“We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

This is what Colin Tipping states in his book, Radical Forgiveness, and you may have heard others say similar to this.

What does this mean? This is what I, and many others believe: we come here on Earth to experience the opposite of love and oneness, which is fear and separation. To fully understand one you have to fully experience the other.

At some time or another we have all felt scared, sad, alone… like no one understands how we are feeling…. and it really can get to the point of feeling hopeless.  There are many people who feel like this daily and it can come in the form of depression or anxiety.

So here’s a concept…this is part of the human experience we signed up for! To feel…pain, suffering, desperation, anger, resentment…the list goes on. To grow, learn the lessons we came here to learn, and to heal.

If you don’t buy this concept that’s ok, can you be willing to being open that it might be true? It really doesn’t matter if you believe it or not, I didn’t either at first. Just be open with me on this for now.

We have also experienced the ‘nice’ feelings, such as, love, happiness, gratitude and so on. Those ones are easy to feel but the ‘not so nice’ ones we tend to avoid feeling if possible by ignoring or denying them.  Or we wallow in them because we have a lot of built up guilt and shame from our past limiting beliefs about ourselves; and sometimes we don’t even know it’s there beneath the surface, sucking our energy and screwing up our lives when we don’t deal with them.

In the course of my experience with Radical Forgiveness this has come up a lot. It’s actually one of the most crucial steps to releasing our stuck, blocked energy. Having our feelings and feeling them is the essence of being human.

You may have experienced what happens when you don’t feel your feelings. Your body gets uncomfortable, your stomach may get upset, you might get a headache and mentally it’s not a positive experience.

But wait! You might say this happens when you feel your feelings too, and you would be right, but the difference is when you get the feeling part over with at the time, or shortly thereafter, you will get past the uncomfortable feeling much quicker.  The feelings won’t keep coming up in your life in different circumstances and when you least expect it in an obtrusive, uncomfortable way that may hurt someone you care about.

When we allow ourselves to feel and once it’s passed, there will be some calm around the situation and you will be ready to look at it with a different perspective.

Stuffing our feelings, acting as if we don’t have them, doesn’t work well. They will come back time and time again. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about and many people are raised to do this, especially men.

Either way, they are coming out, we see this all the time, there are a lot of hurt people hurting people. I will acknowledge there are terrible things people experience and those feelings can be unbearable to go through. So much that they will repress them because they can’t handle it. This is our brain’s defense mechanism to protect us and professional help is usually what will help to uncover, feel and move past the situation in due time. Another way is Radical Forgiveness.

I recently attended a Miracles Workshop given by the founder of Radical Forgiveness, Colin Tipping. A small group of us spent 2.5 days acknowledging our deep pain from our pasts which instilled core negative beliefs about ourselves. These beliefs hold us back from having good relationships, happiness and being the creator of our lives.

So many people are being held back by their un-healed childhood pain, so for two days we felt our feelings. We confronted our perpetrators in various exercises.  The part that felt the best was when we beat on a pillow with a tennis racket, I didn’t know I had so much anger in me and it felt amazing to get it out of my body!

Yes it was uncomfortable at times, and we were all vulnerable, never having gone that deep with our feelings, but after we cleared out years of pain we felt stronger in having experienced it all and at peace with our situations. We could look at it with a different perspective, a Radical Forgiveness perspective.

We were meant to experience our pain in order to fulfill our reason for being here. I know this may be a hard concept to grasp but it’s a whole lot better than living stuck with no way out, trying to numb the pain with escapism and addictions.

It truly was a Miracle for everyone, after we got through all those feelings and to the other side, where peace and love were waiting for us, it was well worth the risk, and I would do it again in a heartbeat.

Want to know more? Read Radical Forgiveness. It has changed thousands of peoples’ lives and it can change yours too! You can order the eBook here.