Episode 36: How Forgiveness Can Set You Free
HANNAH: Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Friends Missing Friends. Today I talked to Mark Anthony Lord, who is a spiritual leader, ordained Minister, and the founder of The Bodhi Spiritual Center in Chicago, and Living The Course, a virtual, global community. He is also an author and speaker, sharing his wisdom and insights on relationships and spiritual growth – and today, we talked all about forgiveness.
I believe that forgiveness is extremely tied into grief. Throughout my grief journey, I experienced an incredible amount of anger at the world, at myself, at anyone and anything that played a role in my friend’s death. And that anger was really really toxic. I’m less angry than I was, but I do think I’ve still got a ways to go – and Mark’s views on forgiveness are incredibly beautiful and also very accessible – you do not have to be religious or spiritual to relate to it to apply it to your life.
And just a quick heads up, that the topic of sexual abuse is brought up in this conversation, so please take of care of yourself, and you can check out the show notes for some suggested resources. Without further ado, here’s my conversation with Mark.
TRIGGER WARNING: mention of sexual abuse
HANNAH: I’ve been thinking about forgiveness a lot since we last talked and I guess I just want to start by asking like, what is forgiveness? How would you define it?
MARK ANTHONY: I would define forgiveness as a letting go. What it does is forgiveness actually works in our own minds. It doesn’t impact the other person or doesn’t even touch itself out into the world, the effects of it will, but the activation of it and the process of it happens within our minds. If you have a story looping in your head, about something that happens or something you did, something else did, there’s a resentment or regret, something unresolved. It occupies your energy and a space in your mind. Forgiveness is like something that cuts the cord to that and can make that story disappear for you in a way that is from the energy of love. It transforms the energy, brings that energy that you’ve been wasting in your mind. And that sort of brings it back home, if you will. So kind of gets you back into the present moment because our stories keep us Recycling the Past. And our stories that we haven’t resolved will continue to create our future. So forgiveness is a powerful way to release the past. Get into the present moment. And now here in the present moment, you have an opportunity for something new.
HANNAH: I love that and I love what you said about how it’s not about the other person because I think sometimes it can be hard to forgive someone if you feel like you’re granting something they don’t deserve, but it’s not about them, right? It’s about like you letting go of the anger.
MARK ANTHONY: They will receive the effect of it but that doesn’t need to be our focus. But the truth is, wherever we allow forgiveness to set our minds free, the other person that’s involved also is the recipient of that on the energetic plane. Like they will be given grace, through your acceptance of your forgiveness. They’re given grace and because your mind is healed, if you will, from forgiveness about them or about the experience, you will look at them in a new way. They will no longer be your enemy, they will no longer be the one that caused you harm. Like all of that gets to disappear.
Now I want to jump in because everyone always asked this. Well, “does that mean I can’t have boundaries?” Or “I’m going to be a doormat?” No, it doesn’t mean that at all. In fact, when you’re in your power and in your natural energy of love, you will create the right boundaries from that place. So your boundary is no longer from like, “don’t hurt me”, defending and pushing away. Your boundary is from self-care. Your boundary is from a higher vibration and that’s the kind of boundaries we all want to learn to set.
HANNAH: That’s such a good point. I didn’t even think about boundaries. But that makes total sense.
MARK ANTHONY: Yeah, because people jump ahead, they go, “well, if I forgive them,” and then they jump ahead and they make up all these stories. I’m like, “when you forgive them, you’re not even gonna have those stories to worry about,” you know, but that’s what the mind does. Fear pushes forward and goes “okay, well, if I forgive them, does that mean I have to have lunch with them?” It starts to mess around and really what you’re doing is you’re afraid of forgiveness, but you haven’t even gotten the benefit of it yet.
HANNAH: Yeah, that’s fascinating. So as far as like, anecdotally, I can make the connection to how this can relate to grief. Like for example, a story that played in my head a lot after my friend died was “I was a bad friend.” I didn’t visit her when she was alive. And then that overgeneralizes until I was a “bad friend”, and it just played in my head over and over and over again. And I don’t know if I reached forgiveness. I feel like I was thinking about this today, actually. I reached a “rational” forgiveness and that I kind of reached the conclusion of, “I did the best I could, I thought I had more time.” But I don’t know if that’s really the same as forgiveness, that might be like a different kind of thing. So I don’t know what your thoughts are on that.
MARK ANTHONY: Well, I love that. That’s, I mean, that’s not a bad place to land. For sure. I think that’s one of the results of forgiveness, in your own mind is you get a new perspective. And the new perspective is kinder, the new perspective is more holistic. And it’s a win-win. It’s a win-win situation. So I actually like where you landed. I think ultimately, real forgiveness—you did real forgiveness—but ultimately, I guess the full experience of forgiveness would include this deep knowing that everything actually went perfectly. This deep knowing that nothing you could have done or not done would have made any difference because there’s a flow to life that we can truly trust. And deep forgiveness includes even knowing in your heart, that your friend who is no longer in the physical form is perfect. And you’re still connected and there’s love between the two of you. That’s the “huh” kind of feeling that you want.
HANNAH: Oh man. Yeah, that sounds great.
MARK ANTHONY: Yeah, and it’s possible. It’s possible for all of us.
HANNAH: What would your recommendations be for someone to start this process?
MARK ANTHONY: Yeah, I love that question. Because that is important. And I want to tell a story, if I may. Our training and our understanding of forgiveness from when we were children, isn’t what forgiveness is. Whenever I teach and speak on this, I tell the story of a time when my brother and I was like nine, he was 10. It was summer and we got into this fight, as brothers do. And my mother put us both in the dining room against the wall and she said “Mark, say you’re sorry to Chris.” I said “I’m sorry, Chris.” And she said “Chris, say you’re forgiven.” To Mark he said, “You’re forgiven.” And then she reversed it. “Chris, say you’re sorry to Mark. Mark, tell Chris, you’re forgiven.”
And I tell people there’s four problems with that story. I wasn’t sorry. I didn’t forgive him. He wasn’t sorry. And he didn’t forgive me. But we did it to get out of trouble. Like we did it because we had to do what we had to do. So our conditioning, what forgiveness is from the onset feels like we’re going to lose something. Or like if we give in that the person is going to get away with something. And so these ideas are what stop us from the freedom and the real depth of connection that forgiveness really does offer us. So I acknowledge that because I know 99% of us were, that’s what forgiveness means. It’s like this broken idea that I ultimately lose. And then that model of forgiveness goes well then I’ll just be a better person and I feel sorry for them because they’re obviously not okay, or whatever story we make up. None of that is forgiveness and it won’t give you freedom. So what do we do when we find ourselves stuck? In those kinds of cycles, that resentment, the rehashing the bitterness, because that’s what unforgiveness does to us. I know “unforgiveness” isn’t the word but I use it.
HANNAH: I like it, I like it.
MARK ANTHONY: But the problem is if we are trapped in these kinds of things, it becomes toxic and it really will take its toll mentally, physically, emotionally. Our relationships will begin to suffer, your view of the world will become more and more kind of shaded from this experience. So forgiveness is an important thing to really, really set us free. So how do we do it? In the beginning? It’s so simple. It’s so simple that it’s kind of maddening. Because all you’re asked to do in my experience and how I teach it, is you have to ask that it’d be done. And all you have to say is “I ask that forgiveness set me free.” Now if you’re feeling really generous, you can include the other person. “I ask for forgiveness to set me and this other person free.”
And what you’re doing is, in your asking, you’re activating. So the asking creates an opening inside of you where you’re kind of saying to the universe, “I’m willing to let this go.” And then think about your Higher Self, your higher power, whatever you believe in, God, life, something greater than the you that is stuck in the problem. And that’s my higher power. Higher Self is a good idea. You’re actually calling upon that part of you. That maintains its connection to the higher truths. And the part of you that I call your spiritual side, that doesn’t get hurt or harmed or injured and the world before, we go to that part. And we say “hey, activate forgiveness for me.” And imagine like a spaceship, I’d get sort of like very sci-fi, like a spaceship comes in and it starts to like, activate the changing of your mind. There’s no spaceship. I’m kidding. But you get what I mean. I don’t want people to go, “a spaceship activates the process!” And the forgiveness is a purification process. And yes, it is by your asking that it begins.
Now if I can move forward for just a moment. The second step in this forgiveness process, there’s only three steps to my forgiveness process, number one: you ask. And number two, you refrain from repeating the story. Because when we tell the story, we often tell it from the victim vantage point. We tell it to sort of prove that we’re right about it. And that’s a common way to communicate in our world. That’s not a high vibration way, but it’s very common. So you’ve got to refrain from that because every time you find yourself gossiping about the story or retelling it to make yourself right and them wrong, you’re recycling all the energy, you’re starting over at square one. And so refraining from it is important part of the process. Now it’s hard to refrain from it in thought because thought moves way faster than the actual speaking of words. So as thoughts of the story come to mind, don’t beat yourself up about it. Make that a call to go back to step one. Every time the story comes in my head and like driving down the road, just by myself. No one’s even in the car. And here’s remembering happened. I go, right here. “I ask that forgiveness set me free.” Just go back to step one, and repeat it. But repeat it often.
Don’t do it one time, repeat it. I asked that we make it a mantra, especially if you’re driving down the road, either your mind is going to go down a dark alley, or you’re going to learn how to manage it and heal it through the practice of forgiveness. So I will spend minutes driving down the road, “I ask that forgiveness set me free. I ask that forgiveness set me free.” What I’m doing is changing my vibration with intention to get me back up into that connected spot. And you will begin to feel the shift within yourself through the practice.
Most people don’t give forgiveness enough of a chance and it requires continual, like how often do you forgive? Often, as much as you possibly can until you feel that freedom. I use the analogy of you know, I can say to you, “Well, I went to the gym last month and I don’t understand why I’m not skinny. I don’t understand why.” Right, so you’d be like, “you went last month!” Yeah, that’s crazy. It’s a good analogy because it’s the same thing with forgiveness. Do it daily. Do it. It has become, for me, part of my spiritual maintenance.
HANNAH: Oh, I love that. Yeah, so many thoughts are going through my head. So yeah, it makes sense that it has to be a lot because you’re undoing something that’s probably really deeply entrenched in your brain. The story that you tell yourself over and over.
MARK ANTHONY: Yeah, not only is it deeply entrenched in your brain, that one experience but this is what happens: when something happens to you, you also have in your subconscious mind lots of beliefs and patterns of lack or limitation are what your parents told you. So if you’ve got in your subconscious mind, a belief that you got acquired from your family, that people are unfair, or that you’re never going to get your shot. Or your family’s not smart enough for whatever beliefs you have, something can happen to you. And all of that can get triggered. So not only are you now experiencing the results of the experience, but everything in your subconscious mind that vibrates with that will chime in and go “oh hey, I’m here, too. Oh, hey, remember this?” It does. It can feel really large and overwhelming.
HANNAH: Yeah, that’s true. Like the ancestral trauma that passes down. Yes, there has been like epigenetic studies that show that that is actually in our DNA, or can be, so yeah, it absolutely would affect our thought processes and trauma as well.
MARK ANTHONY: Exactly. That’s why if you and I are walking down the street and someone passes by and does something random, I could go “oh, that’s nothing” and you could go “oh my god, can you believe he just did that?” We’re literally looking at the same thing from different thought systems. Which is why if you are the one that goes “oh my god, I can’t believe you just did that,” that’s inside of you, a call for forgiveness. Not about the other guy. But whatever got activated in you again, remember forgiveness is a process that purifies your mind, of the stories and of the thought patterns that aren’t true. But they live in you.
HANNAH: So then may I ask what step three is?
MARK ANTHONY: Step three is go back to step one. Step three is so simple because if you have thoughts, if thoughts are catching you because they’re harder to stop when I’m stuck, like when the story got activated in my mind and now my emotions are activated and I’m contracted. And it’s just because I was thinking, that’s where I go back to step one. I go ask that forgiveness set me free. Ask for forgiveness. You just go back to asking and activating the process. And I literally think of forgiveness, it’s weird, but I think of it like an IV drip. You know, when you’re in the hospital and they hook you up to the IV drip when you ask for forgiveness, the universe like it’s just dripping into your consciousness and you’re just activating it.
HANNAH: It really is like that.
MARK ANTHONY: Yeah, my definition of forgiveness is a mystical something that is done unto you. So it’s not something that we do, and this is where people get really confused. If I could do anything for your listeners, it’s to separate you from the process of forgiveness. You activate forgiveness by asking, you don’t do it. You don’t even know how to do that. How could you possibly know how to realign all the thought systems and all that’s connected to the story? It’s not possible from your human perspective and from the part of you that’s stuck in the pain. You can’t figure out how to do that. That’s another one of the lies around forgiveness. “I’ve got it. I thought I did this already.” Or people say to you, “aren’t you over that yet?” You know, and then you feel bad. Because you think you’re the one that’s supposed to do that. I don’t have that. I’m not responsible to do forgiveness. It’s something mystical that’s done unto me. I have experienced the profound effects in the healing power of it. Through my part, which is to ask.
HANNAH: Yeah, and I know you said this to me before but I’d love to say it again, that this is a practice that doesn’t require a religious belief or maybe even spiritual belief necessarily, right? I don’t know if you want to speak to that.
MARK ANTHONY: Yeah, I don’t experience forgiveness at all as religious act. I do experience it as a spiritual experience because I’m a spiritual teacher. And that’s what I do. But I do agree with you that you don’t even need to be spiritual, but you do need to be willing to kind of again, that’s why I say like, if you believe in some kind of higher power or higher thought, or whichever way or just the universe or presence, I don’t know there’s so many names now—for something kind of greater than the part of you that is stuck in the problem. And honestly, we all have within us that higher self that even that’s enough to call upon.
HANNAH: Yeah, I like that a lot. Because I think sometimes people hear the word “spiritual”, and they just assume that to be spiritual they need to believe in, I don’t know, crystals and tarot cards, you know, and it’s like, there’s so many different types of spirituality that you just can’t really necessarily put that in a box.
MARK ANTHONY: Exactly, exactly. And yet, I think of it this way, is kind of silly, but it works. Looking for spirituality or for something greater than me, is like a fish swimming in the ocean looking for water. Like imagine the fish being told, “you need water to live” and like, “oh my god, I gotta find water. What’s water?” They’re so immersed in it, but does it really matter if the fish believes in water? Like, it doesn’t even need to believe in water. If it’s in water, it’s going to work. So I don’t know, this kind of works for people sometimes to be like, it doesn’t matter if you believe in it. I know that there’s something working for all of us, call it love. You could just call it love. Everyone knows what love feels like when we feel good, and we feel love for someone or for a pet or for something that’s occurring. That energy alone, you could call upon.
HANNAH: I really like that, it makes it like really accessible to people who have all kinds of beliefs and ways of looking at the world. It’s not like, you know, “I don’t believe in the universe as being a higher power therefore I can’t do this practice.” I like that. It’s not like that. So do you have an example from your life or someone you know, where they were really transformed from this practice?
MARK ANTHONY: Absolutely. I have lots of students and people that I’ve worked with that have it but yeah, from my personal life, and especially to support you and your focus on grief. I had a really, really rough childhood. And a childhood that really deserved a grieving time. You know, there were losses, if you will, that I had that were very, very deep because of things that happened to me: sexual abuse. And I’m a gay man. So growing up in a homophobic world where you’re so afraid to be yourself and, and all of the things that come with that in a violent world against LGBTQ people. So all of that was my childhood. And so it was very traumatic. And so as an adult in my 20s I really started to experience the effects of that through addiction and big self-sabotaging; I just hated myself. I so fully rejected myself through the process. So although that’s different than your story of grieving, letting someone go, grief has so many faces that deserve to be acknowledged. And so what I didn’t know but I know now from hindsight, is grief, like forgiveness, takes as long as it takes. And the more we honor that, the more we give space for that—it’s a paradox—the faster it works, you know?
Yeah, so I say that I really do believe that forgiveness became over time, as I understood it and did it more, it really did become a primary spiritual practice, for me a spiritual practice. That really helped me become free from the stories of my childhood and the grief and the pain and the sadness that I was recycling inside of me because, like you mentioned earlier, for me, grief collapses with guidance, the word that I use that a lot, but I get collapsed with it and I think that there’s something wrong with me. You know, and that’s, that’s when someone’s like, well “speed this up.” “Well, why do you still feel bad?” “Well, you should be over that.”
That’s me not honoring my process and what is required. Because I think grief works, I know, you know, grief works. It works. It’s a part of a plan to move us forward. But we often resist it. You know, we resist the experience of it because we’re afraid of it. So forgiveness really became my friend along the journey and forgiveness—and this is what forgiveness does—it doesn’t bypass my experience. In fact, for me, it’s the opposite. It leads me through it, which meant there were more tears, which meant anger had to be expressed on a pillow. You know, forgiveness moved me to my body being used as part of the healing process. So forgiveness led me to a great therapist. I think that forgiveness just connects us to whatever you need to help you.
HANNAH: So was it through this experience that you kind of discovered what you teach today, or how did you come across that?
MARK ANTHONY: Yeah, well, so I was around 25. And I basically woke up in a treatment center. I was living in Chicago, but I woke up in a treatment center in northern Canada. My parents had shipped me up to a private treatment center from drugs and sex addiction that was just killing me. And so I found myself up in this place. It was January, northern Canada. And I was like, “I’m leaving,” and they basically opened the door and they’re like, “the closest town is an hour away driving, good luck.” And it’s freezing cold, so I’m not really going anywhere. So I stayed, and about a week or two in, I was meeting with my counselor there, and she was my angel. And she said to me, she said two things. She said, “Mark, you’ve got to find a new higher power. And you’ve got to learn how to forgive if you want to live.”
And for some reason that pierced right into my heart. At that point, I didn’t want anything to do with God. And I had, what the heck is forgiveness and I needed to live like that, it just struck me. And I’m glad it struck me because it’s sent me even, though I had no idea what she meant, she was the catalyst for me to start a whole new journey of “what is forgiveness?” “How do I study it?” No one really knows what it is. So I had to sort of piecemeal different things together along the path. So for me it was a life or death situation that got me into it. And then the more I did it, obviously like, I can’t believe I have the life I have today. There are times I can’t believe I’m alive. I mean, that’s how intense my experience was. So yeah, it’s just it changed my world.
HANNAH: Thank you so much for sharing that.
MARK ANTHON: Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. I’m so grateful. I’m so grateful for the journey. You know, that’s another thing that that forgiveness does by the way, you’re left with no shame, you’re left with no embarrassment. Like what happened, it’s perfect and you can make it can fit into your construct of how you view life where it’s part of your of your of your positive perspective and not something that is negative and outside of you.
HANNAH: How does someone know if this is something that they need, that they need to reach forgiveness?
MARK ANTHON: It’s a great question. You know, it’s interesting, one of my great teachers who was really a catalyst for me on my path of becoming a teacher of forgiveness. She used to say, “how do you know there’s more forgiveness work for you to do?” “Well, are you still breathing?” That was her point. Her point is as long as you’re here, there’s some point of view that you have on life, on yourself, on people, on whatever, like what will happen if you make forgiveness a way of life? It’s going to take you deeper and deeper into looking at constructs, at belief systems that are attacking and that are true, ultimately, of you? But those are the finer subtle ones that a lot of people don’t get to because they’re still working on big, gross ideas, you know?
So how do you know if you’re just starting, you know, how do you know what where could you apply some forgiveness for practice? Well, any person, place or thing that you judge or causes an upset of any kind. That would be an invitation for forgiveness. If you’re really committed to it as a way of life, that’s how you view it. Like, “oh, man, that person just walked by drove by really fast with a loud car, bla bla bla bla, what an idiot.” You know, those kinds of things pop out to me. For me. That’s a call to go “oh, wait a minute. There’s something again.” And this is where it gets more challenging because the whole world would say, “of course they’re an idiot. They’re driving their car too fast down your street.”
Everyone agrees. Everyone loves to attack. But few people love to find a place where you get to see everyone differently. My goal in life and it is absolutely my goal in life, is to see everyone, absolutely everyone as whole, as innocent, as part of a presence of love. That’s what my goal is and anything that is a thought or an experience that isn’t that, is what I use to activate forgiveness.
But a great thing to do is because, especially for women, the mind attacks—women judge themselves so harshly, beating themselves up—what to say, what not to say, apologizing for themselves. Like there’s a way that women in our culture, because they’ve been suppressed, have that sort of pattern. So you could begin paying attention, what kind of a hammer am I using against myself? Inside my thinking? You could start there and say every judgment that I have and a way to do it, take three minutes and write. What judgments do you hold against yourself? Judging your body. Judging your success or not success. Judging what you said or did say. Judging something that you did in junior high school.
It was, you know, you could just take five, three to five minutes and just like, what am I holding against myself? That list becomes a place where you could say, this is what I have people do, put your hand on that list and say, “I ask that forgiveness set me free from all of this. I am ready to be free from the stories these thoughts and these judgments against myself. I ask that forgiveness set me free.” That is a really amazing thing. And if you stay on that, if you stay on that, you just do that.
Like I always want to get people to the 21-day kind of practices. If you focus on forgiving yourself for every judgment for 21 days. I’m talking like a minute in the morning and a minute when you go to bed set your alarm and your clock, I say “I ask that forgiveness set me free. I ask that forgiveness set me free.” Put your full attention on that statement and repeat it for one minute. In the morning. And one minute. That’s two minutes a day. Yeah, for 21 days. That’s 42 minutes. And at the end, you should be feeling lighter, should be feeling more spacious. Just suddenly something will begin opening within you. It’s ultimately the only way you’re going to know if forgiveness works is through the application of it.
And this is what’s really interesting, Hannah, what people are really afraid of—and this is really what I know in teaching so many people—what they’re really afraid of is their true power. What they’re really afraid of is being in their authenticity, boldly and clearly. Because most people around them aren’t that. And so when you say you agree to a life of forgiveness, you agree to sloughing off all of the stories and all the ways your energy gets misused and fragmented. And it brings it all together and you’re going to rise up out of all of those agreements that you share with your family, with your friends and with organizations and somebody could be like, “Oh man, that’s scary,” to step out of these agreements and say we’re going to be mediocre, we’re gonna play by the rules. I’m gonna live in a box. And it upsets people.
When you start feeling happier when you start feeling more powerful, and you start creating from that place, you’re going to upset the applecart and that scares people. But take a moment and look at the applecart. Is that really what you want? You know, and one more thought I actually consider especially again when I’m working with women because I think they’re the leaders in our freedom and bringing the feminine power into the world right now. I say to them, “do this for your children. Do this for your future generations. Do this for your family and friends so that everyone gets the opportunity.” If you feel called to wake up to greater good, know that you’re not just doing it for yourself.
HANNAH: I love that. I really really love that.
MARK ANTHONY: Yeah, I do too.
HANNAH: And I can totally see how it would be scary because, and I’ve been experiencing this too in my life, where those negative stories that we tell about ourselves in the world, over time can start to feel like our identity. And so sloughing that off feels like “oh my god, like who even am I?” Yeah, so it’s definitely scary.
I haven’t experienced this personally, but I can imagine how incredibly difficult it would be. If, for example, someone caused extreme, extreme harm against a loved one: murder or assault like so many things. How would one even begin to broach something so huge? Because I can just imagine how incredibly difficult that would be to think, how can I possibly forgive this person? You know?
MARK ANTHONY: Yeah, yeah. Well, that was my path. That was my path. And it’s quite mystical and I get a little nervous sharing it but I also feel like it’s important to share it because I seriously I could not have caused the gift that that I received on my own. This is how I know it so fully. So as I mentioned, I was sexually abused as a child. And it was really haunting me as an adult. It was infecting my relationships, my sexual experience with my partner was always overlaid and like, I just get apocalyptic images in my head. It was very traumatic, and it was very painful. And it was really getting in the way of my experience of life. So this is again, coming out at the treatment center where I was like, man, come on forgiveness, come on forgiveness.
And it wasn’t an overnight miracle that I got. I again, I went to therapy. I went to 12 step meetings, I worked with spiritual counselors. I really had a full commitment to my healing, because it was hurting too much. I wasn’t living well inside of this story, but I couldn’t get out of it. I couldn’t get out of it. So adding up, you know, therapy was helping, twelve step was helping, all of the pieces that I was doing, while I was just practicing forgiveness, were coming together. I was sitting with my spiritual counselor. And I was in the triggers of this story again, and she did this prayer for me of forgiveness, the way that I teach it now and just in asking it just an opening.
Well, that very weekend, I was living in LA, I flew to Chicago. I was a director and choreographer for a living and I was being considered for a big job and so I went to the table read and during there, there was sexual abuse in the script. And I was kind of taken aback. So here I am sitting at a table read with all these people around me, producers and everything. And I’m like, barely breathing on the inside. So I made it through the weekend. I got on the plane to fly home. I remember I sat by the window I put on my sunglasses, looked away from people and tears started coming down my face and I just was like, I asked that forgiveness set free. “I ask that forgiveness set me free.” I was just kind of begging for relief. And suddenly, something, I’ll call it spirit—Spirit pulled me out in my mind pulled me out of this story that kept haunting me. And said “look at this the way I see it,” and the whole abuse scene disappeared. And all that was there was light dancing with light. It was just the back of everything, all the traumas, all the things—there is love dancing with love. There is a source of goodness that we all are and that’s what’s real. Everything else overlaid over it will dissolve. And every one of us will find ourselves in the center of our own divinity, our own natural power. That’s what I was shown. The story was taken off of it. And I was shown what’s really happening.
And then that story was kind of put into a ball. This is all in my mind, and it was thrown out into the universe. It was like, “this will never hurt you again.” And then I kind of popped back into my experience. I know that’s so crazy mystical and it’s weird. But it happened. And from that day, to today, I have never been haunted by it. In fact, I was told, “by the way, you won’t even think of this unless you use it for teaching purposes.” That was the only reason—like this! Suddenly it’ll come to me for teacher purposes and I’ll tell the story. But throughout my day, Hannah, it’s not in my cells. It’s not in my memory. It’s not in my body. It’s not in me anymore to even think about or go to. I mean, that is what I would call a miracle, the miracle of forgiveness will dissolve the pain. It will release you from the story and it will place you on higher ground, where a story can no longer touch you. That’s honestly my deepest truth of it. And that was my experience of it and I wish that for everyone. Because I feel like I was just given this gift. But the reality was, I wasn’t just given it, I had been working. You know, it’s one of those like, “Oh, you’re an overnight success.” No, I’ve been doing it for 10 years.
HANNAH: Yeah, you did all that work. You asked for forgiveness over and over.
MARK ANTHONY: Yeah. I mean, it wasn’t an easy time getting there. I will admit that like, I had to really dedicate myself and it was scary and there are times I didn’t think it was working at all. But then suddenly it all culminated in the right moment. And I really had a miracle. Yeah, all I know is like, I’m not special. Like if that can happen to me, that can happen for everyone. Spiritual healing through forgiveness really does work.
HANNAH: And it’s probably, I’m assuming, experienced a bit differently for everyone. I don’t know if you’ve seen that.
MARK ANTHONY: No, absolutely. You’re absolutely right. Like mine was more visual and, you know, but that’s kind of like what my meditations are like, that’s just kind of how I’m wired. So I think forgiveness works perfectly through each one of us, exactly how we’re wired. Someone else may just have an exhale that goes “huh” and it’s gone. You know, it can be very simple. It can also primarily, and this is mostly how it works, I think I was given that dramatic experience because I think it was my calling to teach forgiveness. So you know, I was sort of given an extra jolt. But for most people, it’s the dissolution of the story over time. It’s more gentle and it just releases like how if you’re getting a massage and the muscle is so tight but if you’re just gentle and keep going eventually it will release and let go. That’s kind of how it typically works.
HANNAH: Yeah, where you might not even realize it’s happening over time. And then one day you’re like, “oh, wait, I do feel lighter than I did, however long ago.”
MARK ANTHONY: Or, and the great test is like the story popping up, right? Like, I haven’t thought about that. Oh my god, when’s the last time that popped into my head? Like you suddenly realize your mind has been freed from the habitual recycling of the pain body.