Goddesses Never Age: The Secret Prescription for Radiance, Vitality, and Well-Being (21 page)

Forgiveness isn’t an intellectual exercise. If you attempt to mentally forgive someone who hurt or betrayed you but don’t release the anger, resentment, and grief, it’s like snipping off the top of a dandelion and leaving the long roots in the earth. Forgiveness is a process and it must involve emotional release that occurs in your body and mind simultaneously. Don’t be distracted by the other person’s emotional issues, which aren’t yours.
Your feelings matter.
Remember, this process is for healing and freeing
you.
You don’t have to discuss it with the other person—ever! Nor do you need that person to apologize to you. You don’t need to reconcile with or even see that person ever again. That’s not the point. You don’t want to remain angry, of course, but you have to let your true feelings arise and be experienced and expressed. Then, after you feel your grief or rage starting to subside as you do the work of releasing it, you can look at your past more objectively and sort out what belongs to you and what belongs to someone else. Forgiveness isn’t condoning what the other person did. It’s deciding to release the toxic feelings that remain and to set firm boundaries for yourself so you don’t get hurt again. Dr. Mario Martinez refers to forgiveness as liberation from self-entrapment. It is a process of reclaiming the worthiness and self-love that you inadvertently gave to the person who hurt you. Forgiveness is about loving and freeing yourself in the present. Releasing your old emotions and replacing them with loving kindness toward yourself is like climbing to a mountaintop and breathing clean fresh air.

THE PAIN THAT ENDS THE PAIN

It’s incredibly painful when people betray you, dismiss you, or harden their hearts to you. It’s as if you have a boil that needs lancing, or a sliver that is trying to work its way out of your skin. When your body creates inflammation, it sends fluids to surround the foreign substance or object that needs to be removed, which causes an exquisite sensitivity. The pressure is intense. Blood can’t get to the area to wash out the foreign body or toxin. If you cut into the boil or pry out the sliver to release the pressure, it will be very painful at first, but then the fluids will flow,
cleansing the area. Tears, sweat, urine, mucus, and blood escaping through the skin all remove toxins, which is why your eyes itch and your nose runs when you’ve got a cold. All of this can be seen as a metaphor for our need to let our emotions flow forth and wash out of us. As meditation teacher Stephen Levine says in his book
Healing into Life and Death
(Anchor Books, 1987), feeling challenging emotions is “the pain that ends the pain.”
⁵
Intuitive Llorraine Neithardt recalled her mentor Reverend Phyllis Woodbury telling her, “My dear, the only way to heaven is through the gates of hell.”
⁶

Simply allowing yourself to have a good cry can be cathartic and healing. It energetically releases stagnant emotions of anger and grief. This is why the famous writer Isak Dinesen wrote in
Seven Gothic Tales
(Random House, 1934) that the cure for everything is salt water: “Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.” Movies and music that make you cry can also help you get in touch with and release your blocked emotions. A movie like
Beaches
or
The Notebook
primes the pump so your own feelings can come up and out. My daughters and I watched the 2012 movie
Les Misérables,
and the sequence where Anne Hathaway sings “I Dreamed a Dream,” channeling every feeling of abandonment, sadness, and hopelessness any woman ever experienced, is so powerfully cathartic that the short clip should be sold separately for any woman who needs a good cry! The three of us sat together in the theater, awash in tears.

In fact, weeping in order to let out your feelings is crucial for your health. If you find tears welling up at an inconvenient time, I suggest you silently say to your emotions, “Don’t go away. I’ll get back to you. Please come up again.” Then, as soon as you can, get to a place or into a situation where you can let your body release those tears along with the sounds and movements that go with them.

Releasing your emotions shouldn’t involve force. Just as pulling out a baby with forceps can cause damage, trying to force out emotions before you have the strength to deal with them is not wise. The body knows how to heal. You can assist a little as the head is crowning, but you have to work with nature and not be too aggressive. Don’t go digging for buried pain; gently allow
it to arise. A
New York Times
blog cited research showing that soldiers who have suffered PTSD may avoid therapy out of fear that they’ll be pressured to talk about their trauma in detail before they’re ready to. These soldiers may instinctively sense that directly confronting deep trauma can be too painful an experience for them in the early stages of their recovery.
⁷

You can also let emotions surface by doing meditation, Reiki, or bodywork such as massage, all of which still your mind and allow your body and energy field to bring to the surface feelings that need to be released. If you’re working with an energy healer or a masseuse, be sure they know that the best way to support you in emotional release is through encouragement—words such as “Good job! You’re doing great! Let it out!” are helpful.

Another way of releasing emotions is through movement. Indigenous people danced, sang, and chanted for healing. Eve Ensler, author of
The Vagina Monologues,
organized the global movement called One Billion Rising to draw attention to the fact that one in three women—that’s one billion people on the planet—have experienced being raped, sexually abused, or physically assaulted. Instead of the usual angry protesting, Ensler used a far more celebratory—and effective—approach to healing: strike, dance, and rise. She urged people to leave work, dance with passion, and rise up as one to end violence against women. What a great way to honor the joy of living rather than dwell on pain! Recognize the grief and anger, and then move your body into a primal space of healing.

Singing and chanting give voice to emotions too. Sing on your own or in a choir, or start a sing-along with others. I know some women who sing old camp songs from their Girl Scout days, complete with hand motions, every time they get together. Their husbands and kids have learned to join in because they know there is no stopping the sing-along when the “girls” gather with their families. It is a celebration of the friendship and love they have shared for years, and the strength they’ve received from each other and given back to each other. Don’t you love how women—particularly sisters and good friends—tend to giggle whenever they get together?

RELEASE AND RELIEF

When you let any emotion flow, it makes it easier to get out of that numb state and let all of them flow. I look back now at videos of myself from 20 years ago, before my divorce, and I’m shocked by how shut down I looked and sounded. None of my feelings flowed freely because I didn’t want to face my fear, pain, or anger. I was too busy trying to keep my marriage and family together, look like a professional, and reinvent the language of women’s health for the sake of my patients, for whom I felt responsible. The burden of this was huge.

When you do finally allow yourself to feel your emotions fully, you may be surprised by how quickly they move through you. They rise and subside naturally, even though it may seem you’ll never stop crying or raging when you first let your feelings surface. Look at how children will wail and tantrum but then allow their feelings to subside. They’ll sniffle and then run off to play. They don’t brood and hold on to the anger or sadness.

That said, you don’t want emotions to get so intense that you end up believing you can’t handle the experience—that the tears will never end and you’ll fall into a never-ending abyss of sadness. That fear-based belief can shut you down all over again. Create a container for releasing your emotions by using a grief or anger
releasing ritual
.

After a release of emotions, you will feel a sense of relief. Your muscles will relax and your entire body will feel cleansed. And you may well end up laughing. Then you can enhance the healing by further shifting your energy. I like to dance, watch a funny movie, or read something inspirational that redirects me to turn everything over to the Divine. Reward yourself for doing the hard work of feeling your old, painful emotions to get them up and out of you.

After an emotional release session, you can also do an Epsom salts, mineral salt, or sea salt bath, which will relax your body and release toxins. Baths can be a marvelously soothing form of self-nurturing. While in the bath, or out of it, you can close your eyes and do affirmations or a Divine Beloved prayer. To heal yourself further, you can also do what I did with my father, as I explained earlier, and reimagine that painful scenario of your past playing out differently. I imagined dancing with my father and seeing him respond with encouragement and compliments, and imagined myself glowing with pride under his approving gaze.

Humor raises your vibration and makes you feel good again, so go ahead and laugh at yourself or your situation. Crack a joke
as you reach for a tissue. You can’t sustain shame, fear, and sadness when you’re laughing.

You can also say a prayer, such as “Divine Beloved, please change me into someone who loves myself fully and sees how desirable, smart, and wonderful I am.” Make sure you say this out loud daily for 21 days. Affirmations train your brain and mind to feel comfortable with a new reality you’re choosing for yourself: a reality in which you are strong, able to love with an open heart, and so on. Say your affirmations or prayers with feeling until you sense an energetic shift in yourself. The shift begins inside you and then is mirrored outside of you. As I’ve heard Agape minister Michael Beckwith say, “Affirmations don’t make something happen. They make something welcome.” So true!

I also recommend the At Oneness Healing System created by Robert Fritchie, founder of the World Service Institute and featured in his Healing Yourself from Within webinars. Bob, who wrote the marvelous book
Being at One with the Divine
(World Service Institute, 2013), teaches the power of Divine Love to people all around the world and has spent decades documenting the healing power of this energy.

To truly heal from emotional, physical, or spiritual wounds, you first need to connect with Divine Love—and this love is available to everyone, but we have to ask for it. Making this connection is the most important part of living like an ageless goddess! Bob has created a type of prayer called a Divine Love petition for just this purpose. You can learn more about his incredibly helpful program on his website, but even just doing a Divine Love petition of your own can be very powerful.

Exercise: Divine Love Petition

PRACTICES OF AWARENESS

Meditation, prayer, or any mindfulness practice can help you get in touch with your emotions and remain present with them so that you can release them. Sometimes if you just stay present with bodily pain and ask that it be released to Divine Love or to God, it simply dissolves in the light of your love and consciousness. The same is true of emotional pain. Buried emotions and unresolved issues can reveal themselves in dreams too. Don’t ignore any dream that produces a strong feeling in you, whether or not it’s a nightmare. Pay attention to symbols, particularly how you feel about them in the dream. Doris E. Cohen points out that women will often dream about their homes (which
represent themselves) or toilets (which represent the need for cleansing when you’re feeling pissed off or in need of getting rid of emotional crap). And pay attention to the specific qualities of the symbols. If you dream of water, is the water cold? Polluted? Part of a deep mountain lake? Leaking from pipes? Full of debris floating by? The details can help you understand what it signifies.