Forgiveness Made Easy: Learn to Forgive and Release Toxicity for Mental and Emotional Well-Being with Barbara J Hunt

Jennifer Norman:

Welcome to The Human Beauty Movement Podcast, everyone. My name is Jennifer Norman. I am your host.

Now, I would love to tell you all about what is going to be spoken about today. This is a topic that is such a triggering point of conversation for us all. It is the topic of forgiveness.

I have a wonderful specialist who is joining me on the show. This is Barbara J.Hunt. Barbara is a forgiveness specialist. She's a speaker, she's a workshop leader and a bestselling author of Forgiveness Made Easy. She has over 30 years of experience in personal and spiritual development. She's a mentor, a coach and a group facilitator. She leads online forgiveness field workshops and courses on mental and emotional well being. She works in private practice internationally and on bespoke retreats in rural Somerset in the UK. Barbara is also a musician and a singer songwriter, and she's recorded several CD albums and singles, including her song for International Peace. Her newest album and her next book are due to be released this year. Welcome to the show, Barbara.

Barbara J Hunt:

Thank you, Jennifer. Thank you, everyone.

Jennifer Norman:

Oh, it looks lovely there where you are in the UK.

Barbara J Hunt:

It's green and damp. How we have our summers.

Jennifer Norman:

We all love the UK and it's very familiar for that. And I'm in Los Angeles where it's not so green anymore, but it's soon to be damp because we're due for a hurricane this coming weekend. So we'll all brace ourselves. But let's talk about the hurricane in most people's lives, which is somebody does somebody wrong and sometimes we feel like we can never forgive that person. How in the world am I going to forgive that person? First of all, how in the world did you get into this work? It's so intriguing.

Barbara J Hunt:

It is actually quite I think it's quite an interesting way in because a lot of people who talk about forgiveness and teach it, they have a big event that happened and sometimes it's something that they've had to get over and they've worked through it, or sometimes it's happened spontaneously by some kind of amazing grace. And my interest began when I was taking a personal and spiritual development course called the Mortar Life Program back 30 years ago, in fact, 31 years ago now. And they had us engage with our resentments. So we were invited to write down the names of all the people that we thought we held some kind of grievance. Again, so this wasn't a really big thing. Some people did have big events in their lives, but we were invited to lower our bar, which I did. And I thought, well, probably pretty much everyone I've ever met to some extent or another. So I started writing my list of people that I was holding a little grievance against, and I got to number 36 and I thought, yep, probably resent my mom as well.

Barbara J Hunt:

And what was interesting about that was that she was ill so from about 15 until when I was 30, she had multiple sclerosis. And it was quite a shock and a revelation for me to admit that I was resenting her for something that wasn't under her control.

Jennifer Norman:

Right.

Barbara J Hunt:

And so that sort of opened up the door for me to have more of an attitude about everyday forgiveness. And we were encouraged to take forgiveness on as a practice, a bit like a meditation practice or a yoga practice. And for me, so that is something that I consistently done for the last 31 years. And I have a little list in the back of my journal and if I'm noticing that I'm carrying a resentment and I want to clear it up, I write it down, I take the time to do the practice and then I clear it off my list. So it's like an ongoing thing. And the way I like to describe it is forgiveness is really a practice where you're deciding to choose to not hold your ill will. And before we go any further, I'm going to use a really specific definition because this might really help.

Jennifer Norman:

Yeah.

Barbara J Hunt:

This came from one of my original teachers who said forgiveness is the absolute refusal to hold ill will against someone for what they did or didn't do. And I'll repeat it because it's quite long. Forgiveness is the absolute refusal to hold ill will, a grudge, a gripe, a grievance against someone for what they did or didn't do. And the best way to describe it is to kind of like is to see it a bit like this. So we gather all these sort of like the things against the other people in our lives and we're carrying them in our hearts.

Jennifer Norman:

Barbara, for those who can't see, who are just listening and streaming, is gathering everything around her. She's got pencils, she's got a case of goodies, she's got a water bottle. Okay? So she's got her hands full of all of these things and she's holding them, she's clutching them to her.

Barbara J Hunt:

And so the refusal to hold the ill will is under my control. So the absolute refusal looks like this.

Jennifer Norman:

Putting everything down, moving it away and clearing your hands, clearing everything away from you. Yeah.

Barbara J Hunt:

And that's what's amazing about choosing to have a practice of forgiveness because it means that it's not dependent on whether somebody else apologizes or takes responsibility or tries to make amends. It's you. And you choosing what you want to keep in your heart, which is automatically incredibly empowering to you because it's not dependent on the other person.

Jennifer Norman:

Right. Forgiveness is really for you, not necessarily anything about the other person. So if you say to that person, I'm never going to forgive you, the metaphor is like drinking poison and hoping that the other person will die. And so you're holding all of that toxicity, all of that ill will, that resentment, and harboring it and keeping it with you in an energy which is debilitating and it's rippling and crushing.

Barbara J Hunt:

Yeah, exactly. And some of the reasons why we find forgiveness so hard so there are two things that happened. Two of the reasons why we find forgiveness so hard is that we don't notice that we're carrying all of this. We're not aware of it. We're also not aware the poison is in our bloodstream. We think the other person is wrong. And so therefore, the etymology of the word resent comes from sentia to feel. So it means re feel it, to feel it again.

Barbara J Hunt:

So you're having all those feelings going round and round inside your system.

Jennifer Norman:

It's true.

Barbara J Hunt:

Yeah, within you.

Jennifer Norman:

It's as if it's happening right at that moment. Your body doesn't know the difference.

Barbara J Hunt:

Exactly. It's a very good point. And also, one of my other favorite quotes besides the poison one is carrying resentment is like setting yourself on fire and hoping the other person will be bothered by the smoke. And I really like that one because you get a real sense that they're not even in the fire with you. You're hoping the smoke will waft in their direction. And like you said, the reason why we need to forgive is because it frees us, it frees our hearts and means that we can resolve things that we think we can't resolve. And that's the power of it. So just to finish, my thought was one of the things that occurred to me was the potential power of forgiveness.

Barbara J Hunt:

It feels like when you do take it on as a practice and I like to think of forgiveness as what mindfulness and meditation is for the mind, forgiveness is for the heart. Like a secular ethics practice. You don't have to have spiritual beliefs, you don't have to have a religious context. You just have a desire that you don't want to carry those feelings inside of you anymore. And I could see the potential. And there have been lots of studies about the power of forgiveness. Lower cortisol levels, improved heart health, lower blood pressure, all of these. And even there was one study that I learned about earlier this year where the trajectory of how fast a melanoma metastasized was lowered in the people who forgave.

So it has amazing potential in terms of healing. And so that got my interest, like the amazing potential. Because if you imagine, like, everybody decided to do their forgiveness work, so we'd do like a summer of forgiveness. So every human being makes their list. They work through their things that they need to forgive. We would come out into a completely different world. So I love the potential. And then you have to ask yourself, so why don't we? Why aren't we doing it?

Jennifer Norman:

Yes, it's so true. Because I feel that once something is done to you, a lot of people take that so personally. They take it as an embodiment about feeling as though they've been wronged, feeling the victim and they hold on to that identity of victimhood and that is a debilitating circumstance. It's putting you under this feeling that others are more powerful than you are and they're taking something from you. If we can move from victimhood to victory, then we feel much more empowered. We get on top of things, we liberate ourselves to live our own lives free of the shackles of those emotions. Which to your point, can be so detrimental to our health because of all of the physiological reactions that occur when we're feeling in that way.

Barbara J Hunt:

Yeah, exactly. And there are reasons why we hold on to our resentment. And again, quite a lot of this is going on underneath. If you imagine an iceberg, we have our conscious beliefs and our actions and then a lot of what goes on underneath is we're holding on to resentment because it protects us. We don't necessarily know we're doing that and that's why the idea of letting go of our ill will can feel so exposing and so vulnerable that we don't want to do that. We'd rather hold the resentment and feel some kind of power. And I think the way that forgiveness has been taught has been quite directive. If you like, like you should forgive if you have come from some kind of a spiritual upbringing, you should forgive the people who hurt you and do good to exactly.

But without taking into account the fact that your resentment may have served you well, especially when you are little, something happens to you when you're a child and you don't have any power and you don't have any agency. Resentment can feel like you do. It can feel like it covers your heart, protects you until hopefully you get the right circumstances and the right support to be able to do your forgiveness work. Which is the most beautiful healing because what tends to happen is we might talk about what happened but there isn't a resolution. And the way I work, especially with one to one sessions, is in a way that helps to clear the memory and means that you're restored back to before it happened. And it's very powerful. It's like I don't want to say magic, but it's a very powerful healing modality because often this represents a grief. And when I often say that forgiveness and grief are like sisters, they come together.

So often when we're doing our forgiveness work, actually what we're doing is we're grieving the things that we didn't get, particularly when we're younger. That's why I love the Brad Brown definition of somebody holding ill will against someone for what they did or didn't do. Because often it's the things we didn't receive. We didn't receive praise or we didn't receive encouragement. Adults around us maybe weren't tuning to what we needed or maybe we didn't receive attunement there's all these different things that we might not have received and we hold grievances about what we didn't get. And what's interesting about that is if you're not being adored when you're tiny, I think there's a part of us that's bewildered. Think about what babies are like. They're just like, love me, I'm so gorgeous, snot down their faces and covered in food.

And they have this sort of this sense they somehow deserve to be adored. And I'm always fascinated by the fact that that is in us. So if we have unkind or abusive treatment from the adults around us, we're very confused. So we think, well, it must be me, it must be something that I'm doing wrong, because we don't have the mental capacity to think that maybe the people around us are doing the wrong things. And I often try and remind my clients about that because it's so precious to know that we have that part of us. Like, the true north knows that we are worthy and we're whole and we're complete no matter what kind of treatment we get.

Jennifer Norman:

Right. And I feel like there is this situation where a lot of us feel like if something happens, they might not say anything about it, but they're keeping score. It's almost like they're ticking off boxes and saying, oh, you did that to me. Oh, you did that to me. And they might not say it. Yes, you're keeping a list. And then all of a sudden it kind of gets to the place where it's the straw that breaks the camel's back and then a floodgate opens up about things that have happened years ago that you've still been harboring resentments about. And the other person is like, what are you talking about? That was a million years ago. Are you still holding that? It's true.

Barbara J Hunt:

Exactly. And that's why if we keep it's like pegs that we're hanging all the different misdemeanors on, if we have the hooks psyches are in our hearts, that's what gets those new things will get hooked onto those old resentments. Which is why it's worth doing your practice to clear those things. And often the resentments that we hold are much more to do with us and our interpretation of what happened. And not really about the thing necessarily, it's about our interpretation of what happened. As I think Gabor Mate says, trauma is not what happens to you, it's your response to what happens.

Jennifer Norman:

What happened. Yep. Everything that happens in life is neutral. Your reaction to it is everything. And there is this phrase which I like to use, which actually liberated me, which is, if something happens, I have a choice. It's a distinct mindset to say, because this happened, I can be bitter or I can be better, and I choose to be better. And it's just as simple as that for me. And it's really been so, so vital, so helpful for me all these years because it's like, I don't want to be that begrudging, bitter person that people don't want to be around because I'm holding all of this negative energy.

I want to be the person that just feels free to be themselves. And if something happens that's not because of me, it's because of the circumstance or somebody else is having a bad day.

Barbara J Hunt:

Yeah, I love that rather to be better rather than bitter. I think the other place where forgiveness can get a bit sticky is where we don't stand up for ourselves. Because it may be that we can do the reframe inside of ourselves, but it also may be that you need to take somebody to court or you need to have a conversation with them and back to this sort of sense of like you've got all these pencils.

Jennifer Norman:

In my little, shall I say?

Barbara J Hunt:

Sometimes you need to have a conversation about one really important thing. The rest is just I resent you for that and that and that. But this is the important thing that we actually do need to discuss or maybe we need to have a mediated discussion. Maybe we do need to end our relationship. So forgiveness is not about just saying it's okay, it's not condoning unacceptable behavior. Abuse is never acceptable. You might be able to find a reframe on what happened and with the right support you can heal. But at the same time that's still we say wrong but because people don't really like that but actually an immoral act.

There's never going to be a time where sexual abuse of children is acceptable. Just never. So forgiveness isn't about saying that is okay, it's saying I am not going to hold my ill will against the person who was a violator. I'm choosing to let that go from my heart and it isn't easy and you do particularly in those kinds of cases, you do need support to work through that with somebody who can help you. Quite a lot of the things on your forgiveness list, little things, you can clear those off. Helicopters was one of mine recently because I live in the countryside and there were lots of helicopters. So I put them on my forgiveness list, did my forgiveness work and then I definitely was less triggered when they flew over.

Jennifer Norman:

Interesting.

Barbara J Hunt:

That's the magic of forgiveness. I always talk about it's a bit like velcro. So if you've got lots of hooks, you get hooked. Whereas if you make yourself more like teflon or an icy sheet, things don't hook you in the same way. So that helps you to be a liberated human being who can then use their energy. Because sometimes people say, oh, you need anger to be able to do things in the world, you need to create things in the world. And sometimes action does come out of anger but you don't get up and take the kids to school because you're angry. There are other things that motivate you and you can choose to, rather than resenteer, resend all that bad feeling inside of you.

You can use it to make changes in the world and that's the power of releasing your resentment. You can become more of an activist or a change maker or an influencer when you choose to do have a different attitude towards your resentment.

Jennifer Norman:

Yes, some people will say forgive and forget. Some people will say forgive but never forget. And so where would we fall on the spectrum of forgiving and then forgetting?

Barbara J Hunt:

Well, I think ideally if you're not hooked by something, it's like forgetting but again, you don't want to necessarily if you were in danger you do want to be able to remember when that happened. I needed to move my body out of danger. There's definitely an argument for remembering those things. I think it's different from having like a wire that's still live that when you touch it you get an electric shock as opposed to a wire of something happened. These events were true in my life. Those things did happen but they're not alive anymore, they're not causing pain. I sometimes talk about having splinters in your arm. It's like if you've still got a splinter in there, it's still painful when you touch it and the only way to stop it hurting is if you actually get the splinter out and then it doesn't hurt anymore.

Jennifer Norman:

Right root cause. Going deeper, I find, is always a very helpful practice. And I'm sure that you do a lot of that with your work, with your clients as well. Rather than being mad because something happened or somebody did something, gaining a little bit more perspective about putting yourself in that person's shoes, developing a bit of empathy, developing a bit of more understanding and context for why that person may have done what they've done or that it was just an accident and something that was beyond anybody's control. It becomes a little bit easier to soften the heart, shall I say, and also moving from a place where you're just fearful of that person or fearful of that situation, and then fear, I think, and grieving and all of those kind of negative energies do cluster together. And rather than having that persuade you into action because it's essentially moving you, you can say, I'm choosing to come from a place of love and from a place of understanding and make your actions always inspired action rather than reaction.

Barbara J Hunt:

Absolutely and it's a delicate balance and when I work one to one with clients, I do this in group fields as well so I host online group forgiveness fields where we do our practice together. It's like a dojo online to do our forgiveness practice. But when I work one to one exactly what you've described, where you take the position of the other person, that is a key moment in the process where you are allowed to express from their point of view and that point often people have a real epiphany about they didn't know better, they couldn't have done better. And sometimes there's another maneuver which comes from the peace negotiator William Uri, where he calls it going to the balcony. So you take a higher position. And I say it's a bit like the story of Scrooge, when you're letting the person be taken up by the ghosts of past, present and future. And then they're looking down at their lives and they can see with equanimity and clarity and compassion the damage they did, the impact that they had, and take full responsibility for what happened. And that can be a very pivotal point in the process to help people get from speaking out their full extent of their resentment, which is the beginning part, where you just let yourself just say things that you need to say that you may never have said or you may have said, but you maybe felt like the other person hasn't heard.

And all of this is done in your imagination, very important that you don't do it face to face with the other person. And just like I said with this, occasionally after you've done your forgiveness process, you may need to have a conversation and you talk about the thing that's important. But most of it, like you said, all the things that we resent someone for, they're ours, they're our personal interpretation, they may be our misinterpretation. And so the other person, I think it's hard, most people don't like getting feedback, they don't like getting negative feedback, they don't like getting criticism. And so it's really hard to hear someone's long terade of resentment. So that's why I don't ever recommend that people do it face to face. Although, having said that, there are amazing projects called restorative justice process where you are meeting the perpetrator and it's a mediated meeting and it's a long process, but you actually do get to have a mediated meeting with the perpetrator, which is incredibly powerful. But most of the work that I do is in the realm of the imaginal with my clients.

Yeah, just as powerful.

Jennifer Norman:

I was actually just going to bring up the topic of justice because I think that once you feel like it is a win lose situation and say, for example, you do go to court or you go to mediation and you feel that you've won, are you still able to release that energy? Is that really satisfying to you? In some cases it's not, because there's still that underlying work to be done. And even though a situation like that, which might be isolated to one case has carried with you, there may be many others. To your point of having a list of all the people that you've been holding grievances against, think about how that might have been a culmination of other grievances in your life. So I think that it is it's a very interesting practice to sit down and think about how you may have been victimized or playing the victim or holding grudges grievances resentment against anybody else in your life. And then choosing to do the work, to really empower yourselves, to get free of that feeling of being under the thumb, feeling that you are in control of your own life. Even though these situations have happened in the past, there's one thing that you can't do is change the past. You can only change your future. And that starts with the present moment.

Barbara J Hunt:

Exactly. And what's beautiful is the present moment is a doorway back to what hasn't been healed. That's the really amazing thing is however long ago it happened, when I used to work on a retreat, I worked with a woman who was in her 70s, who'd been abused when she was in her teens. And she said, all of that bad feeling that I'd felt every day, it's gone. So even if you held your resentment for decades, it doesn't change the story, it doesn't change what happened, but it just means all of the bad feeling. There's often guilt, there's shame, there's our own part. Sometimes there is. When we're doing forgiveness work with somebody else, we're needing to forgive that person.

But also sometimes there's things we need to ask forgiveness for. And I often make a distinction between the three different strands of forgiveness. If you like, one is needing to forgive someone, being forgiven, where we need to ask for forgiveness and self forgiveness, which is often just as hard because we use our resentment against ourselves in the same way. We think, well, if I don't forgive myself, then it's like saying I'm committed to being a better person or I won't let myself off the hook. Because it means that if I forgive myself, it's like saying it was okay and I deeply regret what I did. So there's all these sort of like the tangle of the mind that's in there and we need to untangle the mind as well as untangle the heart.

Jennifer Norman:

Absolutely. And I was just going to say about self forgiveness, sometimes that is the hardest thing because we are so critical of ourselves in any situation, a lot of times we're our own worst enemies. And if there's something that you have done that inadvertently has harmed somebody else in some cases I was actually listening to a story recently about a woman who was having a bad relationship with her husband. Ended up to drink to solace herself. Ended up driving her kids someplace drunk, got into a terrible, terrible car accident, felt like she could never forgive herself because they all ended up in the hospital. Thank goodness they were all alive. But for the rest of her days, up until the point where she had this conversation, she's like, I can't forgive myself because that would give me permission to either do it again or feel like whatever I've done was okay. And so she's using it as a way to remind herself and to punish herself for the action that was caused such a long time ago.

Barbara J Hunt:

Yeah, that's the reason why we find it hard is because we think it's going to give us permission to keep doing the things or to make another mistake as opposed to really making a commitment that I will never get in the car under the influence of alcohol. That is my absolute commitment to myself and to the other people, the road users, and choosing to not carry the ill will because it's more likely that if you feel that uncomfortable that you're carrying that ill will that grievance against yourself, the self recrimination, you feel bad. There's more likely that it's going to make you want to do other things that are going to numb those feelings out, like maybe use alcohol or food or you may have other addictive behaviors to stop you feeling those things. And it's back again to that sense of being vulnerable is really letting yourself honor the feelings that you're feeling. Like yes, she may well have guilt and shame and it's a way of including those as part of the healing and we're really not very good. There's a sort of secular world talking about like negative emotions and some of them we need to feel and own, like guilt or grief or sadness. And then they're not necessarily negative. They can be very heart opening, they can be very connecting, but they're just making room for all the different feelings and then also looking at the meaning that you're giving something, which be another piece of very important work for somebody in those circumstances to do.

Jennifer Norman:

Right, so for this podcast, I would love for people to know if there are certain things in their lives that they need to forgive or if there's self forgiveness to be had. What are any of the specific steps that people can take? I just want to give a little bit of clarity around perhaps a process that they might be able to go through in order to of course, this is not going to do it justice, but it may help for people to kind of walk themselves through a cycle from going from this place of pain to a place of purpose.

Barbara J Hunt:

Yeah, well, I do have a seven step forgiveness made easy process and then there's also a little bit of preparation work. So that would be where I would say a good place to start is. So start your forgiveness list, sit down with yourself, just a bit of quiet and just feel in. Who do I need to forgive? And you can think through your life. You don't have to do it chronologically, but you can or you can. Just one person might make you think of somebody else and then somebody else and you just make a note of all the people that you feel. Oh yeah, actually I do whole resentment. And the thing about it is one of the things that I'm trying to do in the big world.

Is to change our attitude towards forgiveness. To say, yes, we all carry resentment like we do, that is just our human nature. But you don't have to keep carrying it. You can put it down. And there are ways of doing it, but it's more normalizing. It and because I think there's a lot of shame around holding resentment, like with my case, resenting my mom for being ill, I didn't want to admit that. And you would never put it on your dating profile? You'd never go, oh, yes, I bear grudges for years and never let someone forget about what they've we know it's not an attractive quality. And actually, if we have friends who are constantly going on and on and on about whoever it is, their boss or their sibling or their ex or whatever, it can be actually quite toxic to be in that because nothing's really shifting.

And so starting with your list and just being really honest with yourself. And I always challenge people to get to at least 36, because if you think about it, both parents, siblings or no siblings, cousins, grandparents, early friends, teachers at school, middle school teachers, first heartbreak, second heartbreak. If you just think first boss is you second husband. Exactly. Your kids, I mean, hilariously. I did open a space for forgive your kids and no one, well, actually one person and two people signed up for it. It was really funny. Like, we do not like to admit actually we resent our kids sometimes.

And I just think it's being honest about you pour all your love and attention and energy and finances and everything into this little darling and then they go all slouchy and angry with you when they get to their teens or throw tantrums when they're tiny. It's just about being honest. Yeah, I hold a bit of agreements about that, or I've got a bit of ill will going, or I'm judging that person, or I actually hold serious resentment or hate or anger. And beginning with admitting, it can be really powerful.

Jennifer Norman:

Making your list and admitting are part of step number one.

Barbara J Hunt:

Yeah. And then the next thing to do, and I do this with the groups, is get people to write down how long they've held each of those resentments for. So if it's a childhood resentment, it may be 30 or 40 or 50 or 70 years, and then you add up your score of all how many years have you held your resentment? And usually most people have over 100 years of resentment in their hearts. And as a group, we have thousands of years of resentment. So if you think you've got a group of people at a concert or something, thousand years of resentment in that room, and most of the time we're just lying to it.

Jennifer Norman:

Okay, so that is step number one. Step number two is counting the years. What do we do after that?

Barbara J Hunt:

And then after that is to decide to have forgiveness as a practice. So either come to a forgiveness field, there's ways of doing the process and also in my book in Forgiveness Made Easy, there is the outline of the process, the seven step Forgiveness made easy process, which includes some of the things we've talked about, where you're taking the other person's position and you're expressing the full extent of your resentment. You're really looking at how is this resentment served me? What's the cost of the resentment? Because that's the other thing that we're often not in touch with, is like, I'm holding this and this is creating protection for my heart. What's the downside of having an overly protected heart? Maybe I'm not responding to beauty or somebody new wants to come into my life and I've still got the resentment from my old relationship. So we need to be really precise and honest with ourselves about what's underneath the top of the iceberg, really the underworld, and be honest about it, and then take the time to work through a process and you don't have to do it my way. I mean, I have spent a long time looking at other ways that people do forgiveness work and trying to create something that is really powerful and transformational and there's lots of different parts to it that I think go towards making a complete process where you feel like you really have let go of something. And having said that, because it's a practice, you don't ever say, oh, I've done yoga, it's a practice, I've been to the hygienist, it's not no, there's more of that that needs to happen. And sometimes did work with one woman recently, and we did three sessions, 390 minutes sessions, just on her relationship with her mum because there was such a lot there.

And it's a bit like when you first clear out a pot and then you're kind of, oh, you just realize, oh yeah, there's stuff stuck on the bottom, I better get that off too. The great thing about it, it's a practice, so you can keep doing it if you want to let it go. And I also tell a story in the book of a friend who has become a friend, but she wasn't a friend, she was a friend of a friend. And everyone going, oh, you get on really well. And we just didn't. And I asked her, oh, do you want to share a lift to go to a class? And she were like, no thank you, I prefer to be on my own. And I thought and then the next, you know, so I did my forgiveness work. Next time I saw her, we were in a shop together and I said, oh, can I just I'm in a bit of a rush, can I just push in ahead of you? And she's like, oh, go on then.

And I've just done my forgiveness work, so I put her back on my list did my forgiveness work and really, really good friends. And I love that story because I was willing to keep doing my forgiveness work. I don't want to hold ill will against anyone for what they did or didn't do. I want to have a free heart. I want my heart to be open to the world. I want to be responsive, and I don't want the past to direct my present or my future.

Jennifer Norman:

Right. This will serve a lot of contemplation for a lot of people, because a lot of times we don't face the idea of forgiveness right then and there. We don't really take time for it. We just kind of carry it around with us like baggage. To your point, there is no clarity about how many people, how long? What is this doing to me? What's the cost of it? How am I responding to it? And so if we were to take pause and think about all of the things that we can do to continue improving ourselves, continuing the development, continuing to evolve as liberated and powerful humans, and feeling those feelings, like if something has happened to you and you think back about it, do you feel I don't have very much emotional tie to it. It doesn't feel bad to me. Then it's like, congratulations, you're probably there. But if there are still some things that are nagging, that cause pain, when you think about it, you're harboring those resentments.

It's like, wow, that's where I need to do a bit of release work. Those are the areas that I can still chisel away and get that gunk off the bottom of that pan and really feel better about myself. And you'll know it by how it makes you feel. You'll feel it in your body. You'll feel it in your mind. And so if there's any of those negative places or spaces that you're feeling, that discomfort, that negative energy, what can we do to release it? Well, these practices that Barbara are telling us about can be extremely helpful. Getting down to the bottom of it and not armoring up, not using it as an excuse to not get close to other people, letting it prevent you from living your fullest, truest life, letting it bully you around. That's not the way that we want to be.

We want to be people that live our own lives and choose to let love in, choose to let light in so that we can continue to ripple all of that goodness out into the world. Can we imagine all of that toxicity and how that might inadvertently be rippling out to other people and to other places and spaces that we don't even realize because we're acting in a certain way, because we've made a decision in a certain way. It's a whole dynamic. It's a whole dynamic of starting with yourself, starting with how can I continuously every single day, do something a little bit better to heal, to forgive, to be kind, to allow love and vulnerability to guide me instead of fear and armouring up. Barbara, this is wonderful. Thank you so much for bringing your practice to the world. I think that it's really, really profound.

Barbara J Hunt:

Yeah, thank you. It's wonderful to have such a deep conversation and I really feel your questions are really, like, helping us to go deeper and deeper into the actual practice, which is wonderful, and it is having an intention. I think that's the other thing that people can do is to have one eye on what is going on inside my relationships and can I free my heart? And there's a lovely Egyptian myth which is when somebody dies, their heart is put on a pair of weighing scales and on the other side is an ostrich feather. And if their heart is as light as a feather, they go on into the afterlife. And I love that because it's this sense of we can be light of heart and lead afoot if we really choose to do our work. And it is just a practice. And there's lots of really wonderful short versions, so like tapping or the hoponopono, the Hawaiian tradition. So there's lots of different ways we can do it.

But actually, for really getting down to the bottom of the pot, it makes sense to do it either in a group or if there's been a significant trauma, then to work one to one with someone.

Jennifer Norman:

Absolutely. The human beauty movement does offer tapping sessions. You can go onto our website, onto the class page, and you'll see that there will be an energy tapping session and it's a bunch of sessions by one of our wonderful hosts. Barbara has her book forgiveness made easy. I'll put that in the show notes that you know where to find it. Barbara, thank you so very much for being on the show today. It was such a pleasure to host you.

Barbara J Hunt:

Yeah, it was a real pleasure to have a conversation with you. Thank you for sharing my work with your community.

Jennifer Norman:

Thank you. Thank you for listening to The Human Beauty Movement Podcast. Be sure to follow, rate and review us wherever you stream podcasts. The Human Beauty Movement is a community based platform that cultivates the beauty of humankind. Check out our workshops, find us on social media and share our inspiration with all the beautiful humans in your life. Learn more at www.thehumanbeautymovement.com. Thank you so much for being a beautiful human.