Relationship forgiveness is the biggest challenge for every single one of us having a human experience.

Those relationship challenges to forgive are hard. Really hard sometimes.

I love that A Course in Miracles is so straightforward about it. In the Text, where it talks about the holy relationship and the special relationship, it tells us that relationship is the best tool we have for our awakening.

Here’s what I learned right away when I started teaching forgiveness workshops.  The reason people seemed unable to forgive is that they don’t release the judgment.  That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

The way I teach it, forgiveness is the release of the judgment.

Not the announcement of forgiveness. Not the decision to rise above it.  The release.

ACIM tells us “To forgive is to overlook.”

I’d like to invite you to consider a relationship you have where there’s an old, unhealed hurt or an old resentment. In a certain way, the older the better. If you focus on any relationship unforgiveness in your life where you still feel any kind of upset, that’s the one. The stronger the better.

Now here’s the part that catches so many of us.  As spiritual students, we’ll say “I forgive. I forgive that. I forgive you. I forgive myself,” and yet it still pains us.  Maybe you believe you’ve forgiven and it still upsets you when you think about it.

Maybe you’ve done that thing of going into denial about how you feel, and you’re not even aware of how you feel anymore. But you can admit to yourself that you don’t feel peaceful.

You feel resentful. You feel regretful. You feel guilt, or shame, or hurt.

Whenever there’s that unhealed hurt, that upset of any kind, then the forgiveness isn’t in your heart. It’s more intellectual.

I know so much about that from my own life. I think that’s part of what led me to become a forgiveness teacher. I had so much forgiveness work to do myself.  We teach best what we need to learn.

What we’re really holding on to, when the forgiveness stays in our head, is an opinion. A judgment. A belief.  Opinion, judgment, belief. All words for the very same thing.

What all those words mean is that we’ve made up a story that we believe to be true.

If you’d like company while you release one of those stories, my FREE Forgiveness Workshop is where we practice this together, out loud, in real time.

Let’s lay the judgment down and see who we are without it.

THIS SATURDAY – FREE FORGIVENESS WORKSHOP If you’d like to practice this kind of honest looking in community, my FREE Forgiveness Workshop on Saturday August 29 is a beautiful place to begin. Click here now to learn more and register.

SEPTEMBER: My Finding Freedom From Fear Bootcamp is 90 days of moving out of coping and into real trust, faith and listening to the higher wisdom, together.  This is my longest running program – popular because it is such a game changer.  Are you up for truly moving past fear?  I only offer this once per year – We start in September!  Click here now to learn more now.

SEPTEMBER: How about some free classes with great ACIM teachers?  Living A Course in Miracles: Release the Worry, Rest in Trust is open for registration now!  Worry isn’t natural. It’s a habit, and habits can be dissolved when we’re truly willing. That’s what we’re doing together September 10 through 13 in my FREE series. 5 teachers, 8 classes, 4 days, and every one of us has walked through the worry ourselves and come out the other side. We’ll look at what worry actually is in the mind, why willpower has never once dissolved it, and how to hand the future over so we can rest even while life is still unresolved. Not denial. Not pretending we’re fine. A real change of mind. It’s FREE, and I’d love to have you with us. Register now so you don’t forget at powerofloveministry.net/Release

NEW PODCAST EPISODE: I Took God to Couples Therapy with Neda Boin.  We can put ourselves through so much and call it devotion. The harder it gets, the more committed we think we are. Neda Boin lived that for years, and when she finally sat down with God about it, what surfaced wasn’t the thing she’d been trying to fix. It was sitting one layer underneath, and it’s the layer almost none of us look at. If you’re forgiving faithfully and peace still hasn’t come, this is the one I’d like you to hear.