by Lisa Cybaniak
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Forgiveness can be a very controversial topic, in my experience. Everyone has their own concept of what it means to forgive, and how to do it. I find the people who are shocked the most when I announce that I’ve forgiven my abuser after 10-years of child abuse, are those who believe that forgiveness is the same as acceptance. To them, this means that because I forgive my abuser, I must condone his actions. Forgiving him must mean I’m saying what he did was okay, acceptable, and valid.
Don’t get me wrong, for more than a decade I too believed that to forgive him meant I would need to invite him into my life… after all, forgiving him was the same as saying he did nothing wrong, right?
After having a psychic tell my mom about the abuse, allowing her to save me by removing me from the situation, and then my Grandma’s spirit joining me on a bus ride, shouting at me for running my negative mantra about myself in my head, never again allowing me to take those words seriously, then levitating off the ground during my Reiki Master attunement, AND meeting my Higher Self in my first meditation, I was open to shifting my perspective on forgiveness.
How Do You Forgive?
If you’ve been listening to this series, then you know that the message from my Higher Self, as you heard in my last episode, was to forgive. But how? How do you go about forgiving someone for altering the course of your entire life? Is there even a way to forgive someone for violating your trust, your mind and your body? And I suppose the other question I had, was why? Why in the world should I care about forgiving him?
With spiritual guidance, that’s the how, and the why.
Choosing This Life
Let me explain. Guided by my Higher Self, Angels and Guides, I began to read, learn and really understand the concept of being a spiritual being having a human experience. I came to realise that I chose this life, to be born to my parents at this particular time, with a set of lessons to learn and a purpose to fulfil.
What once was pure confusion over why my abuse happened to me, and why was I so terrible a person to be tortured in this way, became a deep understanding of my role in my own life. I’m not saying that I necessarily chose to be abused… like anyone would want to have a childhood like that, or would deserve it, for that matter. Let me go into more detail to explain.
Life Beyond Death
You see, I was beginning to understand the concept of past lives and the connection of all living things. My “conversations” with my Higher Self, along with the guidance I was receiving through Reiki and my gut instincts on which books to read, were all teaching me of life beyond death. After we die, we reflect on our life, comparing the life we led with the lessons we wished to learn, the evolution we desired, the help we promised others, and the purpose we vowed to explore.
This lead me to learn about the choices we are able to make before we reincarnate – what obstacles we want to face, the lessons we want to set out to learn, and the souls who will be there to help us in the journey, this next time around.
Soul Agreements
My journey into spiritual growth allowed me to learn that the people who have the greatest impact on our lives are the souls we made agreements with before we came to Earth in this form. There’s an understanding between us for one to help the other with a specific piece of our puzzle.
Of course, we are that person for others as well. There’s always balance.
And then we’re born, and our human mind forgets it all. We forget the obstacles, lessons and the pact we’ve made with the other souls. In fact, we even forget we are souls! That’s all part of our process – the point of having a human experience.
As humans, we have free will. We get to make choices at every step. This means that while my abuser’s soul agreed to assist me with learning my life lesson, as a human he now had the ability to choose to impact my life in the positive or the negative.
Choosing the Negative
The choices he made had nothing to do with me. He didn’t take a look at me, have a spiritual memory recall remembering his pact with me and decide in that moment that he didn’t feel like it. No. Between us making the pact and meeting in this life, he had a life. He had experiences that shaped him into the human he had become. That’s the human I met at the age of two. And that’s the human that made the unconscious decision to help me with my life’s lesson in the most negative way he could think of.
Nonetheless, I did learn the lesson. Not because he taught it to me, but because he presented me with the option of living a miserable life, or a life of purpose, because of his actions. I had the choice all along. I chose a miserable life for over a decade, until I began to have this spiritual shift, when I realised I could make a different choice.
What it Truly Means to Forgive
You see, it’s not his actions I’ve forgiven. Rather, it’s his choice to aid me in learning my life lesson in the negative. Because of his choices, he wasn’t able to actually guide me or teach me my life lesson. In this way, he failed in his pact. That is something he will need to reflect on when he passes from this life.
But I too will need to reflect when I pass. If I choose to hate and blame him for his choices, spending all my energy and time wrapped up in that drama, of which I cannot control, rather than learning my life lesson and living my purpose, then I too will have failed in my mission.
Forgiving my abuser was about acceptance of a different kind. I didn’t need to accept his actions. I needed to accept the choices he made. They’re in the past. There’s no going back. I can either move on, or I can live a life of misery, anger and hatred towards him and myself, never learning my life lesson.
Forgive and Let Go
Letting him go means recognising that his soul must be very important to my soul if he had such a deep responsibility in our pact of teaching me my life lesson. So I honour that importance, give thanks to his soul for being in my life, release him so our bond is cut, and acknowledge every step of the way that the person I have become is BECAUSE of my past, not despite it.
I have learned my life lesson, not because he taught me but because he pushed me into a deep dark hole that I chose to climb out of. That was a choice. And it was a choice to recognise that there was a lesson, and a choice to go and identify it and learn it.
Once I was truly able to forgive my abuser, at this level, finding my strengths and falling in love with myself was easy. This was my life lesson.
When you begin to look at your life at this level – the spiritual level – life has meaning and purpose. Your path unfolds quickly and easily. And your connection to yourself, your Higher Self, your Angels, Guides and all life deepens and becomes palpable.
It’s an experience I truly hope you’re able to experience.
The next leg of my spiritual journey has me seeing someone’s past life unfold in front of my eyes!
In the meantime, I want to know your take on all this – forgiveness, reincarnation, Guides, Angels and your Higher Self. What do you think about it all?
Press play on the episode above to get all the details!
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Resources
My book, Survivor to Warrior: You can change your life, covers all this and more! You can access it by searching for the title in your country. Here are the links to purchase in Canada, USA, and UK.
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Voice over credit: Shari Vandermolen. Shari is offering a free download of one of her songs to the fans of the Life Like You Mean It podcast! Just visit www.GiftFromShari.com and tell her where to send it. Shari’s debut album is available for streaming on all the major platforms including Spotify and iTunes.
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