Free Yourself From Blame & Resentment

The path to forgiveness begins with recognizing the ways we create separation and aspiring to not push anyone, including ourselves, out of our heart. In this opening session, we explore the definition of forgiveness and what keeps us holding so tightly to blame. The guided meditation will help you identify where you are creating separation and to set your intention to free your heart.

We learn to release blame and hatred by awakening the two wings of awareness: Mindfulness and Compassion. In this session, we begin to cultivate these wings by developing self-compassion. We look at the ‘trance of unworthiness’ and then explore a practice I call the ‘Yes’ meditation that helps undo the deep conditioning to contract in self-aversion.

Understanding causality and releasing self-blame are the necessary first steps towards true responsibility—the capacity to respond with compassion and wisdom to our life. In this session, we examine how self-blame deepens the grooves of harmful reactivity. The guided meditation will help you to see the suffering driving the behaviors you judge as ‘bad’ and enable a shift to relating to yourself with kindness.

This session moves forward with a full practice of self-forgiveness. It is based on a powerful and easy-to-remember tool that awakens self-compassion: the acronym RAIN. In this practice, you will create the foundations to open your heart and include all beings, without exception.

There are times when we are unable to access the self-compassion needed for self-forgiveness. This session explores how, if we get stuck in the conditioning of hatred or anger, we can reach out to a larger belonging and discover the loving presence that, in the moment, is difficult to access within. The guided practice will help you find a pathway to a source of loving that is larger than the small, separate, hurting self.

For self-forgiveness to be complete, we need to offer our sincere prayer, care and sometimes, active help to those who have been injured. This session guides us in offering our heart’s care where there has been injury, even if the person is no longer alive. The guided practice will support you in this very tender and healing process.

In this session, we move from self-forgiveness to extending our forgiveness to others. This process begins as we take full responsibility for our own feelings and bring a healing compassion to our own wounds. I call it the ‘U-turn’. The guided practice will help you make a healing shift from blame to tending to the wounded place inside you.

After learning to make the U-turn, we can find the inner resourcefulness to extend forgiveness. In this session, we bring all the previous steps together and explore the full practice of forgiveness: asking for forgiveness, offering forgiveness to ourselves and extending forgiveness to others. You will find this forgiveness practice to be a life practice, one of dissolving the armor that surrounds your heart.

In the same way that we can open our hearts in our personal relationships, we can be part of the awakening of hearts in our wider society. This session explores how we can learn to see past the mask of those who we don’t know, those we might consider as ‘bad’ other. The guided meditation will help you see the vulnerability in all beings that can awaken a heart of compassion.

This final session explores what it means to live with a forgiving heart. When our hearts are awake and inclusive, the light and love of the universe shines through us. We are manifesting our full potential. A beautiful expression of this awakened consciousness is the capacity to see the sacred as it lives through all beings. In the guided practice, you will explore seeing the goodness in others, seeing the humanness and realizing the space of loving awareness that is our shared source.