Jack Canfield: The Success Principles
Shawne Duperon: What about forgiveness where does that fit?
Jack Canfield: Forgiveness is critical. It is principle 29, complete the past to embrace the future. And what happens is there are two aspects of forgiveness. One is forgiving others, and the other is forgiving yourself. If you are holding resentment or anger towards somebody, a number of things happen in your body. Your body becomes more acidic. The more acidic your body is, the more likely it is to get sick. Cancer, they seem to say can’t grow in an alkaline system, which is why it is important to eat a lot of vegetables and not too much acid forming foods. And so, any kind of stress, which includes anger and resentment will eat you up, literally.
The problem for forgiveness for most people is they don’t know to do it. It is easy to say just forgive somebody, just make a choice. Do it.
Let me just say this. You have got to forgive yourself as well. Anything you have done, you have to realize I was doing the best I could with the awareness I had to meet some basic need. I remember a client I had who was feeling guilty 20 years after Vietnam. Couldn’t make eye contact with anybody because every time he would look into their eyes, he would see people who had bayoneted to death because he was a point man in the Marine Corp and the average life expectancy of a point man in the Marine Corp, that’s the guy in the front of the patrol, was 22 days in Vietnam. He survived, but he had to kill a lot of people to do it. So we had to literally hold his head steady and make him look at people until he started to cry, and then we got him to say I forgive myself because I am a good person and good people don’t kill people except when they are conscripted by the army, sent to a foreign land, and people are trying to kill them and they are 18 years old. You have got to forgive yourself for anything you ever did because it is not serving you. It is not serving the other person. The only thing that really serves another person is to forgive yourself so you can come back fully present without constriction and if there are any amends that need to be made or any balancing in terms of returning money or anything like that, go ahead and do that.
