It was a marvelous therapy for me. I’ve never been so candid and honest about myself and my past actions…it’s like months of therapy. ~ Nina
The Freedom of Forgiveness
Wisdom and compassion emerge from the forgiving heart.
Forgiveness is essential for healing, transformation, and authentic happiness. We have all been hurt by others, and we have all hurt others ourselves. With The Freedom of Forgiveness, Dr. Bob Weathers and Douglas Prater have created a powerful new tool and practice to help us experience the freedom of forgiveness.
A joint project between iAwake Technologies and Integral Recovery Institute
So THIS is what extreme peace feels like! I loved it! ~ EZ
Listen to the 3-Minute Sample Now
Use of headphones will provide the most optimal experience, but are not required.
To fully experience the potential of this program, please get comfortable, close your eyes and relax for the next 3 minutes. Allow the guided meditation and ambient music soundtrack to immerse you in a deep sense of relaxation and peace.
Don’t be fooled – it is the integration of guidance, music, and the design and technology infused in the soundtrack that evokes the deep state of relaxation, trust, presence.
The Freedom of Forgiveness guides you to:
- Forgive others
- Forgive yourself
- Increase compassion for yourself and others
- Transmute and heal toxic shame and self-hatred
- Increased resilience in stressful situations
- A deeper sense of self-acceptance
John Dupuy introduces The Freedom of Forgiveness [01:08]
Additional Info
About
Track Details
01 Full Guided Meditation with Instructions (36:33 minutes)
02 Shortened Version for Daily Practice (16:33 minutes)
03 Music and Brainwave Entrainment for Self-Directed Practice (20:33 minutes)
Full package includes:
- 3 tracks (total of 73 minutes)
- Tracks accessible on the free iAwake Technologies app for iOS and Android
- Downloadable audio files available in MP3 and WAV formats
- User Guide (downloadable PDF)
- Ongoing support (responsive email, active Facebook forum, FAQs, videos, audios)
Research on the Benefits to Forgiving
Dr. Davidson, of the Waisman Clinic at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has
discovered many benefits of forgiveness, including:
- Lower blood pressure
- Stress reduction
- Less hostility
- Better anger management skills
- Lower heart rate
- Lower risk of alcohol or substance abuse
- Fewer depression and anxiety symptoms
- Reduction in chronic pain
- More friendships and healthier relationships
- Greater religious or spiritual well-being
- Improved psychological well-being
From http://wiadopt.org/Resources/Tip-Sheets/Taking-Care-of-Yourself/The-Journey-of-Forgiveness-Learning-to-Live-a-Life-of-Forgiveness
Excerpts From the Forgiveness Practice
For whatever I have done to you, or not done for you, causing you harm, please forgive me…
For whatever you have done to me, or not done for me, causing me harm, I forgive you….
For whatever I have done to you, or not done for you, causing you harm, I forgive myself…
Adapted from a guided meditation from George Haas
Practicing Forgiveness and Self-Compassion
From Dr. Bob’s Blog Post:
http://www.drbobweathers.com/forgiveness-and-self-compassion
Shame may be overcome, in time, with regular practice of forgiveness and self-compassion, because the latter two are fundamentally incompatible with shame.
In the spirit of former university colleague Joseph Wolpe’s “reciprocal inhibition” — where one behavior provides an effective antidote against another — today I would like to introduce Forgiveness Practice. I learned this practice first from George Haas and Noah Levine, local meditation teachers in the Buddhist tradition. (My own doctoral dissertation over 30 years ago was on mindfulness meditation from the same tradition.)
In this practice, we learn to first ask others for forgiveness for ways in which we have harmed them. We do this in our “mind’s eye”; though there is often the accompanying wish to later address face-to-face those we have harmed (as in the 12-step tradition’s “making amends”).
So we start with asking for forgiveness, then move next to extending forgiveness to others for ways in which they have harmed us.
Once having accomplished these two steps, there is only one more. But it’s the most important in terms of operating directly on our shame, or relentless self-judgment. Here we extend forgiveness — for wrongs committed at others’ expense — to ourselves.
Sound simple? Well, in truth, it is…and not!
One key is to practice this regularly. I did, earliest in recovery, every single day…for years.
You see: I had been introduced to completing a personal “moral inventory,” then making amends, in my early engagement with a sponsor in the 12-step program. I meticulously catalogued scores of personal failings, from moral acts to internal resentments, then similarly listed persons I had wronged (for me: an even 100) and surmised I would need to clear the ledger by personally addressing each wronged individual (if some, only in sincerest, and often repeated, prayer and meditation).
But I always had the sense I had only scratched the surface here, even after so protracted and detailed a season of work (for me, an entire calendar year of dedicated practice). “Scratched the surface? You’re kidding, right, Bob?” might be your understandable response.
I realized that there was some kernel of transformation, at least for me, buried in the above 12-step work…and I wanted to take it even deeper.
Now understand: I have been in my own personal therapy since the beginning of my own career as a therapist (though that alone had not kept me from becoming addicted in mid-life). I had surely done a tremendous amount of inner work, including on traumas endured as well as perpetrated. But there was an intuition, after having committed a year of my life solely to moral inventory/making amends, that here might lie a “surgeon’s scalpel” for getting to the heart of my own crippling shame.
This is when I entered into the above, intensive mindfulness training, focusing now on bringing forgiveness and self-compassion into my daily awareness in a way quite unprecedented — this with all due respect for the decades of therapy I had already undergone. Directly to the source, at last!
This then is the practice that I now share freely with you, as it was originally with me (by George and Noah above).
Dr Bob Weathers on the Transformative Power of this Practice [03:21]
How to Use
Download the iAwake App
First, download the FREE iAwake App, login with your email and all your tracks will be right there. You can stream them, but we’d advise downloading them (from within the app) to ensure an interruption-free experience, and to be able to listen offline.
How to Use The Freedom of Forgiveness from the creator, Dr. Bob Weathers
I recommend setting aside 20 minutes a day to initially applying, then deepening into, this transformative practice. Just as doing a single of push-up’s, or practicing five-finger piano exercises for one day only, will not build our strength or musical ability significantly, so dipping into this forgiveness practice for a time or two will scarcely make a difference. You might in fact enjoy your first experience of it, and that’s a good start. But what will make all the difference — in fact, change your entire life — is dedicating regular time (I recommend daily) to the practice.
This I can promise: if you develop a sturdy foundation in regular forgiveness practice (dare I suggest 90 practice sessions in 90 days!), then you will have built into your brain and body a network of responses that will serve you reliably, day-in and day-out, as well as be forevermore accessible when you run into any specific, thorny relationship, outer or inner. You’ll then be able to apply the technique PRN: as needed. And with certain success.
One more recommendation: start by going easy on yourself. I do not recommend starting with your most difficult relationship, or most profound shame, but rather begin with a relationship which will give you good practice for deepening into tougher, more challenging areas later. Just as with physically working out, where you go gently earliest on, in order to build endurance and strength sufficient for later, more strenuous exertion and tests, do the same here, with building your “muscles” of forgiving others, of forgiving yourself.
If you are in this for the long haul, and I surely hope you are, your investment in this practice, building patiently over time, will return long-term dividends beyond your wildest dreams. Guaranteed!
Final note: I have found that my most important relationships require repeated visitations in this practice. Do not be discouraged. Repetition here does not equal redundancy. Go where the energy is on any given day. This healing takes place in a spiraling form — going ever deeper, even as we return for healing in those relationships most central to us, currently and historically.
As Carl Jung said: “If you turn toward the Self, it will turn towards you.” So it is with this healing exercise. If you turn toward forgiveness, it will most definitely turn toward you.
Blessings to you in this noble endeavor.
Technology
The soundscape for The Freedom of Forgiveness was composed and engineered to create an ideal space to integrate and deepen into the transformational and healing potential of the guided meditation track. The track combines a number of psychoacoustic and brainwave entrainment modalities to help listeners enter into the deep state of mind where forgiveness, healing, and growth catalyze lasting change.
The music was composed using a 432Hz tuning scheme (as opposed to Western music’s traditional 440 Hz standard), which is believed to align more closely with the resonant frequencies of life and of the earth.
These meditation tracks primarily target the theta frequency of 5 Hz, which is associated with deep access to the subconscious mind, insight, rejuvenation, healing, and transformation. The final minutes of each track target a 3 Hz “high delta” frequency to integrate the psychological work of the guided track at the deepest levels of the unconscious mind through deepening connection to pure awareness and the space from which all things emerge.
Entrainment to the theta and delta states is created through the use of:
- Low frequency binaural drone harmonically related to the musical key and tuning system
- Additional binaural textures embedded into the select instrument lines
- Gentle isochronic amplitude beats phase-aligned with the binaural textures
- Rhythmic entrainment in the more active musical lines
The Technology Behind The Freedom of Forgiveness [01:54]
Creator
Dr. Bob Weathers is a highly regarded addiction educator, recovery coach, author, and public speaker.
Over the course of his professional career, “Dr. Bob” has provided tens of thousands of hours of therapeutic counseling and recovery coaching to satisfied clients. He has also committed over four decades to teaching, training, and inspiring graduate-level mental health providers at several southern California universities, including helping to develop their nationally accredited addiction studies certificate and mindfulness-based clinical training coursework. His two most recent books on addiction recovery are currently in press with Cambridge University Press.
Douglas Prater is an author, meditator, fitness enthusiast, and musician who holds a degree in Music: Sound Recording Technology from Texas State University. Born and raised in Littleton, Colorado, Doug also spent significant periods of his life in Austin, TX, and Atlanta, GA. Always longing to return to the mountains, he now lives in the Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina.
Doug has composed and engineered brainwave entrainment audio tracks since 2010 for meditation, creative pursuits, and the attainment of peak performance flow states. He is the developer of Rainstorm Sleepwave, Infinity, Stealing Flow+, Stealing Flow – Power Nap, the technology and soundtrack for The Near Death Experience: Waking Up to Life, and the technology for The Freedom of Forgiveness. He is also the producer, webmaster, and project manager of the Journey of Integral Recovery podcast. Doug is the author of the forthcoming book The Dharma of Harry Potter: A Muggle’s Guide to Buddhism (and a large catalog of fiction written under a handful of pseudonyms that he won’t tell us… we suspect he writes romance novels).
Very intense process, but with a gentle handed guide. Tears and joy. Leading me into and then accepting some difficult challenging interactions from the past. I was not even aware I was so unforgiving – particularly of myself – that is the biggest insight. ~ KM
I love the detailed explanations and added commentaries along with and before and after the actual forgiveness meditation words in both the long and short tracks. Bob’s voice is clear and soothing. My experience with repeated listenings, was that I was able to move deeper into the heart of forgiving work. It sometimes brought up difficult feelings too. But I could pause the track and allow the emotions. The back ground music for the guided track is lovely, the balance is good. ~ Angela MacLeod