Change Your Story – Rev. Aimee Daniels
This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
DESCRIPTION
We all carry stories from our past but we don’t have to let them define us. Using the practices of Radical Forgiveness, we reframe our experiences and transform old wounds into wisdom. Join us this week as we delve deeper into seeing our story from a spiritual perspective, open to new perspectives and step into a greater sense of freedom and compassion.
SUMMARY
Rev. Aimee Daniels discusses the concept of “radical forgiveness” as a spiritual practice to move beyond victim consciousness and create a new, more empowering story. The key points include:
– Radical forgiveness is about seeing the perfection and wholeness in every situation, rather than judging it as good or bad. It involves raising one’s vibration above the situation.
– The speaker shares her own experience using a “radical forgiveness worksheet” to examine a past marriage dynamic that left her feeling trapped, betrayed, and angry. By tracing the root beliefs and false interpretations underlying this story, she was able to reframe it and feel compassion for all involved.
– The process of radical forgiveness involves 1) telling the story, 2) feeling the feelings, 3) collapsing the story by recognizing the interpretations and core beliefs, 4) choosing freedom, and 5) integrating the practice through prayer and affirmations.
– The ultimate aim is to release old stories and beliefs that do not serve us, and to recognize our inherent wholeness and the oneness we share with all people, even those we may disagree with. This shift in perspective is seen as a way to help transform the world toward greater peace and understanding.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Aimee Daniels:
Give myself a minute to get settled here. Thank you to the music team for singing that song. To me, that song really epitomizes forgiveness. And every time I hear it, it just reminds me that we’re all moving through life. And there are always things like even though we are doing our spiritual work, there are always things that come up and it’s about forgiveness. So Reverend Linda, oops, I clicked forward too fast. Reverend Linda last week talked about thinking about where old stories are running our lives and just having a willingness to shift our perspective and trusting that there’s love and purpose in whatever is happening. Today we’re going to focus on changing the story, changing our story through radical forgiveness. And radical forgiveness is a spiritual practice. I think this is one of the most brilliant spiritual books that has ever been written because it’s really about moving out of victim consciousness.
And so this is a picture of me that Chat GPT made. I asked it, I asked it to make a picture of someone thinking, and it gave me the weirdest thing. I’m like, okay, here’s my face. Just make a picture of my face thinking. And it’s all you see, it’s only pleasant thoughts, but chat, GPT did capture the lines in my forehead, so I got to give it to that. But we create from the time that we are little, the things that happen in our lives, especially when we’re little, we can interpret them as being our fault. We’re little things are happening us around us, we don’t know what they mean. So we interpret it as there must be something wrong with me. I must have done something wrong. And if I think about my story and anyone do the landmark forum besides me, anyone ever do the Landmark Forum?
Okay? So they have you do your act, you figure out your act. So your act is the first way you’ve solved a problem as a child. And so my parents, my dad lost his job when I was little. Apparently he had a bad attitude and my mom had also worked for them. And they warned her. They said, if Bob doesn’t change his attitude, we’re going to fire him. And so they did fire him. So imagine them with six kids and only one of ’em is out of the house, but he’s in college and they’re paying for that. So my parents decided they were going to start a company little tiny tool and die company. And so I’m about three or so, and I don’t remember doing this, but it’s claimed that I dumped a box of detergent in the adding machine when they were ignoring me.
I mean, I’m sure they didn’t make that up, but what I named my act at that time was, I’ll show you. But the belief I had about myself, which was underneath it, was actually that I didn’t matter, right? That they weren’t considering me. I didn’t matter. And when I look at this, I’ll show you in my life, I’ve always tried harder. I’ve tried to be nicer when I let it unconsciously run me. I still do it. And so I also grew up in a place where conflict wasn’t okay. And no one talked about what was going on. You didn’t dare mention it, and you certainly would never want to express your feelings or be angry. And so I want to invite you for a second just to consider in your own life, maybe you don’t have an awareness yet of what the underlying belief is, but just in your life, when do you get that kind of icky feeling in you?
You know what I’m talking about, the icky feeling where it’s like your brain got invaded and then it goes through your whole body and what’s going on. When you get that feeling, it might be that you start to shame yourself in your head, or it might be that you have unforgiveness or it could be you’re holding a grudge. It could be a lot of things. But just as we enter this talk, I just invite you to think about what are those things for you that kind of set you on a path where you’re not in the best place. It could be a situation you need to forgive. And I have a friend, his name’s Artie. Artie is really a creative human being and he always has some wise thing to say. And I’m not going to tell you how he phrases this, but this is the gist of Artie’s recent advice to me.
He goes, just don’t let anything linger. If you have a feeling and you need to talk to someone, talk to them then. And if you have work to do, go do it right away. And it got me thinking as I was listening. I always listen to the book we’re working with, and I always also read it. I have a copy and I recommend you get a copy of this one. It’s really good. But it made me think about how many things I just swallow and don’t say something about because it wouldn’t be nice or it might cause a conflict. And it just made me think about the things that are not resolved in me.
And the other thing I want to say is we can think, for me, for a long time it was relationships and I’m going to do a worksheet on myself later for all of you about my prior marriage. But the truth is the pattern plays everywhere. It plays, not just in the relationships. It might play in your work relationships, it could play anywhere in your life, it could play in your money, it could play in anything. So it is not just one area. And I say that because going through this, I’ve realized I had someone I work with really closely, and I had this experience, I think I might’ve shared this where she was talking over me and I was like, wow, that doesn’t feel good. And then I realized she’s trying to matter. She has the same wound thing going on that I have, and that just gave me an incredible amount of compassion for her.
And so that’s the invitation here too, is not just to embrace this as more of a way of life. When you notice something comes up, just do your work. So we’re going to talk through what that means. So Jason, read to us from Colin tipping. I want to touch on a couple of points, and I know this is a busy slide, but we unconsciously for the most part create our world through our thoughts. And when we do our practice, what are we doing? We’re raising our vibration. Those of you who like Esther Hicks, Abraham, that’s what she talks about all the time, raising your vibration. And so through our spiritual practice, we’re raising our vibration and we’re raising our vibration above the situation. So something could be true in the world of form, but in the world of spirit, we rise above that and that’s really what radical forgiveness is about.
But when we give energy to a thought, which let’s face it, most of us do, if it’s a triggering thought, I know I do. Anybody else give it energy, right? You feed it and you don’t mean to feed it, right? But it just feeds right. It just feeds on itself. And so when we put a large amount of energy behind something, it has a bigger effect. And when we’re constantly thinking things, they can become beliefs. It becomes our belief and our operating principle for what the world is like. And that can also happen something someone told you, like I was thinking about my brother Michael, and he always believed that people were out to screw him, that people couldn’t be trusted and he had that experience. So that was his belief. So what we believe about the world is how it’s always going to be for us, and that’s what we want to examine. That’s the invitation to examine that.
Ernest Holmes says, the individual has been endowed with a creative mind. Their thought is creative. It’s always tending to build up situation and conditions in their body and environment, which correspond to the unconscious patterns of their thinking. So he’s saying the same thing that Colin tipping says. He’s just saying it a different way. And this is why stories matter because the stories we tell in our life are powerful because they have emotional energy behind them. So anything we put emotion behind we’re creating with. And as we already said, most of our thoughts are unconscious. And so we don’t need to blame ourself for those thoughts. It can be easy to think that when you say your thoughts, create things, all of that, that like you’re being blamed for your thoughts. I just want to invite everyone, no self blame here. No self blame. It’s awareness.
Once you become aware of the thought, you can shift it. And even though people might want to go live and excavate forever and what their thoughts and beliefs are and how they happened, this radical forgiveness really allows us to raise up above it into a spiritual vibration to heal it. So that’s where we’re going to dive in here. So what’s just to remind you of what the difference is between radical forgiveness and traditional forgiveness. Colin tipping says in a holographic universe, every minute part of the universe is not only connected energetically to the whole but contains the whole. Therefore, you cannot change one part without affecting the whole. And that’s what this whole system of radical forgiveness is about. It’s about realizing energetically that there can be a shift. And he calls the technique, we’re going to talk about just a delivery system for the secret ingredient, what he calls the secret ingredient, the energetic input of radical forgiveness, which is the willingness to be open to the idea that there’s nothing to forgive.
And you don’t have to have a lot of faith. You don’t need to be in a meditative state. All you need to do is use this simple tool and be willing. Being willing is a huge thing. And the willingness we’re cultivating is seeing the perfection. It’s an opportunity to remember your wholeness, which is what we teach. We’re already whole, perfect and complete. It’s an opportunity. And it’s not about doubling down on what you think your weaknesses are or figuring out how they got created. It’s about elevating so traditional forgiveness. Just to recap this, Linda talked about this is still judgment based. It it’s grounded in the world of humanity. It’s what we’re observing in the world of form, and it polarizes. It judges everything. It’s either good or it’s bad, and there’s right or wrong. And there’s always assumption in traditional forgiveness that someone did something to someone else, right?
It’s kind of the drama triangle. And we’re living the drama triangle in our country right now. I’m not going to digress. I’m going to stay with the spiritual. But if you think about it, the victim becomes, the hero, becomes the villain. It’s a cycle. And if you just think about what’s happening in the country, you can see it. But we’re going into a higher consciousness here. And in radical forgiveness, no right or wrong, no good or bad, unless we think it’s so that’s the key. And it’s rooted in the belief that nothing wrong happened and there’s no victims, which can be hard to get our head around when we’re feeling victimized.
It doesn’t mean in the world of form that people aren’t accountable for their actions just because we’re practicing radical forgiveness just to marry the two. You can spiritually forgive someone, but it doesn’t mean you have to have them in your life. And it doesn’t mean you can’t set a boundary, you can make a choice. But this is about healing on the spiritual level. And we see examples of people practicing radical forgiveness in the world, and not that they know the technology, but this last week, I think it was this last week, remember that terrible shooting that happened a couple weeks ago? There have been many of them, but I’m specifically referring to the one in the Mormon church. I think it was in Michigan. The Mormon, the bigger Mormon church, gave a gift to the family of the shooter saying that it was their act of forgiveness. And I get the chills when I say that because they were rising above into the spiritual in doing that. And there’s other examples as well.
So I’m going to move on. So there’s five steps to radical forgiveness. Linda said what they were last week, and this is not the perfect form, Matt, to do a radical forgiveness worksheet. So you’re going to see that I have one here that I filled out. I was just trying to speak from my slides about this. I’m like, it’s not happening. That is not happening. But most of the form, and if you go on their website, they also have forms, they have recordings, they have things. You just got to sign up with your email. But they have a beautiful mission. By the way, Colin tipping died maybe five years ago, I’m not sure exactly, but their mission is to transform the world to be more peaceful through radical forgiveness. And that seems pretty important right now to me. So a lot of the questions on the form, if you choose to do the form, really relate to our willingness, which is the secret ingredient and our willingness to see the perfection in the situations that are happening.
He says, you don’t have to understand. Trying to understand as a rabbit hole, we could go down for years and maybe some of us have, but the process is to raise us above our human behavior. And as I said, we can use this on everything in our life. So let’s start with telling the story. So this first part is telling the story, and there’s a compassionate listener in the story. Now, if you do the worksheet, you’re kind of doing this for yourself. Some of the stories that he talks about, he was working with the person, so he was witnessing the story, but the story being heard is the first step to letting go of the story. And it’s also to own the story from the point of view of the person it happened to. So to own it from the place of our own victimhood.
We’re not trying to spiritually interpret, right? We’re not jumping ahead here. We’re just simply owning what happened. So my story is about my prior husband, not my current husband, just to be clear. And so the first thing it asked you to say is The situation which I have an upset around is or was. So the situation I was upset about was the dynamic in my marriage. I felt he didn’t consider me. He pressured me to move to Des Moines, which meant leaving my job and my family, and I felt I didn’t have a choice. And then you have to, the next part of this telling story is confronting. So I’m not going to use his name, but you gave me an ultimatum to move and you didn’t consider the impact on me. And I’m upset because you appeared to be willing to move on. And we had been married a year just to give a little, and he appeared to be willing to move on if I didn’t, didn’t move, and I felt like I couldn’t say anything because I was afraid you’d blow up at me.
And how I feel is trapped, I feel betrayed. I feel sad, I feel disappointed. I felt angry. I’m going to tell you I didn’t know that until years later that I was angry. That wasn’t a feeling I had access to and I felt hopeless. And then the next step is to feel the feelings. So this is an important step that a lot of times we don’t want to look at spiritually. We think it’s not okay to have our feelings. We think we’re not supposed to have any negative feelings. We’re just like, I’m good, I’m fine. But when we don’t allow ourselves to have our feelings, that’s denial. And it’s really misses this point that Brene Brown makes so beautifully. The key to our authentic self is our vulnerability. It doesn’t make us bad or wrong. Some of us were taught that don’t be vulnerable, but that’s what makes us fully human is our willingness to share our feelings and our experience.
So whenever you ask a question, and in this section you have to say if you’re willing or unwilling, okay? So he’s got a little checkbox that you can’t see. But the first one is, I lovingly recognize and accept my feelings and judge them no more. I am entitled to my feelings. And it’s actually powerful, I think for you to say this out loud if you choose to do this. And so you have to say, am I willing open, skeptical or unwilling? Well, at this point, I’m very willing. I have to say, I learned something from doing this again 25 years later. I’ll tell you about that in a minute. But then the other one, I own my feelings. No one can make me feel anything. My feelings are a reflection of how I see the situation. I had no awareness of that at the time it happened, zero awareness of that.
And so I said I would’ve been skeptical about that statement at the time it happened. And my discomfort was that I was withholding love from myself. And which is kind of where we start to go by judging, holding expectations, wanting you to care about me and change your behavior and seeing you as less than perfect, then you’re supposed to list the judgments. Some of my judgements were, you don’t accept me as I am. You don’t care about how I feel. You aren’t willing to go to therapy. And I see that as the only way to go forward. You aren’t willing to look at and talk about our problems. You just keep running away and you have a terrible temper and I’m afraid of it. So then he asks you in the step to turn it onto yourself on which ones do you see in yourself. So I have to say, if I say he doesn’t accept me, I don’t accept me as I am, I don’t care about how I feel. That’s a pretty humbling one I have to say.
And then the other one is, did I keep running away? Was I running away? I was afraid of the conflict. I was terrified of conflict. And the point of this is just to bring you into the feeling of it and then we’re going to collapse the story calls it collapsing. The story I now realize, and what I want to say about the step first is this step looks at how our story began and our interpretation of the events that led to our false beliefs that we created around it, and the things that we formed in our mind that determine how we think about ourselves. And then it may influence how we end up living our lives too. The thoughts we form. And when we start to see that the stories for the most part are untrue, and I’m saying spiritually here, they serve only to keep us stuck in our victimhood. And we can become empowered if we stop giving them our life force energy, which is really what radical forgiveness is about, pulling our life force energy back into the spiritual. So once we retrieve our own energy, you get a sense of where I needed to retrieve my energy, then we take back our power. And remember, most of our stories started in our childhood. So we thought everything was about us and we thought we caused all the problems.
So that’s really how we start to collapse the story. So let me read his words and I’m going to tell you how I interpreted these for me just to help you think about your own story. So he says, I now realize that in order to feel the experience more deeply, my soul has encouraged me to create a bigger story out of the event or situation than it actually seemed to warrant. Considering just the facts, this purpose having been served, I can now release the energy surrounding my story by separating the facts from the interpretations I’ve made up about them. And then you’re asked to make your interpretations. I’m going to tell you what some of mine were. I chose poorly and I ignored red flags. I don’t know how to choose a good person for me.
He didn’t love me and didn’t care. I must not be good enough. There must be something wrong with me. He wasn’t committed to me, he wasn’t willing to be honest. No one speaks the truth. Those are the interpretations I made. And I can flip those and talk about myself in them too. I just want to say. But he asks us to consider the level of emotion that accompany these beliefs. And I have to say the strongest ones were about not knowing how to choose for myself and not being good enough. Those were the ones that seemed to have the most charge for me. But we all have those, right? So then he asks us to look at the core negative beliefs underneath the story. And I just gave some samples he gives on the form. I’m going to tell you what mine were, okay. It’s not safe to speak out.
No one is there for me. It’s not safe to be me no matter hard. I try. It’s never enough. And there’s probably some other ones. Those are just the ones I checked on the form. But just this is where we start to shift our perception and this step. And it’s not blaming us for what we think it’s about really just getting related to it. So if we look at it spiritually, we can see it was exactly what we needed for our growth. I didn’t say this part of my childhood story, but I had a parent that was one of my parents. My dad was pretty unavailable. I mean, I knew he loved me. He was physically there, but he just wasn’t really available. And so I kept picking people who weren’t available. Now, it got less bad over time. I started to realize it sooner.
But even after I got divorced, it was still a pattern. But the pattern that I have the opportunity to reframe now is that my soul encouraged me to form these beliefs, to magnify my sense of separation so that I could feel it more deeply for my spiritual growth. And as I now begin to remember the truth of who I am, I give myself permission to let them go. And I now send love and gratitude to myself and to him, and I do. And I just want to say I do because I wouldn’t be in new thought if I hadn’t had that experience. It’s the thing that sent me on a big journey that led me here. And so I am grateful. I also going through this, I also realized that I didn’t have enough compassion for what he was going through when he made me move that he was this super smart human being.
I mean seriously like men, a smart. And he lost his job and he was having trouble finding a job. So this was the job he could find in Des Moines, Iowa. And I don’t think he meant to do anything to me, but I took it that way. But I have a lot more compassion now that I did this. I had some years ago, I had this realization that we both had stuff in our childhood that we weren’t prepared. So you’re supposed to list similar stories and feeling experiences and note the common elements in them. So for me, not mattering the person’s not available, love is not consistent and feeling there was something missing in me and that I didn’t fit in. Those were the things that I saw that were common themes. And as I have sat with this teaching this last month, I actually, rich and I were away last weekend doing a trip he gave me two years ago before they told us we couldn’t go anymore.
And I sat because he’s in a program right now that he had to do reading. And I’m sitting and I’m just sitting there and I’m reviewing my life. And I can see how this showed up in my work also, right? Creating situations where I didn’t feel seen as who I was and situations where I felt like I didn’t fit in. So I can see like it’s subtle, right? It’s subtle, but I’m not beating myself up. It’s like the invitation is to notice where is that happening now, if I am feeling something inside of myself that has that yucky feeling to take it into this practice and to take it into prayer and raise it into consciousness. So we choose freedom. When we notice the pattern, which I just explained that to you about, and Carolyn Mace tells us, the soul always knows what to do to heal itself.
The challenge is to silence the mind. And that’s what we do through processes like this. That’s what we do when we pray. That’s what we do when we meditate, we silence the mind. So the higher wisdom can come through. And if you see recurring patterns of the same story, then don’t be hard on yourself. Just take some time for reflection. You might not want to do the worksheet, you might not want to do this. You might not be ready to do this on some things. Like I had another situation I could have chosen. I chose not to do it. Like if I do that one, I’m going to be like what I’m speaking. I didn’t think that was helpful to anybody. But take these questions into your week. What story in my life feels the most charged right now? Where am I feeling an emotional charge and what are my emotions about it? You can journal, you can just reflect, but just let ’em be what they are. Because the thing is we want to surrender. We don’t want to resist. That’s a big part of what he teaches. We surrender to the process and we let it take us where it takes us. And what if I trusted that there was love and purpose in this? And what if I chose freedom instead of this? So we’re going to go into some prayer now. I warned them I was going to go long isn’t so bad.
Ernest Holmes says that we should realize that everyone in the world is a friend and prove this by never saying anything unkind to anyone or about anyone. So spiritually, everyone we encounter is for our growth. And I know this feels like can feel like a stretch, right? Particularly right now. This can really feel like a stretch when we see what is going on around us. There’s some things that are pretty humanly horrifying. I was trying to decide if I wanted to use that word, but our job is to elevate our spiritual consciousness through our practice because our spiritual lens says that everyone is our friend because our inherent oneness is present. We’re not separate. We impact each other energetically. As Colin tipping teaches us. And if we can shift our own energy, we can shift the energy of those around us. We have a common belief in separation in the world of form.
We do. We live that way and we see it playing out in our politics certainly. But the world is going to shift through love and it’s going to shift through forgiveness and it’s going to shift when we do our practice and our work. And empathy is important because when we do our own work, we begin to have empathy with others even if we don’t agree with them. I think that’s really the thing right now. It’s like got to have empathy. Even if we don’t agree, have the loving kindness in the heart to say, I don’t agree, but can I simply try to understand how someone came to have these beliefs? So as we move into prayer, I’m just going to invite you to close your eyes and take some breaths with me. He talks about integration in this book and part of what he says, integration is saying the statements and the worksheets out loud. But integration can also be breathing, it can be through breathing. So let’s take a few deep breaths together, just breathing in and breathing out and breathing in and breathing out.
And just acknowledge any insights that came up for you as you were listening to my words. Just acknowledge anything that’s bubbling for you. Maybe a place where you want to do some forgiveness work. Maybe it’s a place where you have a belief that isn’t serving you. Maybe it’s a place where you’re beating yourself up. Whatever it is for you, just bring it into your awareness and just breathe into your willingness. Just say, actually repeat after me. I am willing. I am willing. Let’s say it again with more conviction. I am willing. And you also need to surrender it. So let’s, I’m going to say a surrender statement. I invite you to repeat it after me. I surrender to spirit’s highest idea of my life right now. Say it with surrender to spirit’s. Highest idea of my life right now.
I surrender to the healing that is coming forth. Say it with me. I surrender to the healing that is coming forth. One more. I release the weight of old stories. Say it with me. I release the weight of old stories. Let’s say it one more time and say it loud so that you’re shaking it off. I release the weight of old stories. And so we invite the wisdom of spirit in this moment, just knowing and affirming that God is all there is knowing that this spirit, which is a present presence, which is never absence, that it has our back, that it is surrounding and supporting us in love and healing and goodness and wisdom, and just peace. That this spirit is supporting us in peace at the center of our being, knowing our wholeness, knowing that we are already whole, perfect, and complete. I affirm my wholeness with spirit just as I affirm the wholeness of each person hearing my words.
We are all already whole, perfect and complete. And so as I know this oneness that we live in this oneness of love and wholeness and goodness and peace and understanding. I know and declare for each and every one of us that there is a breakthrough in this very moment. That the story is beginning to shift and that a new story is coming forth, that is more empowering, that is healing, that recognizes that you’re already whole, perfect and complete, and that gives you the love that you are seeking. I just know if there are any relationships to be healed. I know that by the power of this word, that there is movement on that and they are healed. And I know that in our willingness, however we turn to God, God turns toward us. And so I just know that in our willingness shift is happening, and I just deny that separation is an experience that has any spiritual reality.
I just know that oneness, wholeness, peace and love rule the day. And that is what I’m declaring for each of us. And I’m declaring that for our country and the world. I know that something bigger is possible. And I call that into the world of form now. And with so much gratitude for all of this, knowing this prayer is fulfilled, knowing there’s peace at the center of everything, knowing that there is love and wholeness and healing, knowing that each of us is moving forward into our new story, our greater yet to be just gratitude for this, gratitude for the lessons learned, the lessons integrated and the forward movement and freedom that comes from that. And with so much gratitude for all of this, let’s say together. And so it is. Amen, man. Think you remember Navy.