer.”
Tippings' tool for Radical Forgiveness takes us through five stages. We can do the work as a victim or a perpetrator. The five stages involve telling the story, feeling the feelings, collapsing the story, reframing the story and integrating the shift. The first three stages are similar to traditional forgiveness the last two involve radical forgiveness.
There are powerful exercises to help us get to know ourselves. They help identify our authentic, false, ideal, modified, lost, disowned, saboteur and sexual selves. He also has tools to identify appropriate and inappropriate guilt and identify, neutralize and transform shame-based core negative beliefs.
Tipping offers six fascinating paradigms to identify our religious and spiritual beliefs and shows how they impact our lives:
The scientific/secular/rational (forgiveness is a conscious decision).
The religious where the world is a continuous struggle between good and evil (forgiveness is not ours to bestow. We can ask God or Jesus on our behalf).
Being intellectually interested in spiritual ideas (understand forgiveness intellectually but find it hard to do).
View that life as a mystery to be understood, figured out and experienced (forgiveness is extending compassion).
See the earth as a school and life the curriculum (forgiveness and everything that happens has a spiritual purpose).
Seeing all of creation as perfect and divine and a part of the Godhead (everything is in perfect divine order. There is nothing to forgive).
Another potent Radical Self-forgiveness tool is the Three Letters Process. The first letter is written from the victim's standpoint, the second from the perpetrator's standpoint and the third is a reframe written from our I Am Self. This is where we recognize what we did was meant to happen and declare our understanding that there is nothing to forgive on a spiritual level.
Tipping says we have three types of intelligence that enables us to function in the world. They are mental, emotional and Spiritual. Mental intelligence is located in the brain and is responsible for all our cognitive activity and the rational mind. It includes our thoughts, ideas, concepts, paradigms and theories. Emotional intelligence springs form the heart and guides our emotional responses to life – such as love, fear, guilt and pleasure. It also tells us when we are lying or in denial. Mental and emotional intelligence emanates from the ego. Spiritual intelligence comes from the World of Spirit and Universal Intelligence (God). Unlike the other two it operates below the level of awareness. Spiritual Intelligence guides us on our spiritual journey and helps us move towards growth and healing. It is not bound by time and space. The tools of Radical Forgiveness are designed to activate our Spiritual Intelligence.
There are also worksheets for the two forms of apology (the ordinary and a Radical apology) and a Radical Self-Acceptance Worksheet. The Radical Self-Acceptance Worksheet helps us recognize our shadow when we see what people mirror back to us. It's called the “If you spot it, you've got it” principle.
Tipping says in spiritual terms everyone is doing what they are supposed to be doing – sometimes for reasons known only to Spirit.
This is a life-changing book.
