Forgiveness and Healing the Body Politic
Written by OMTimes Radio on November 14, 2017
Aired Tuesday, 21 November 2017, 5:00 PM EST
Forgiveness and Healing the Body Politic
It might seem a bit strange for a program called Wiki Politiki to do a show on something as personal and spiritual as forgiveness.
And yet it makes perfect sense, particularly if we want to go above and beyond the current level of polarized discourse, where each side has dehumanized the other. If we truly want a healthy, thriving, vital, and wise body politic we have to metabolize the toxins of 5,000 years of the Rule of Gold: Doo-doo unto others before they can doo-doo unto you.
There isn’t an ethnic group, religion (with the possible exception of the B’hai faith) or other tribe that hasn’t “done unto” some other group, and had it “done unto” them. The history of man(un)kind is filled with atrocities and silent holocausts that have left just about all of us with some form of PTSD.
Seriously.
South Africa took steps to heal (i.e., restore wholeness) through their Truth and Reconciliation movement a quarter century ago so that they could acknowledge and forgive the wrongs perpetrated by both sides, without revenge, retribution and punishment. If we want to heal the body politic in the USA and elsewhere, we now must do the same.
This week’s guest, Dr. Leonard Laskow, offers a deep and practical wisdom on the power of forgiveness, personal, tribal and global. Dr. Laskow is the author of For Giving Love: Awakening Your Essential Nature Through Love and Forgiveness, and offers scientific evidence that the process of forgiveness yields positive physiological benefits!
We’re also featuring the healing work of Celeste Yacoboni, author of “How Do You Pray?” who offers a Hawaiian forgiveness ritual, Ho ‘opono Pono (making the right, right) as a way of forgiving yourself and others. Tune in and find out about how a medical doctor at a mental health hospital in Hawaii helped “heal” the inmates — by doing the process on himself!
Please join us Tuesday, November 21st for this enlightening and heartening show.