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Their goal/mission statement....
The Fetzer Institute is a private, nonprofit operating foundation. Our mission is to foster the awareness of the power of love and forgiveness in the emerging global community.
We engage with people and projects around the world to help bring the power of love, forgiveness, and compassion to the center of individual and community life.One section of the website is The Campaign for Love and Forgiveness
Among the many resources you will find on the website is a booklet called...Four Conversations about Forgiveness Participants Handbook.
Within the book are suggestions for how to let go of a grudge....how to forgive. The following are the 9 steps from Dr. Luskin's Forgive for Good workshop
- Know exactly how you feel about what happened and be able to articulate what about the situation is not OK. Then, tell a trusted couple of people about your experience.
- Make a commitment to yourself to do what you have to do to feel better. Forgiveness is for you and not for anyone else.
- Forgiveness does not necessarily mean reconciliation with the person that hurt you, or condoning of their action. What you are after is to find peace. Forgiveness can be defined as the “peace and understanding that come from blaming that which has hurt you less, taking the life experience less personally, and changing your grievance story.”
- Get the right perspective on what is happening. Recognize that your primary distress is coming from the hurt feelings, thoughts and physical upset you are suffering now, not what offended you or hurt you two minutes – or ten years – ago. Forgiveness helps to heal those hurt feelings.
- At the moment you feel upset practice a simple stress management technique to soothe your body’s flight or fight response.
- Give up expecting things from other people, or your life, that they do not choose to give you. Recognize the “unenforceable rules” you have for your health or how you or other people must behave. Remind yourself that you can hope for health, love, peace and prosperity and work hard to get them.
- Put your energy into looking for another way to get your positive goals met than through the experience that has hurt you. Instead of mentally replaying your hurt seek out new ways to get what you want.
- Remember that a life well lived is your best revenge. Instead of focusing on your wounded feelings, and thereby giving the person who caused you pain power over you, learn to look for the love, beauty and kindness around you. Forgiveness is about personal power.
- Amend your grievance story to remind you of the heroic choice to forgive.
* Look deeply and long at what went wrong.
* Empathy for the other is key.
* Tell the story differently
* Give the gift of forgiveness freely.
* One day at a time, keep the forgiveness strong
Although the second list is somewhat streamlined and consolidated, the gist of both is the same and they overlap on key points. One is the need for a thorough awareness and understanding of what happened.
* Look deeply and long at what went wrong.
AND
* Know exactly how you feel about what happened and be able to articulate what about the situation is not OK. Then, tell a trusted couple of people about your experience.
But the overlap that piques my interest...and is mirrored in the teachings of "new age gurus" like Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie....
Tell the story differently
AND
Amend your grievance story to remind you of the heroic choice to forgive.
Byron Katie wrote a book entitled.....Who Would You Be Without Your Story? Something to seriously consider in the process of forgiveness....
More tomorrow....
And a PS.....
There is another well known "steps to forgiveness model"....by Everett Worthington Jr who gleaned the method the hard way....learning to forgive the rape and murder of his elderly mother. It is called the REACH program. REACH is an acronym for
- Recall the hurt
- Empathize with the one who hurt you
- Altruistic gift of forgiveness, offer
- Commitment to forgive, make
- Hold on to the forgiveness
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