Marya Mann and Cindy Longhofer sending energy.
There was a frog in my throat the night we practiced the Forgiveness Dance as part of our Yoga Dance Training last month in Kona. We practiced progressive forgiveness as a way to help heal the heart’s wounds and induce radiant health and joy around the places in our hearts where we’ve felt victimized. In a guided meditation, we invoked three separate kinds of people with whom we wanted to experience forgiveness.
“First, we invite into our heart a person who we want to ask forgiveness of,” I said, “someone who has felt hurt or betrayed by us, and who is withholding love because of it. We ask this person to forgive us and to allow a place of peace in our shared heart. May we find peace and a renewal of love with each other. May we ask that person, ‘Please forgive us for whatever we’ve done to cause you pain.’ And we ask the person’s higher self or spirit to open arms to embrace and listen to our higher self in a communion of souls forgiving and reconnecting to each other.”
As a Wellness Consultant and Writer, I have heard enough horror stories from quite ordinary people to convince me that there is not a human being on the planet who has not been seriously victimized at least once, and in minor ways more times than they could count. Who among us can say they have never blamed someone else for their lack of happiness? For many, blame is simply a way of life.
Indeed, the victim archetype is deeply ingrained in the human species, and acknowledging that it exerts great power over mass consciousness can help us to transform it. So in the Yoga Dance class, I asked students to invite into their hearts a second person, someone who wanted our forgiveness. This friend or family member or co-worker, requests our forgiveness. It is someone we have pushed out of our hearts because we refuse to forgive what we perceive as a violation against us. “Say to the person who is asking forgiveness, ‘I forgive you. I know that you are in pain and have felt victimized too.’ As your higher self, open your spiritual arms and receive the one who is asking forgiveness back into your heart. Feel the courage of compassion and how your higher self’s radiance adds to their radiance, and their light adds to yours. Feel and see how the spiritual power in real forgiveness dissolves old hurts and impediments to love. Open spiritual arms and receive each other. Replace hatred with love’s light.”
For eons we have played out victimhood in many aspects of our lives, convincing ourselves that victim consciousness gives us the right to dominate others. The victim-dominator two-step seems fundamental to the human condition. One dominates, another is the victim, and usually a rescuer comes in the middle to mediate and often becomes the dominator in a never-ending cycle of the classic crazy-making family triad of relational abuse.
Colin Tipping in Radical Forgiveness says the time has come for us to stop creating our lives as victims and dominators. The fundamental question, he says, is this: “How can we let go of the victim archetype as the model for how to live?”
“To break free from such a powerful archetype, we must replace it with something radically different—something so compelling and spiritually liberating that it magnetizes us away from victimhood. As we continue to move into the new millennium and prepare for the imminent next great leap in our spiritual evolution, it is essential that we adopt a way of living based not on fear, control, and abuse of power but on true forgiveness, unconditional love, and peace.”
That’s why the third person we invited into our hearts at the Yoga Dance Training last week was ourselves. How many times have we withheld forgiveness from ourselves? Guiding the dancers, I said, “Bring your innocence and basic goodness to the forefront inside your heart. Feel the flame of purity flickering with joy in your heart. Compassion is your purpose. Your forgiveness of self spreads light upon the world. Infinite love and forgiveness inside your heart opens all the spiritual doors and re-invigorates your dance of pure aliveness.”
To transform an energy pattern so fundamental as the victim archetype, and thus the dominator archetype, many, many people—souls who possess the wisdom and love necessary to accomplish this immense task—must awaken and accept their spiritual mission.. Perhaps you are one of the souls who volunteered for this mission.
Everywhere we look—in the newspapers, on TV, and even in our own personal lives—we see examples of people who have been victimized by crazy people.
There’s a lot to forgive in the world. If we’re lucky, it’s a full-time passion and we move from compassionate action to forgiveness as quickly as A to B.. But for some people, victim consciousness seems to hold their history together so they weave from old hurt and wound to another arrow and dart, their preferred method of feeling affection, even if it’s negative-love affection.
The skill of the new human is to learn from mistakes and move on. Thus, we see incredible acts of heroism and goodness. Goodness will win when the dominator trait, the one that begins with arrogance and ends with torture, repression, genocide and open warfare on a vast scale, runs itself out. Goodness is what will go on as long as we are free to forgive.
When we stop forgiving, we stop living.
- From Brave New Viewsletter by Marya Mann. Visit www.maryamann.com/the-way-of-quantum-healing-yoga-training-in-hawaii/
Namaste!
Becca Chopra
