The Freedom of Forgiveness

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]