"Forgiveness...is more than saying sorry" (BWE Weekly Update: Week 15 / February 27, 2021)
That subject line comes directly from “Just Friends”, one of the best movies of all time, especially because it transcends the “Christmas movie” category in that it’s worth watching ALL year long, not just during the holidays.
So, I wrote out this really long post this week about the next part of the BWE Process, which is identifying the internal and external blocks to what you want. And it was detailed and thorough, but good GOD was it boring. It was also very “So, the next thing you want to do is…” which is just not the tone I want to have with this project, you know? I like the idea of one day being able to teach people this stuff, but I very much want that to come from my own example.
So I decided to scrap it, miss my self-assigned deadline of sending this out Thursday evening, and spent most of Friday workshopping this thing I’ve been doing around creating new beliefs to replace old, limiting ones, and then dropping those new beliefs into habit loops. That post was less boring, but man was it long, and so after finally finishing it on Friday evening, I decided that I would let it percolate overnight and then proofread + edit it with fresh eyes on Saturday morning.
But I couldn’t shake the feeling that that wasn’t really what I wanted to talk about this week, either. I woke up on Saturday morning, did the Breaking the Habit of Being Myself meditation, and then decided to write a whole new post.
A few days ago, I got a huge hit around practicing more forgiveness as a way to change my energy (and gratitude, but we’ll talk more about that next week). It came to me in a roundabout way…I was brushing my teeth and thinking about all of these big, scary goals I had announced in this newsletter last week. Feeling that old fear creep up, I worried about actually being able to accomplish them. The new life in L.A., in particular, started to feel big and scary again. What if I’m not the kind of person who can actually make it in L.A.? Or, more to the point, make it in Hollywood? I asked myself.
“Then you’ll just have to become the kind of person who can,” I heard a voice say.
In order to do that, I realized, I had to start to doing the things that Dr. Joe Dispenza and Zach Bush, MD, talk a lot about in regards to letting go of the past. In very simplistic terms, it is almost impossible, from a quantum and cellular standpoint, to create a brand new future and identity for myself if I’m still constantly stuck in the past.
There is a LOT I want to talk about regarding the above, so just expect me to bring it up at least a few more times during these newsletters. However, for today, I’m just gonna focus in on releasing the past through forgiveness as a way to create a new future for yourself.
I am not super great at forgiveness. I tend to toggle between not carrying a grudge against those who have severely wronged me and hating people with the fire of a thousand suns for the dumbest, smallest reasons.
I also have a lot of what you might call “anger.” Which tends to manifest as low-grade bitterness and resentment (unless you’re some dipshit from high school who comes onto my FB page to tell me I don’t know anything about the real world…THEN you will see just how much latent rage is roiling beneath this surface). This, again, could become a whole post on its own, but it’s Saturday and so we just don’t have time today.
These feelings serve as a defense mechanism. So do grudges. Subconsciously, I seem to think that if I can keep feeling resentful and angry towards the people or situations that have hurt me, then I’ll remain protected against them. When I tap into this energy, all I see is a hurt and angry fox hunched up and looking back over its’ shoulder, warning whoever’s out there to not come closer while it licks its’ wounds.
But the thing is, that’s not working for me anymore. Staying stuck in my past and using it as a way to protect myself from any future hurt is just…the exact opposite of everything I want for myself. And that kind of operating mechanism sort of worked for me when I didn’t trust myself (or when I didn’t trust that I would be able to aptly handle those that I can’t trust), but now I do. I trust myself a lot. Maybe not 100% yet, but I’m getting closer to it all the time.
So I had this sort of realization that I was carrying all of this resentment and bitterness towards people who aren’t even in my life anymore. And, even more relevant, I was carrying all this resentment and bitterness towards myself for allowing them to hurt me. There’s this hilarious Tik Tok trend set to “Don’t You Want Somebody To Love” by Jefferson Airplane, where someone mentions some awful or embarrassing memory and then it’s just quick hits of them cringing over it throughout their day, and that is really what it is like for me, sometimes!
And I realized something…with all this reading and research and work that I’ve been doing around neuropathways and overwriting old beliefs, if I’ve still got all those old OLD memories banging around in my brain, that means less room for the stuff I DO want. I mean, I’m still carrying around a memory of me doing something stupid when I was NINE that still regularly gets pulled up when my dick brain wants me to feel bad about myself.
That is NOT productive! It is also NOT helpful!
So I started doing this thing…every time a memory like that comes up, I stop and tell myself, my guides, the universe, my brain, whatever, out loud, that I don't want this memory anymore. It is no longer useful to me, and I’m choosing to not carry it in my body or in my brain anymore. “I release this memory from my body and brain, and I command my brain to replace the space with something new.”
And I swear to god, it WORKS.
Sometimes, I can literally feel it being released from my body - my whole body shudders, I get chills, and even when I try to pull up the memory again, it has none of the emotional or cringy components that it did before. Or, it just doesn’t come up again.
So this week, I took that a step further by focusing on clearing out more space through forgiveness. First, I made a written list of all the people in my life that I was still carrying resentment, anger, or bitterness toward. Then, gradually, it became a list of every single person that I had any type of bad feelings towards…even if I didn’t even really know them but their IG feed annoyed me, I wrote down their name. Why? Because I started to realize that I just don’t want to carry any bad feelings towards anyone, anymore, and for an entirely selfish reason: It just doesn’t serve me in any way, and it’s taking up energy that I would much rather use towards getting my life.
And it also doesn’t serve them, either…not even in the way we think it should. How many people have figured out that you don’t like them and have totally changed because of it? For me, the number has been zero. I have gone out of my way to make some people very uncomfortable through my thorough and blatant dislike of them and they’re still the same shitty human beings they were before.
So, anyway, I had a really long list! So much so that it felt a little overwhelming. I usually like to use a Forgiveness meditation by Gabby Bernstein that has been really powerful in the past for really big resentments and relationships, but if I did that for each person on this list, that would take me all year.
So instead, I decided to try using Ho'oponopono, the Hawaiian Forgiveness Ritual. The Core of the Ho'oponopono are the four magic sentences, which I thought were “I forgive you, I am sorry, thank you, I love you”, meaning…”I forgive you, I am sorry I have held onto this for so long, thank you for teaching me what I needed to know, and (directed at them and yourself) I love you.”
Which was hard enough for me to do with some of the big names on my life. In fact, that shit made me ANGRY. It was benevolent enough for me to even forgive them in the first place. But saying I’m sorry? To THEM?! I do NOT thank them! And I do NOT fucking love them!
But it turns out, I was wrong, and the actual Ho'oponopono is even harder!
It’s actually:
I am sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you.
Wow, no thank YOU.
But as we’ve learned during this project, if I’m resistant to something, it usually means I need to either dig deeper to find out why or just move through that resistance and try it anyway.
So, I set about learning more about it, trying to stick mainly to knowledge that was directly from Hawaiian indigenous spiritual leaders, but also finding the below helpful:
With regular practice, reciting these four simple phrases helps develop self-love and self-esteem at the times when we need it most. In this way, it’s both a lullaby to the self and a guaranteed insightful way to approach forgiving other people.
Part of the reason why this traditional Hawaiian forgiveness prayer is so powerful is that it first requires you to acknowledge that wrong was done by saying you’re sorry.
Having other people acknowledge our feelings is a universal need; in ho’oponopono, you must first acknowledge that wrongdoing exists, which is a way of acknowledging these feelings. Only then will it be possible to find it in your heart to forgive someone else, or yourself.
In the final step, you acknowledge love – both for yourself, and others.
And then I stumbled upon the words “The miracle lies in your willingness to try it”, which is pretty much all you have to say to get me to try anything.
So I tried it. I’m trying it. I felt so much resistance to it first…it felt like I was giving away so much power to certain people I never want to give anything to ever again. But I just keep repeating it and feeling my way through it, and gradually, the resistance eases up, and I find myself back in the place I usually am, looking at forgiveness as an act of slicing through the thick, rusted chain of negative energy that links me to that other person.
I also like that this is a one-two shot…a healing for my relationship to others and also a self-healing for myself.
So anyway, it’s a practice, so I’m practicing it. My goal is continue to stay in a place where, when I start to feel that old resentment or bitterness - or even just negative feelings towards someone - I quickly take it through this practice and release it.
Since this forgiveness and releasing is a ton of energy work, I’ve also been following it up with restorative yoga, which has felt really good…especially when it’s literally just 20 minutes of lying down on the mat and breathing. I get to feel like I’m doing something while I’m actually doing NOTHING!
God, I wish I could carry that over to everything else in my life…
Stanley Tucci: Search For Italy (on CNN)
Babies. This show. This SHOW. I was a lil’ scared that it was going to make me weep from longing, since your girl AC isn’t doing any international travel until she and 75% of the world has been vaccinated, but instead, it was the exact perfect thing to tide me over until then. The show is a BALM…a lovely, delightful, soothing show full of culinary adventures and interesting characters. Also, that beautiful bald bespectacled hunk of a man Stanley Tucci is so GD sexy and fun to watch. It’s a vacation in a show. I NEEDED it. And you probably do, too.
Vital Proteins Madagascar Vanilla Collagen Latte
Look, at this point, Vital Proteins should just pay me to be an ambassador already, because I just keep recommending their products on here. I got the Vanilla in last week, and combined with oat milk, cashew milk, or some A2 milk, it is a super fantastic substitute for a regular vanilla latte. I’ve also been using it in combination with the Matcha Collagen Latte, which has improved the taste of the Matcha by 100%.
When it comes to sleep, I’ve never been a big white noise person. I still sleep with a nightlight as a full adult of 42, but the only time I’ve ever really needed to have noise going at night was when I lived in the haunted cottage in Rice Lake.
However, in the last year or two, the external feature of my clairaudient abilities has experienced a noticeable upgrade. This has been kind of cool to experience during channelings or readings, but I would really prefer to not hear the sound of disembodied voices when I’m trying to go to sleep.
Enter in Sleep Sounds by Alexa. Ocean and Thunderstorm Sounds are my go-tos, they are SO relaxing to fall asleep to, and I swear to god, the quality of my sleep has even improved since I’ve started using them.
Strength Tarot Poster by ManyManyMoonsAgo (on Etsy)
I bought this poster of the Strength card to remind me of my personal theme for 2021, which is self-mastery. This Tarot card from the Major Arcana embodies that principle, and I was delighted to find a really cool, colorful rendition of the classic Rider-Waite-Smith illustration. My poster literally just arrived last night, and it turned out beautifully! The quality is excellent and the color is gorgeous. Every card in the Major Arcana represents a different part of the human experience, so if you’re looking for some new art to represent a quality you want to embody more this year, this is a very cool way to integrate that.
Anyway, that’s it for me this week! Hope you babies have an excellent full moon experience, and if you’re feeling it, come hang with me on the @BigWorthEnergy IG Stories (I WILL also update the grid this week if it kills me) for more of what’s going on in my personal journey toward a stronger sense self-worth!
Also, if you want daily and confidential updates on those doings, the annual membership to the Secret Sharing Circle is now 50% off for a very short time.
Sweet Dreams of Stanley Tucci,
-AC