Creative Status: Episode 68: Barbara J Hunt: Forgiveness Made Easy

by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

Creative Status is a podcast about using creativity as a vehicle for improving your life by deconstructing ego, integrating the shadow self, and designing and manifesting a real life.

Every episode explores how the creative process can help you GROW REAL by moving towards wholeness in yourself by making the unconscious conscious.

Embark on a transformative episode of Creative Status as we explore the profound power of forgiveness with the Barbara J Hunt.

A forgiveness specialist, speaker, and bestselling author of “Forgiveness Made Easy,” Barbara brings over 30 years of experience in personal and spiritual development to the forefront.

Join us for a conversation that delves into forgiveness as a catalyst for growth, authenticity, and alignment with truth.

Meet Barbara J Hunt: Discover the wealth of Barbara’s expertise as a mentor, coach, and group facilitator.

Renowned for her bestselling book, Barbara leads online “Forgiveness Field” workshops and courses on mental and emotional wellbeing, fostering healing and transformation.

Forgiveness as a Path to Realness: Barbara shares insights into the transformative journey of forgiveness, unraveling its profound impact on personal growth and alignment with truth.

Explore how forgiveness can be a dynamic force in our lives, paving the way for authenticity and a deeper connection to our true selves.

Creative Status: Where Forgiveness Ignites Authentic Growth

Join Barbara J Hunt and Oli Anderson for an episode that explores the transformative power of forgiveness.

Tune in to navigate the intricate terrain of personal and spiritual development, unlocking the secrets to authentic growth and alignment with truth.

This episode is an invitation to embrace forgiveness as a potent force on the path to becoming more REAL.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson

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Show Transcript: Forgiveness Made Easy (for REALNESS)

This podcast is about cultivating acceptance and growing REAL by using the creative process.

Intro

Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there. Oli Anderson here you’re listening to Creative Status. This is a podcast about tuning into your realness, i.e. cultivating a deep, unconditional acceptance for yourself and life and using the creative process as a vehicle for unblocking anything that may be getting in the way of you doing that. today’s episode is an interview about forgiveness. It’s with Barbara J Hunt.

She’s the author of the best-selling book Forgiveness Made Easy, and she also does loads of workshops and stuff like that around helping people to let go of resentment and to move towards acceptance and to forgive people.

This is all really very relevant to stuff that we talk about on the podcast, because ultimately, the only way that you can become real is to cultivate acceptance, because the only thing that you can accept, really, at the end of the day, is reality or the truth. And so if you’re holding on to resentment and you’re not forgiving, then you’re going to have some inner friction, frustration, and misery – and so forgiveness is a super powerful shortcut to releasing a lot of that tension.

This is a really cool interview. There’s lots of good stuff. I must be honest and say that when I was recording it, I had quite a severe case of manful so I may come across as having a bit more brain fog and mental torpor than usual, or maybe not.

Either way, Barbara smashed it – there’s some amazing stuff in here about letting go of resentment and, moving towards acceptance….Won’t say too much, but Barbara, thank you so much for your time and for coming on the podcast. Everybody else, hope this helps you. It’s, a really important topic. Here we go. Boom.

Interview

Oli: Oh, hi there, Barbara. Thank you so much for joining me on today’s episode of Creative Status.

We’re going to be talking about a super important topic that I’ve wanted to do an episode about for a long time, which is forgiveness. That’s your whole thing. You train people to be more forgiving and tell them understand the philosophical, psychological, spiritual implications of being able to do that. Before we get into it, do you feel like introducing yourself, telling people how you ended up doing this kind of work, and also sharing what you want to get out of this conversation that we’re about to dive into?

Barbara J Hunt: Sure. Thanks, Oli. Thank you for inviting me. Yeah, so it’s a bit of a weird thing to get into, actually, forgiveness and it’s almost like, it feels like my calling is to spread the happy word around forgiveness. And I’ve been interested in personal and spiritual development since I was about 15. So for a really long time, and I’ve been curious about effective tools, things that actually work.

So besides all the things like talking therapies and physical body work, somatic therapies, all that sort of thing, and keeping healthy and, well, I’ve been really interested in mental and emotional well-being, and particularly, forgiveness, because it just seems to have the most potency, and we’re already aware of mindfulness, and there’s quite a lot of information about meditation and the benefits of that. And, my vision is that forgiveness will become the next big thing out there.

I’d love to just explore it a bit more, because what I find generally is when I talk to people about forgiveness, the comment that I get most often is, “Oh, I never thought about it like that before.”

So I’m hoping that, you and I can sort of dive deep into the nuances of forgiveness, what it is and what it isn’t and why it matters, and sort of the broader picture, not just why it matters for us individually and for our personal relationships, but in the bigger context, because, oh, my goodness, there’s a big context that needs a bit of help.

Oli: Yeah. Wow. Okay, so let’s just dive right into it.

What do you mean when you say that there’s so much potency in forgiveness?

What do you mean when you say that there’s so much potency when it comes to forgiveness? Because I agree with you:

What I’ve seen when I’m working with people, if they can start working on forgiving themselves and then forgiving others, by extension, is that it just, unblocks so many powerful areas and strengths within that person that they didn’t even know was there.

But what is it, from your point of view, that makes it so potent?

Barbara: It’s really true. I used to work on a retreat for seven years, I worked on a detox retreat. And, I used to think of forgiveness as colonics for the soul, because we were doing colonics for people and they were fasting as well, and we would do deep emotional work -and around forgiveness in particular.

Should we start with the definition of forgiveness that I use? Because that can really help to clarify what we really mean about forgiveness, what it is and what it isn’t. Because I think that in and of itself is sometimes where even before we’re having a conversation about forgiveness, people have switched off because they’re thinking, well, I’m never going to forgive them.

It’s like, you can talk all you like, lady, but I’m not, forgiveness. So this definition comes from one of my first teachers about forgiveness, a guy called K. Bradford. Brown and he created something called the Mortal Life Program. And, they’re still going; they’re still teaching their work. And this is excellent. And he says that forgiveness is the absolute refusal to hold ill will against someone for what they did or didn’t do.

So I’ll say it again, because it’s quite long. Forgiveness is the absolute refusal to hold ill will. So that could be a grudge, a gripe, a grievance, hate, anger against someone for something that they did or didn’t do. And I really love it because it’s very specific and it turns the emphasis away from the thing that happened or the thing that the person did to your absolute refusal to not hate the person for doing it or for not carrying the ill will. So I don’t know if you want to reflect back on that.

Oli: I think another powerful thing about that definition is that it includes what they didn’t do. And I think a lot of the time, the reason that we get so worked up and that we hold grudges in the first place is because we have some m expectation about how other people are supposed to be in the world, how they’re supposed to show up in our lives, how they’re supposed to do things for us that they can’t do.

And, for me, I think that is a big part of the problem, clinging on to those unreal interpretations of people that block us from truly accepting them and seeing them as they truly are in reality. And, it sounds like, if I’ve understood it properly, this definition is just about stepping back from all that stuff so that you’re getting a more solid foundation for seeing clearly something like that.

Barbara: Absolutely. And you’re bang on in terms of our expectations, that saying about today’s expectations are tomorrow’s resentments. Because we have scripts, we want people to know automatically what we’re thinking and feeling and how they should be treating us. And sometimes we tell them, sometimes we don’t, but we still expect them to know. And it’s always that the very big theme is “if you were different, I’d be happy”.

So if you were doing the things or not doing the things, then I’d be happy. And so kind of good luck with that, as in everybody else is doing their own thing. So the only chess piece that we have any control over is ourselves. And that’s we are the ones who need to be taking charge of what do I choose, keep in my heart.

Because the other thing, just very broadly about holding onto a resentment is that it’s kind of a waste of your time and energy, because it doesn’t change anything. The thing has still happened. The person has still done the thing or not done the thing. It’s just, do you choose to keep holding onto it forever, or for however long you want to hold onto it?

Because it doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t matter how hard you resent somebody. I could kind of go, okay, I’m going to resent them really, really hard, especially on Saturdays. It doesn’t make any difference. So then you have to start unpacking. Why do we do it? Why do we prefer to hold on to our resentments than to let them go? And that’s where it gets very interesting.

Forgiveness stops you from holding on to the unreal. And that includes the reality of ourselves and others.

Oli: I think this is where it comes back to the main theme of this podcast, which is, if we simplify life, we’ve either been real or we’ve been unreal. And when we’ve been real, we always have that foundation of acceptance that we’re kind of alluding to. Because the only thing you can really do with reality is accept it. And that includes the reality of ourselves and the reality of other people.

And I think one reason, if not the reason, that forgiveness is such a powerful, powerful thing, is that it stops you from holding on to the unreal. And ultimately, the unreal, I think, is always some ego identity thing that we’ve attached to and then projected out into the world and onto life itself and onto other people, so that we can avoid our own emotional stuff.

And a lot of the time when we’re resentful of people because of our expectations and all the stuff that we were saying, we’re actually fighting to hold on to the illusions that are making us miserable in the first place. And so there’s a kind of effect, I think, from forgiving ourselves and others that allows that whole unreal structure that we’ve built our lives around to just fall down like, a house of cards. And it really is very simple.

It’s just, if you can train yourself, which we’re going to get onto, train yourself to forgive, what you’re actually doing is training yourself to go from a state of non-acceptance to acceptance, and from unreal to real. And then when you’ve got that real foundation, that’s when you can start moving towards wholeness and bring more creativity and joy and all these other amazing things into your life. And so I really think if someone’s struggling, forgiveness is a shortcut to getting themselves back on track, if that makes sense.

Barbara: Yeah, right on. And it’s so potent because it’s the master art of letting go. And if you think about all the other spiritual practices that are out there, like meditation that is a kind of letting go. And death of the ego and forgiveness is the same, but it’s harder because it involves other people.

So I think of it as like the master spiritual practice. But you don’t have to be spiritual to practice it. And that’s another important thing that my, invitation to people is to see it as a mental and emotional health practice. You don’t have to have a faith or a belief about it. You just have to realize what a potent thing it is to be able to do – because ultimately it is about inner mastery. And that’s what you’re talking about.

It’s like being able to see through the illusions of our fabrication about how we think life should be to how it actually is. And one of the major reasons why I think we struggle so hard with forgiving somebody is because we don’t want to feel the grief of what we’ve lost or what was betrayed. And we don’t even talk about that.

We just talk about who’s right and how we’re justified in getting revenge or justice. We don’t go. Actually, what’s underneath here is the painful reality that you’re talking about is sometimes life is really, really kind of, hard to bear. We’re vulnerable and we don’t want to admit it. So having a resentment gives us the illusion of some kind of power or strength.

Oli: The illusions thing is the main problem, I think I always say “the truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off and it will make you miserable”. And the reason for that is not because the truth can hurt us in any way. Actually, when we’re talking about letting go, all you can let go of is your illusions – because the only thing you can hold on to is the truth or the real stuff. That never goes anywhere.

And if we’re in a situation where we’re holding a resentment or we’re just resisting life or distorting life because of our resistance, to it, the thing that causes us pain in the way that we’re talking about is trying to hold onto those illusions. Whilst reality is just showing us something else. And I think in relation to forgiveness, that, like you said, is the main reason that forgiveness is so difficult.

Because actually we need our illusions in the short term, to hide from the uncomfortable truth that people aren’t black and white, they’re not good or bad. They’re real. That life isn’t always going to be easy. There’s a lot of uncomfortable things you have to grow through, and blah, blah, blah.

All of those things are really valuable in the long term. But in the short term, when we’re going through it, we try and resist acceptance, which means seeing people as they truly are, which means that we might as well forgive them. And so we get caught up in these kind of ego traps and this kind of state that we’re talking about of non-forgiveness, that just holds us back from the truth, ultimately.

So, if that is how you see it as well, how do we train ourselves to forgive in this way that you’re talking about, where we can face the truth, head on about ourselves and others, and start, I guess, tapping into this power that can be unleashed through forgiveness, which really is just a return to reality, I would say.

Barbara: Yeah, I agree, but it’s a hard return to reality. It’s like giving up an addiction. When you give something up, you haven’t really got anything to show for it. It’s an inner, posture. And what you have is relief or release or freedom, but they’re not. I think we find it hard when we can’t imagine things. And if you ever look up, well, I have looked up images of forgiveness on the Internet.

You get like a pair of hands or some stones with forgiveness written on them or a feather, but we don’t really have an image of it either. So it’s hard for us to understand what is it that we’re trying to not do and I don’t usually talk about unforgiveness. I talk about resentment because when we say, unforgiveness, that’s just like a euphemism for I’m not going to forgive you – as in, I resent you.

And one of the first things we need to do in order to train ourselves to have more of a forgiving attitude in general, is to notice when we’re holding on to our resentments. And that, like any other spiritual practice, means that you have to be really honest with yourself and to notice, what does it feel like when I’m doing that?

And it was funny, actually, I was just noticing today there’s, a kind of a group that I belong to, and there’s one person’s name in there. And I’m thinking, you know what? I’m not completely clean. When I scan through that list, I’ve got something. So she’s going on my forgiveness list. And so I will do my practice, my forgiveness practice. So that’s, again, I teach it like, a practice is something that you do a bit like a yoga practice, or you go to the hygienist every now and then, or you take the bins out every now and then.

 It’s like it’s the work of your heart. You do a little bit of cleansing work on your heart. Since I did that mortal life program many years ago, I’ve kept a list in the back of my journal. And when I’m thinking, oh, actually, I need to do some forgiveness work on that person. Or sometimes it can be a global thing or one of the big players in the world, a decision maker that I don’t agree with.

I do my forgiveness work on those people because I notice myself resenting them. And that doesn’t change anything. They don’t even know I’m resenting them. And so it’s not affecting the world or changing anything. All it’s doing is just making stress in my body. So I would say the first thing that in order to train ourselves to be more aware of what we need to forgive is to, admit to ourselves, our shadow, that we are holding a resentment – judging that person. I’m making them wrong.

I think I’m superior to them, or that what they’ve done is they shouldn’t have done it. And I’ve got a story. And so as soon as you notice, you have to notice first. Then you can start doing the work of undoing it.

Oli: So if we’re going to reverse engineer resentment, what kind of symptoms might somebody notice in their lives? So you’ve alluded to a few of them already. We might realize that we’ve got some hatred for somebody or something like that.

But I think that, because what we’re saying is that forgiveness is ultimately the way back to wholeness, to acceptance, then we can kind of assume that if we’re resentful, then we’re not going to be aligned with wholeness in the sense of kind of evolving and expanding and feeling a sense of flow, feeling connected to life and all those kind of things.

We’re probably going to have the opposite. So we’re going to have friction, we’re going to have frustration; we’re going to have misery. There’s going to be a lot of mental tension because we’re holding on to, interpretations of people because of our own ego stuff and so on and so forth.

Reverse engineering resentments for forgiveness.

Are there any other kind of obvious symptoms where people can, I guess, reverse engineer and say to themselves, “Wow, okay, I didn’t realize, but actually, I’ve got some work that I need to do”?

Barbara: Yeah, all of those things that you said. Definitely there’s a physiological aspect to it. So you might notice tension in your jaw, or just when I read that list of people, tension in my stomach. So you can notice those subtle clues.

But also, when I originally took that training, we were invited to write down all the people that we held any kind of grievance against any little thing or big thing. And this was through the whole of our lives. And it is such a brilliant exercise. So sometimes I lead groups of people called on a forgiveness field.

So basically, we come together, a bit like coming to a dojo or a yoga studio to practice. So we come together online to do some forgiveness work and I invite people to write their list of who they’ve resented and who they might be holding onto a resentment. And then I get them to add up the number of years they’ve been holding onto their resentments.

And, most people have an individual score of over 100. So in a small group of a couple of hundred, you know, like 20 people, there’s over 1000 years’ worth of resentment just amongst us. And that kind of normalizes it. And it means that, yes, you can admit.

So when I actually wrote my first list, I thought, well, I’m going to lower my bar and think pretty much everybody I’ve ever met, like early school friends, siblings, blah, blah. And I got to number 36. And I thought, yeah, probably resent my mum as well, put her name down. And the thing about my mum was I was resenting her for being ill. She had multiple sclerosis from the time I was 15.

So admitting that you resent somebody for an illness, now, what a horrible woman must I be? But actually, what a human woman I am. Because so many other people, as soon as I say that, go, oh, yeah, actually I do too. Or I’ve got elderly parents who need care, or I’ve got this kid who even though we love our kids, sometimes we resent them as well. Shock, horror.

So it’s important for us just to be really honest, because otherwise all the resentment just kind of. It just ends up somewhere else. It gets projected out into what we now have culturally, are these massive divisions, between us of those people, as opposed to my people. That’s the sort of the long disadvantage of not admitting that you’re holding resentments.

And don’t forget, also, culturally, most of our media and stories and movies are not about forgiveness. They’re about revenge. And they’re about how you get one over on the man or how it’s almost like we’re training ourselves for the complete opposite of forgiveness.

Because forgiveness isn’t sexy. It’s not interesting. Like a kind of a really good, cool revenge story. We’re all like, yeah, as opposed to someone’s forgiven somebody. You might be moved, but you’ll just think, “Well, I could never do that”.

Like these amazing, heroic stories of forgiveness. Somebody’s child has been killed, and then they manage to go on and forgive the killer. Just extraordinary stories, which maybe we find hard to relate to because we’re just thinking, well, I still can’t quite get over the fact that my husband won’t put the lid on the toothpaste or whatever. Yeah, we have to be real, Oli, which is what you’re talking about. Be honest about how petty we get.

Oli: There are so many questions I have after this stuff you’ve just shared. First of all, do you think it’s possible to live without resentment? Like, as a human being, can we get to that point where everything just, slides, of us, like water off a duck’s back? Nothing really bothers us anymore because we’re grounded in something true rather than all of these interpretations and so on that lead to resentment. Is that possible, do you think?

Barbara: In theory, yes, but in practice, I mean, I’ve been doing this for more than 30 years. I still get hooked. I still do my practice. But it’s like saying, have you got any spare change? I don’t know. I haven’t finished living my life yet. We don’t know what’s going to happen. So it could be that somebody does something really difficult, like, to a member of my family, or there’s some. I don’t know, a mistake or something that’s made or maybe harm.

Do I then do the same thing? I’m committed to a forgiveness practice. I’m going to choose to do my forgiveness practice every time. Because if you. One of the biggest teachers about forgiveness was Jesus, whose birthday is coming up soon, and he said, 70 times seven. When do you forgive70 times seven. And, so that’s like, every time.

So it is like a practice because you wouldn’t say to somebody, when will you finish doing yoga? It’s a lifelong practice, and the same with meditation. So I feel like forgiveness is in the same area. What I do know as well is from, like, 30 years of practicing, is that it’s still my choice. I still prefer to not carry any resentments, which is why I will write that person’s name down and I’ll do my practice. It doesn’t mean that I’m not unfuckwithable yet.

Oli: Yeah. But I think it is possible to get to that point where we can understand ultimately that we’re all human, basically, right? And so the benefits of forgiving mean that we ultimately forgive ourselves. I think that’s what it comes down to…I think that was going to be my other question.

So, it is possible to forgive everybody, but only if you forgive yourself first. Because if you don’t forgive yourself first, which just means accepting yourself unconditionally and realizing that you’re on a journey towards wholeness that is going to last your whole life, you can always go deeper.

If you don’t do that, that’s when you’re going to get to the point where you’re projecting your resentment or judgment of yourself out onto others so that you can maintain that disconnection within yourself, if that makes sense. And so only if we work on that internal foundation are we going to be able to continue doing this work that you’re talking about of forgiving others as, they inevitably annoy us as we go through life, and they don’t agree with us, or they share different values and different needs and all that kind of stuff.

And so I suppose what I’m doing now is switching the conversation onto our relationship with ourselves. Because do you think most people, I think at, the start of these kind of spiritual journeys, where they need to work on their emotional health and their mental health and the spiritual health, at, the start of the journey, there is a sense of disconnection within themselves, which is adding to the kind of tension that causes them to want to cling on to the illusions that we were talking about at the start of the conversation.

And when they’ve got that inner disconnection, the void, that’s when it’s much harder to be able to just accept other people. And if you accept them, that’s when all of this mental tension and the things we need to forgive slips away.

So I’ve been very long winded and rambling, but ultimately, what I’m saying is, is there a shortcut to forgiveness of others by working on forgiving ourselves for the disconnection that we may have picked up because of childhood trauma and shame and guilt and all those kind of things? If we work on that first, is it going to make the other stuff easier?

Barbara: That’s a really interesting question. Do you know the alternative serenity prayer, which goes, God, grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change the wisdom to change the one. No, the courage to change the one I can, and the wisdom to know that it’s me.

So I agree that self-forgiveness is really important. I never say that we have to do it first, because I don’t want to put people off doing any forgiveness work. And sometimes self-forgiveness is the hardest. It’s the one that I find most. I get more people coming to the self-forgiveness classes than to the general ones at the moment, it’s the one that people find the hardest, because you’ve got the least distance between you and you.

At least other people look like they’re out there, whereas you’re with you 24/7 so I wouldn’t be prescriptive and say it’s one then the other. But I agree with you that when you are able to project less on others, that it would be easier to then, I mean, ideally, not being triggered in the first place, not resenting in the first place is the ideal.

So the more inner work that you’ve done on yourself, the more at home you are in yourself, the less you need to do that, because you’re not needing to point score off others. And you can have more of an attitude of live and let live, providing somebody’s not causing harm. And I think that’s another really important thing. Just to say generally, is forgiveness is not about accepting unacceptable behaviour or condoning unacceptable behaviour.

And you do still, if you need to litigate, create clear boundaries or prosecute or whatever, sometimes you have to take radical action to correct something. So amends sometimes do need to be made. But when you have that definition of forgiveness that I’m using, it’s not dependent. My forgiveness is not dependent on whether somebody apologises or makes amends. My forgiveness is on my choice whether or not I hate somebody or carry ill will against them. And that is empowering. And it’s the same with self-forgiveness.

Again, in fact, I was just thinking back to, an email I had from somebody a while ago saying I absolutely cannot forgive myself. And they didn’t say what it was that they were not able to forgive, but that, to me, is a choice. Of course you don’t have to forgive yourself, but it’s usually when you believe that forgiveness means other things, like, I don’t have to make amends, or I wasn’t responsible, or I can’t make amends, or I can’t change it, or if I forgive myself, I might do the same thing again, which is the most common fear. None of those things are true.

Self-forgiveness is, again, it’s just a choice. I choose to not judge myself and beat myself up and hold onto that story. I may have made a mistake. There is something I want to make amends for, or I can’t make amends for, but I’m going to do other things as my choice to mitigate whatever that decision was or thing that I did. And so I think, there’s the inner work, and then also there is the outer work.

And even the same with forgiveness, the way I teach it and work with people one to one, is I get them to do a process in their imaginations, as if they’re having a conversation with the other person – a bit like a gestalt kind of conversation. And, you may then also go to the person and say a small part of that thing. You may have a request, or like in nonviolent communication, you might have an unmet need that you want to say, “Actually, this is something that’s really important to me. Can we have a conversation about it?”

But doing it in almost like the safety of your own mind or with a therapist, means that you then have the opportunity to fully express the resentment that you have to be able to clear your field of it, so that it’s almost like you’re panning for gold. You’re getting clear on what’s really the nub of this, what’s actually the thing that I need to look at. And maybe it’s something I need to look at in myself because it’s something I’m projecting.

The ‘traditional’ advice in society is forgive, but don’t forget.

Oli: What do you think about the forgive and forgetting? So I guess the traditional advice in society is forgive, but don’t forget. So we release people of our resentment and all that kind of stuff. We let them know, but we also let them know that we haven’t forgotten.

 And I suppose that is rational, obviously, so that we don’t fall into the same situation again or the patterns aren’t repeated and that kind of stuff. But the way we’re kind of talking about it, it’s almost as though forgetting about it is actually the next level, if you want to break it down into levels. Because in a way, by forgetting about it, we’re truly getting to that place of acceptance where we’ve been fully present, if you know what I mean.

Like, the past isn’t clouding our view of the person right now. That’s obviously only if we want to continue a relationship with them or something like that. But otherwise, it’s a bit of a random question, but are there benefits to actually getting to that point where we can forget.

Barbara: In a sense, yes, I think so. I’m thinking in particular, like, if somebody has been betrayed in their marriage, you don’t want to keep remembering that. You want to do your work and have a fresh beginning and not constantly be thinking about it. I have had people write to me, even just reading the book and then doing the work by themselves saying, “It transformed my relationship. I’m beginning a new marriage, even though those things happen. You’ve saved me this really kind of amazing, kind of acknowledgment for how powerful it can be to be able to do that piece of work”.

And in my book, I also talk about needing to do it the equivalent of 70 times seven, because sometimes things will come back up again. Even though you might do your forgiveness work on your parents, or I think everybody needs to do forgiveness work on all the early players, even though you might have had a good…I’ve had a perfect childhood. No one’s had a perfect childhood. Nobody had perfect parents. Ask my son, he’ll tell you.

So it’s like, we do the best we can and we carry resentment, and it’s really good to clear those fields. And then if it’s an ongoing relationship, little things. It’s a bit like you don’t just clear your house, you vacuum whenever you have visitors, not just the first time. So it’s like we need to keep doing the work. And I think as a practice, it’s a bit like, again, back to yoga, you get stronger and more flexible.

So with forgiveness, you become more accepting and more able to see, oh, I’m making a story up there, or I’ve just projected my shadow onto that person and take responsibility for it.

So I think the practice of it is literally having it in your field as a practice, this is a relational thing. And I really believe that when we clear up our, inner relationships, this is sort of the longer view and the potential we were talking at the beginning. The potency of forgiveness is if every individual did their forgiveness work, we would be clearing up thousands of years’ worth of resentment, culturally, historically, comically. And I believe that if we’re going to make it as humanity, we have to know how to forgive and we have to be practicing it in order to be able to move past our differences to create a world that works for everyone.

Oli: One m hundred percent agree. How do we flip – I guess the cultural script – or narrative that sees forgiveness as been a weak thing?

Because ultimately what we’re saying, I think, is forgiveness is the way back to acceptance, to reality, and because reality is often going to throw all kinds of uncomfortable truths in our face that are going to cause us to have to let go of our illusions and all that kind of stuff. Facing reality is about strength, ultimately, but a lot of people seem to think that forgiveness is weak.

Like, if you forgive, and I’m not one of these people, for the record, but they seem to think if you forgive, well, you’re a pushover, or you’re just wishy-washy, the world’s telling you what to do. You don’t have this bloodlust for vengeance and all that kind of thing. And so you’re clearly just a weak person, basically.

Like, how do we get people to realize it’s the other way around, that forgiveness is strength, letting go and getting fully in the present so you can kind of have a fresh start with whoever it is that you’ve, had to forgive. That is true strength, because you’re letting go of your weakness, that stops you from seeing the truth about yourself and the truth about them.

Barbara: Absolutely, 100% with you on that. Totally. And I think having conversations like this, that’s my mission. More podcasts so that I can spread the happy news. But also, if you think about somebody like Gandhi or Nelson Mandela, or even the Dalai Lama, you don’t think, “Oh, there’s a weak person”.

These are spiritual masters, and that is where the strength is. It’s like being able to stand literally, in the face of the equivalent of crucifixion and not hate people. That is mastery. I agree with you. It’s incredible strength. It takes strength and, vulnerability to say, I’m going to stand with my heart open in the grief of this thing and not close my heart. I’m going to keep my heart open. And it doesn’t mean that you don’t set clear boundaries.

You do. You say, “This is unacceptable, we want the British out of India”, and you do what you need to do. He was not a wuss. He got stuff done.

So I totally agree. But culturally, we need to promote moral values and moral virtues, rather than, our worship of power and money and prestige with people who, in my humble opinion, have been on my forgiveness list and are not worthy of my aberration, as opposed to people like Gandhi or Martin Luther king, or any of the kind of leaders who change the world through nonviolence.

There’s a story about Martin Luther king where he is actually somebody, goes up to him on stage and hits him. And he says to the guards who rush to kind of intervene, don’t hurt him and that is spiritual mastery.

Oli: How do we get that in, I guess, a culture that is ultimately built on moral relativism? So there’s a kind of spiritual vacuum, I guess. And to state the obvious, and most people try and fill that void with the things you’ve mentioned, money, sex, power, blah, blah, blah. None of those things are going to give them what they really want, which I believe you can only get by reconnecting to the truth, by cultivating acceptance in the way that we’re talking about- and then putting yourself back in the flow of life, where you’re constantly evolving and expanding and all these kind of things.

To do that, you kind of have to realise that we’re not in control of our lives. And you can say it’s God or the universe, or you could just say it’s chaos. Like, none of us as human beings is omnipotent. There’s always going to be something that we have to surrender to, whether it’s just the laws of nature or some illness that creeps up in our lives. Whatever it is, we are not in control of our lives.

And I think when people face that uncertainty and chaos without some kind of spiritual core, that’s when they end up turning to moral relativism. And it becomes about me versus you, them versus us, right versus wrong, and all these kind of things. And that’s when we end up on the path to revenge and thinking that strength is about using our ego, basically, and its will to try and make life conform to us instead of letting go, of all those illusions and then conforming to life and finding that solid foundation of acceptance that we keep talking abou

t. I think moral relativism, this idea that it’s all relative, and my opinion is just as valid as yours, and I’ve got my reality and you’ve got yours, etc. That’s in a strange way, giving people the illusion of freedom, but it’s causing them to actually lose freedom in the long term because it’s making them more egotistical and therefore holding on to resentments and that kind of stuff. So that was a long winded way of going about it.

But how do we bring the kind of truth that you’re talking about back into the world in a world where most people are buying into that kind of relative way of looking at things? Because what we’re talking about really is, I guess, like an absolute truth of some kind. And if you tap into that, then you’ll let go and you’ll be forgiving, and things will be much better.

Barbara: Yeah, I have a bit of an allergy to the “my truth” thing, because my truth can be just my story and my perspective that I am not going to change. Rather than how can I maybe take your perspective, which is one of the things that happens in the forgiveness process that I’ve kind of curated, is you take the other person’s position. A bit like in the old debating societies where you would debate and then you would switch and then you’d debate the opposite, so that you have the opportunity to see things from a different perspective.

I’m seeing the mental health crisis, even the fact that it’s just called a mental health crisis and not an emotional and spiritual crisis.

And I agree with you. I don’t really know how we do it culturally. I’m seeing the mental health crisis, even the fact that it’s just called a mental health crisis and not an emotional and spiritual crisis, for that is what it is.

The fact that we are noticing how unable we are and how unresourced we are to be able to meet the challenges, particularly of life in the 21st century, that we, I think, will be forced onto our knees before we have to make the changes that we could choose to make. There’s a really lovely Hafiz poem that says, “No one can resist a divine invitation that narrows down all our choices to just two”.

You could come to God dressed for dancing or be carried on a stretcher to God’s ward, and that’s it. I really believe that the greater, like you were saying, that whatever it is, the life force itself, the universe, God, whatever you want to call it, consciousness is something that we are mostly unconscious of.

And as we’ve become more conscious of it, that it changes us. And that’s irresistible. And we can kind of go the hard way, which is what it looks like, or we can try and head things off the past by waking up as much as we can and doing what we can to free ourselves. Because…I don’t know if you ever played that game called Stuck in the Mud when you were a kid?

Oli: No.

Barbara: And somebody’s it. And then they go around and they tag people, and as soon as you’re tagged, you have to stand with your arms out and your legs apart. And the people who are still free, they run and scramble between your legs and you get free. And then you go and free other people. And, I think it’s like that. It’s like those of us who know the importance of doing the inner work and taking full responsibility for, the way we show up in the world. It’s, like, not really our duty, but our privilege to be able to talk about it and to encourage and support other people to do the same.

Oli: So many amazing things in this conversation. We’re going to have to wrap it up. But if you were going to sum all of this up, if that’s even possible, how would you do it?

So I guess what I’m saying is, have you got any final words of wisdom and can you let people know where they can find you as well? And your book and all these other resources you’ve got?

Barbara: Yes, sure. Thank you. Well, I’ll do the logistic-y things first. So my book is called Forgiveness Made Easy: The Revolutionary Guide to Moving Beyond Your Past and Truly Letting Go. And that’s available on Amazon in all different countries. It’s audible as well as Kindle and printbook. And my website is forgivenessmadeasy.co.uk.

And I do one to one sessions with people. They take 90 minutes if you want to work with me on releasing a big resentment or something that you want support to release. And then I also host online forgiveness fields where they’re kind of group sessions which are obviously more, economically, a good deal, because we’re working together in a group and everybody works with their microphones off so you’re not overheard. But I take everybody through the seven steps of the forgiveness made easy process again in 90 minutes.

So it’s a really great way of practicing. And sometimes I do themes like self-forgiveness or forgive your ex or whatever. So I do themes sometimes, but you can bring anything.

I also have like a link tree, which is just Linktree. And then Barbara j. Hunt. So all of my stuff is just Barbara J. Hunt. And if you put Barbara J. Hunt and the word for it will come up with forgiveness and all of the different resources.

And then the last thing really that I like to say to kind of conclude and hopefully inspire people to do their forgiveness work is that I really and truly believe that we could create a much more beautiful world that our hearts know is possible, as Charles Eisenstein says, and peace starts in your heart.

And if you do your forgiveness work and I do mine, and all of those around us do theirs, that we could create a revolution, like one heart at a time. And to me that is the most exciting potential of forgiveness, is we could genuinely do that because it’s a choice and so if we had everybody, like, we all went into lockdown, we go into a forgiveness lockdown, we would come out into a completely different world.

And what I find so tantalizing is that I know it’s a fantasy, as in it’s probably not going to happen, but it is a potential. We could choose it, don’t. But we could. And so that’s why I feel so excited and lit up by the potential of it.

Oli: That’s amazing. Barbara, thank you so much for this one. It’s been a good one and I appreciate your energy and all that stuff, so, yeah. Thank you so much.

Barbara: Pleasure. Thanks very much for having me. Great conversation.

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