Andrea:

I’m Andrea Giles, and you’re listening to the Heal from Infidelity podcast,
episode 154, A New Look at Forgiveness with Dara McKinley.

Hello and welcome to the Heal from Infidelity podcast where courageous
women learn not only to heal from their spouse’s betrayal, but to become
the boldest, truest, most decisive and confident versions of themselves
ever. If you know there’s more for you than the life you’re currently
living but don’t quite know how to get there, you are in the right place.
Stick around to learn how to create a life that will knock your own socks
off. Is it possible? It is. And I’m here to show you how. I’m your host,
Andrea Giles. Are you ready? Let’s dive in.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Heal from Infidelity.
I love when I can bring special guests on that know more about a topic than
I do that have more depth in it than I do who have studied it more than I
have. And while there are episodes here for you to listen to about
forgiveness, today, I am bringing you somebody who her whole business is
around forgiveness. That’s what she does. It’s what she helps people with,
and I’ve been really intrigued by her because she has a different way of
looking at forgiveness that I think you will all find really, really useful
today. Welcome today, Dara McKinley. So glad to have you here. Can you say
hello?

Dara:

Hi, everybody. Thank you, Andrea. Thank you for having me.

Andrea:

Absolutely. So I think we should just dive on in. Tell us about yourself.
Tell us about how you got into the business of forgiveness. What led you
here?

Dara:

Okay.

Andrea:

We’re going in. Let’s just go.

Dara:

So I was born a very spiritual little girl. I was specifically raised to
seek spirituality for myself. My mother grew up in a Catholic family, and
she’s very much a questioner. And so she would question the teachings and
she would get reprimanded for it. So she thought, “I’m going to raise my
kids to be seekers and to seek for themselves.” And that’s what I did. And
beginning when I entered college and I pursued a degree in psychology, I
have always been fascinated with spirituality, psychology and where the two
meet up.

I even have a graduate degree in Buddhism and psychology, and I’m very much
a whatever works type of person. I was always trying new things, always
studying healing modalities. And that’s how I spent three decades of my
life. But when I intersected with forgiveness, I had been on this path for
two decades. Should I go into how I arrived to forgiveness?

Andrea:

Yeah, for sure.

Dara:

So forgiveness as a very spiritually, psychologically oriented person,
forgiveness always intrigued me, but I’m also extremely practical. And I
never could really grok how someone just pardons somebody else. And that
was the main definition I had heard throughout my life was that forgiveness
is one’s ability to pardon. I loved it in theory that we could all be so
high-minded and loving, and that we could pardon people who have done
strong things.

Andrea:

Strong. That’s a good word.

Dara:

But whenever I actually went, “Okay, well then how does that work?” I
remember one time someone said something that it really made sense to me. I
was in a universal church in Seattle, and the teacher started talking about
forgiveness. I went to the edge of my seat like, “Oh, she’s going to
explain it to me finally.” She didn’t really deeply go into it, but she
just said one thing that to this day I reflect on and go, “Oh, I get it
now.”

She said, “To forgive is to give forth.” And she just took the word and
reversed it. And at the time I remember thinking, “Well, I need more, but
now I see what she meant.” So here I am in the early 2000s. I had an idea
for a business. And in my naive youth, I rushed into creating this business
with business partners who had proved to be incompatible. But the business
took off and we just kind of endured each other for as long as we could.
And then everything fell apart and I ended up losing my share of the
business.

So at the time, I had two decades of psychology and spirituality behind me.
So I was like, “Okay, this sucks, but I will get over it. I will focus on
gratitude. I will process my emotions. I will recreate my life, jam all the
things that I had studied.

And three years after this incident, I still wasn’t over it. For me, I just
kept having intrusive thoughts of how wrong it was because there was a huge
layer of deceit around the ending. And so I just was really hooked on that,
and I just kept finding myself really wanting to focus on a hundred
different things. I just kept having this narrative enter my brain that was
ruminating and resentful about how wrong the ending was.

So I had a friend at the time, an older wise woman who watched the whole
thing go down. And every six to nine months I would kind of bust on her and
just vent about how upsetting the whole thing was. And she would listen to
me and she’d say, “Yes, I understand, I understand.” Then she’d end the
conversation with, “You might want to consider forgiveness.” I would get so
irritated.

“What do you mean? Didn’t you just hear what happened to me?” And this
happened three or four times, like clockwork. She would end the
conversation with that. Okay, so here I am. It’s now 2012, October of 2012.
It’s three years to the month that the whole rupture happened. And I start
to have symptoms of a mystery illness. It’s anxiety, fatigue, and insomnia.
I have a three-year-old and a six-year-old. The doctors can’t figure out
what’s happening with me. And I start freaking out that something’s really
wrong with me.

I’m, again, very spiritual person, so very intuitive person, but very
grounded about my intuition. I have noticed over the course of my life that
when I’m very upset is actually when my intuition is almost the clearest,
and it’s because my ego has completely left the field and messages can come
through very clearly. So I remember it was the full moon weekend. It was
the weekend that Hurricane Sandy was hitting the East Coast. It was this
big super full moon.

I got pretty much had a down on my knees moment where I am freaked out to
my core like, “Universe, you have got to tell me how to guide me out of
this. Whatever you say I will do.” I was making this bargain.

Andrea:

Yeah, I’m in.

Dara:

And the message that came through was forgive. And once again, I was
irritated, but it was so strong that I couldn’t ignore it. And so I said,
“Okay, fine.” I accept this mission. I’m a woman who can follow directions.
There has to be some forgiveness. How to online, let me jump online. I
Googled how to forgive, thinking that some five step thing to how to
forgive would pop up. And what came up was why a person should forgive.

I was able to find a few threads online, like forum threads about how to
forgive. And the main discussion would just say, “You just do it. You just
do it.” So I was like, “I am someone who needs directions. And so I was
like, “Wow, I’m going to have to figure this out on my own.” We’re going to
need to swing back to the illness piece because people really have a lot of
questions about that, that I noticed in my podcast discussions. So I was so
motivated by the fact that I had this illness to figure it out. And so the
question that initiated me into the process was, “Okay, I have been
thinking about how wrong this thing was for the last three years. What’s
the opposite of that?”

And that was the first step I took into the world of forgiveness. And when
I was done, I define forgiveness as I define forgiveness as a lot of
things, but one of the main things I define it as is spiritual process
where I truly had to create a new neural pathway in my brain that wasn’t
there before. So three weeks after I took this first step, I felt
completely peaceful and free. And as a geek for healing modalities, I was
really wowed. I was like, “Whoa.” I was like, “Forgiveness is for real.
That worked.”

Andrea:

Wow.

Dara:

I don’t have the resentment anymore. And so that was one thought I had. And
the second thought I had that I’ll never forget was, “And that wasn’t
pardoning. Why does everyone say forgiveness is pardoning?” But that that I
then went on to use what I had developed to, I was like, “Well, let me see
if it works with forgiving myself about something and let me see if it
works.” And so I became a geek in my own little personal life for doing
this forgiveness practice. But over the next two years, I started talking
to friends, families, colleagues, and I started to see, “Oh my God, so many
people are in this boat that they have something they want to forgive, and
there’s just no practical path.”

So I started teaching then, but I would say that that was actually when
forgiveness really started to teach me. And so it’s been a decade long
journey of basically contemplating forgiveness in every free second I’ve
had. Amazing.

Andrea:

How interesting the twists and turns that life takes us on that you
probably didn’t imagine 20 years ago that this would be your whole career,
right?

Dara:

The fitness teacher.

Andrea:

Yes, like this would be your whole career. Amazing. So I have a couple of
questions for you. That’s an amazing story. I know that my listeners very
much relate. You mentioned a few things. You mentioned deceit, you
mentioned resentment, these pieces that you were carrying around that were
very hurtful, that were very hurtful. You mentioned intrusive thoughts.
That’s something that comes up a lot.

And you were carrying all of those things and then you kind of surrendered
into, “I guess, I’m going in, I guess this is what I’m going to figure
out.” And very quickly you felt the transformation from that, right? Would
you agree?

Dara:

Right.

Andrea:

Okay. So a couple of questions I have for you that come up in my
discussions with my clients, something that I see sometimes. What’s the
difference to you between the kind of forgiveness that you experienced and
that you describe and that you help people with and the kind of spiritual
bypassing type of thing and calling it forgiveness of… Do you know what
I’m saying?

Dara:

Yeah, absolutely.

Andrea:

Calling it that. And then I’d love to hear your thoughts on that. What
comes up around that for you?

Dara:

So I believe the mainstream definitions of forgiveness are pardoning,
ceasing anger, having compassion and letting go. And I have come to see
those as all potential results of forgiveness and not the act of
forgiveness. And what I discovered in that process was… Well, what I asked
was, I was like, “Okay, so these are all the things that you’re supposed to
be able to do as someone who forgives. And what is actually the force that
empowers all those things to happen?” Because all those things are actions.
So what is going on behind those actions that enables those four things to
take place?

And then I actually have a very strong component in my course about
emotions. So I do think that if you’re… And listen, I have read, so I
need to do the disclaimer right now. I have read and know of many stories
of people who have survived atrocities who swear that pardoning is what set
them free. And I believe these people. I’m offering an addition to this
definition. So if pardoning is the thing that sets a person free, I believe
you, and that’s awesome.

My work is for the people who it doesn’t set them free that they need to
get… I say I get under forgiveness’s hood essentially, and I look at the
mechanics, and so this is who I’m representing and who my work is for. So I
see so clearly how to kind of say, “Oh, just let it go. Oh, just have some
compassion. Oh, just pardon them.” I can see how much that seems and is
spiritual bypassing.

So the way I teach forgiveness is I actually teach it as it’s a two-fold
definition. The first part, it’s a person’s ability to apply unconditional
love in a very practical way. And the second part of the definition is
identifying exactly what needs it. And so there’s a big emotional component
in what I do because I feel like unconditional love, which I also define is
a spiritual force that comes through us in many different ways. For some of
us, it’s through family. For some of us, it’s through passions, it’s
through creativity.

We are channels for it. And so it gets blocked if you aren’t in right
relationship with your emotional world. So I believe that forgiveness is
very emotionally healthy and requires people to do emotional work.

Andrea:

Yeah. What I’m hearing from you is it’s not to bypass the emotional work.
It’s actually signing up for it like saying, “Okay, I’m going to feel these
things. I’m going to look at them.” And having that be part of your healing
and then having the things that you described be the result of it, the
ability to hold more compassion, the ability to… Those things that you
mentioned. I forget all the bullet points that you said.

Dara:

Yeah, compassion, letting go, ceasing anger. Like magically ceasing anger.

Andrea:

Right.

Dara:

Again, I know that there’s people who are very cerebral who letting go
truly works for them. Because I really observe human beings and I see their
different orientations in the world. And I think for people who are very
thought heavy, letting go actually makes perfect sense to them and is all
they need. But I think there’s people who are very emotional centered. I am
one of them. And we actually need to see our emotions in order to
experience emotional health. So one of the things I teach in the course is
how to circulate emotions.

It’s a very taboo thing in mainstream conversation, talking about emotions,
I think. And so every anatomical system of the body needs to circulate in
order to be healthy. And emotions are no exceptions. It’s part of our human
anatomy. It’s supposed to circulate, and when it circulates, we experience
health. And so I just want people to be very practical and to make
emotions, just a very mundane conversation and caring for one’s emotion is
a very mundane conversation.

Andrea:

Beautiful way of putting it. I love that. It’s just part of what we do,
part of just what we do to take care of ourselves.

Dara:

And once you start doing it’s a great part of what we do.

Andrea:

Yeah. I love that. So tell me more about the difference between forgiving
and pardoning. So I’ll give you a little context of something that I hear a
lot from my clients is they’re afraid to forgive because they are thinking
that it then means that it’s okay, that it’s okay that it happened, that
they should be over it, that they just move forward now and don’t talk
about it anymore. And sometimes spouses of some of my clients will say,
“Well, you said that you forgive me, so let’s not talk about it anymore. We
don’t need to talk about it.” So I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.

Dara:

Yeah, big topic.

Andrea:

So I believe that if someone has done something very strong to hurt another
person, that they’re in significant relationship and partnership with and
want that partnership to move forward, I actually am a believer of making
amends. So my question is, has the person who offended, has the offender
made a significant gesture of amends, or are they just saying, “You just
need to forgive me”?

So let’s give scenarios of both, because I see both. I see the significant
gestures, and then where some of my listeners are still just they’re afraid
to go there. They’re afraid to let go of it. They’re afraid to forgive
because in their mind, they’re making it mean that it’s okay. So let’s
address that, and then let’s address not the grand gestures.

Dara:

So forgiveness isn’t going to… It’s not going to mess with your good
judgment.

Andrea:

So important. That’s so good.

Dara:

What it’s going to do is free an emotional burden and the narrative that
comes with that emotional burden

Andrea:

That is profound. We got to slow that down for a second. Okay. Go back.
That was so good. Okay, so you said-

Dara:

Forgiveness doesn’t make things that shouldn’t have happened okay.

Andrea:

Okay. I love what you said about the judgment that it doesn’t take away
your judgment and that it actually clears things out, which my thought-

Dara:

Yeah. You can have the opinion that something isn’t okay without the
emotional burden and the resentment, and you can use that opinion to just
become a wiser bird.

Andrea:

I love that.

Dara:

And create a new beginning. With this information that you have now. So
forgiveness doesn’t let other people off the hook.

Andrea:

I love that. That’s so good. Something I talk about a lot is the difference
between judgment and discernment. What I’m hearing from you is your power
to discern and to really see things at a higher level can be heightened.
Would you agree?

Dara:

Right. It positions you in a very high-minded way.

Andrea:

Yes. Why is that? Why do you think-

Dara:

What happened to me will never be okay. Of course not. And I would never
want to enter into another partnership with people who I didn’t know I was
compatible with. There was a lot of wisdom gained from that experience. And
I will never think that’s a safe person and that I should be around. It’s
not reconciliation either. I know that that person’s… I don’t know if
they’re not a safe person, but they’re not safe for me.

Andrea:

Totally.

Dara:

I need to go forth making sure that I don’t intersect with that person.

Andrea:

And tell me, on that note, it sounds like you never did have any kind of
gesture towards reconciliation or trying to make it right. And so you had
to do what many of my clients do that never get that. They don’t get it.

Dara:

Right. And so this is another piece that I think is very confusing and
popular understanding about forgiveness is that with this pardoning
definition, and then there’s a lot of understanding that it’s
reconciliation, forgiveness is really an inside job that’s between you. And
again, this connection that we all have to unconditional love. And one of
the things I teach because some people think, “Well, I don’t have a
connection to unconditional love.” And it’s like, “Well, you do. You just
need it to be identified and honed. And that’s one of the things I help
people do.”

Again, your ability to identify what needs it and where to apply it.
Because so many times we don’t get apologies. We have to live in the
unresolvable. I almost think that’s what forgiveness exists for is when it’s
unresolvable and sometimes the person is dead.

Andrea:

Yes.

Dara:

Sometimes the person is never going to apologize. Sometimes the person has
a narcissistic mind frame. And when you’re a really solid person of
integrity who’s very relational and really does care for your
relationships, when you get around people in situations like this, it’s so
hard for our brains because we would never do that.

Andrea:

Totally.

Dara:

So it’s really about a profound acceptance that, “Wow, there are a lot of
people who just don’t have… I’m just kind of coming up with these words
right now, but let’s just say relational integrity.” They just don’t. And
we have to navigate life with them. If you have children with someone who
doesn’t have relational integrity, you have to figure out how to navigate
life with this person. And so I have three timeframes. I don’t know if you
saw that when you were looking over my work, but some people, there are
things that are completely in the past, and those are like, you forgive.
That can have layers to it that might require more forgiveness.

But in general an incident is the most straightforward thing to forgive.
But let’s say you need to forgive an ex who you co-parent with, and they’re
not a healthy person, you have to figure out how to deal with that person.
So I actually say that in those situations… So I call that the enduring
timeframe and chronic illness goes into that category and grief. So there’s
a lot of things that go into that category. You actually have to see
forgiveness as a practice, and the practice keeps you in the high-minded
position when you’re kind of dealing with a person who doesn’t operate that
way.

It keeps you intuitively clear. Because if we’re full of really strong
emotions and resentments, it’s hard for our intuition to guide us through
these difficult situations. So it just helps us stay in the best possible
position even though we have to endure this difficult relationship.

Andrea:

I love that. I love that. My listeners know that something where I’ve had
to learn all of this and practice it is in my own. I got divorced 11 years
ago and then seven months later, he died in a car accident. And so there
are many things I will never hear in this lifetime, discussions I will
never have. And we had six kids together and they were all pretty young.
And things that they will never hear, that I’ll never hear. And so as I have
navigated this space spiritually of really recognizing where he was still
very much living in my head, and he is not here. He’s not actually here. I
can’t go call him up and, “Hey, I want to hear this. I want you to tell me
this.”

And it’s been a reclaiming of my own piece to very intentionally decide
what to do with some of the hurt, what to do, how to frame it, how to talk
about it, how much power to give it, all of those things. And so when you
are describing the timeframes where… It is so, so important. It’s so
important to look at these things because there are so many people where it
is like closed chapter. It’s closed. But so many where it’s not, and they
still have to figure that out, right?

Dara:

Right.

Andrea:

The co-parenting pieces and all of that. Tell me the different timeframes.
I’m guessing we all have things that fit in all three. Would you agree?

Dara:

Right. And at the same time, yeah.

Andrea:

And at the same time, yeah. Tell us more about that.

Dara:

Well, episodic, which is an incident typically can be described as an
incident, enduring, which is something that’s ongoing, and then epic, which
is something that has gone on for a long, long time and thus can just seem
too daunting to forgive.

Andrea:

Can you give us an example of that?

Dara:

As a childhood or a long marriage. We’re all anatomically designed to
forgive, and this is another thing that I teach people in the course is how
to tap into this talent or gift or a thing that we’re born with that we can
use to help us heal. And so when we look at something logically, it’s like,
“Oh my God, that was a 20-year relationship. Where would I even begin to
forgive all this? It just seems overwhelming.” But once you actually decide
like, “Oh no, I do want this. I want to figure it out,” the right
hemisphere of the brain, which is kind of underdeveloped and doesn’t really
get the kudos that it deserves, is actually the part of us that heals.

But in western culture, it’s all left hemisphere of the brain. We’re all
figuring out science and math and logic and how it makes things make sense.
But this other hemisphere of the brain, which is imagination, creativity,
intuition, those are all the players that help us forgive. And it actually
can identify like, “Okay, if you want to forgive this long thing, “you
start with this. And with the epic timeframe, there might be layers. There
often are, because it was so huge, but it’s totally forgivable. You just
have to do it and want it.

Andrea:

Okay. Which leads me to a question. I think we know the answer based on
some of the things you just said, but do you believe that there are any
things that are unforgivable? It’s a big one. It’s a big one.

Dara:

There is nothing that’s unforgivable. And there are things that are
unpardonable, and there are things that are inexcusable.

Andrea:

I love that.

Dara:

But there is nothing that’s unforgivable because unconditional love really
is unconditional, and it’s a medicine. Let’s just use that as an example.
If we ingest a medicine, the medicine doesn’t say, “Oh, but you don’t
deserve to heal.” Or there’s no discernment of a medicine. It just does its
job. Or the sun just shines on whatever is in its path. It doesn’t say,
“You’re a good person.” There’s no judgment. And same thing with
unconditional love. It just does what it does. And that is it just loves
whatever’s in its path.

Andrea:

I love that.

Dara:

So we have the ability to put things in its path so that things are healed,
not so things are pardoned.

Andrea:

That’s so powerful. To talk a little bit more about, you said that
everything is forgivable. Not everything is pardonable, not everything is
excusable. And how would you recommend somebody in their own mind hold that
distinction as they’re navigating?

Dara:

It’s not about forget the pardoning thing. Forget it. I don’t know, but I’m
going to just say this. You’re right.

Andrea:

You’re right.

Dara:

You’re right. This should not have happened.

Andrea:

I love it.

Dara:

You should not have been treated this way. This was wrong. You did not
deserve this. You are right. All of that is right.

Andrea:

I love it.

Dara:

And the question is, do I want to live with the residual, burdensome energy
of this person’s crappy behavior? Do I want to live my life with that? Or
do I want to live from a higher place where I feel peaceful inside and I
can do… My relationships will be better, my creativity will be better, my
health will be better? There’s all this so much about how forgiveness helps
people’s health improve. And so the question is, do I want to be free of…
And I’ll use resentment as an example, but there’s a lot of emotions that a
person could be having, but do I want to be free of this resentment?

Andrea:

Yeah. So with the concept of the truth of unconditional love, right? I know
it’s not just a concept, it’s something that’s so powerful. With
unconditional love, can you tell us a little bit more… In talking to my
people who are dealing with infidelity who feel deeply, deeply betrayed, can
you describe what unconditional love means to you. When you are working with
your people in your course, things like that, what does it mean to you? What
does unconditional love mean to you, and how can we tap into it?

Dara:

So unconditional love is a spiritual force. Some people just feel it. I’m
one of those people. I was just born feeling it. I remember my earliest
memories. I remember feeling it. And some people feel it through their love
for their families, their love for their vocation. It’s this thing, and
it’s almost like we’re peaceful about… It’s a very peaceful love
actually. And it’s not joy and excitement and enthusiasm. It’s not rah-rah
at all. And it’s just like this thing that comes through us, and it directs
us to unconditionally be in relationship with whatever. We’re all
different. It comes through us in many different ways. And so it’s
families, passions.

Another big one is nature is where people can feel it. And so again, if
you’re like me, it’s right there. And a lot of people who come to my work,
they have that experience also. But I also have had people come to my work
where they’re like, “I don’t get it. I don’t feel it.” So for these people,
it’s like, “Okay. So you have to start to study your life and start to see
the things that you are unconditional about.”

And when you notice it, really notice how that feels in your body. So it’s
really an embodied experience and with repetition, and you start to see it,
what I’m saying to people is once you see that clearly, that is a medicine.
That is a medicine that you have that you can use. It’s not just for how
much you love your kids and you would do anything for your kids or how much
you love art and you would do for art. Whatever it is, how much you love
running. That is a medicine that you can apply. So am I answering your
question?

Andrea:

Yeah, that’s so good. I’m thinking about how… I think that there’s
misinterpretation too around that concept of unconditional love, that kind
of like this anything goes type thing. I would venture to say the opposite
is often true in some situations. For example, I’m thinking about our
children. And when we unconditionally love our children, sometimes that
means holding a boundary out of unconditional love. We’re not just going to
have zero expectations and call it unconditional love. Anything goes
because I love you.

And I think that that can be translated too with my clients dealing with
infidelity, that unconditional love is not the removal of expectations or
boundaries or of really setting a standard of how we want to be treated.
Would you say anything about that?

Dara:

Right. Yeah, 100%. And unconditional love, as far as my observation, I’m in
my early 50s. This is a conditional world, and that’s what-

Andrea:

Yeah, I agree.

Dara:

… we’re all navigating, is that this is a world of conditions. I’ve
listened to podcasts where people grapple between boundaries and
unconditional love and how to reconcile the two. And so it’s helped me to
understand that unconditional love is this thing that humans get to choose
to bring forth into the earth, or it comes through in our natural wiring.
But to say that if you really… I have yet to be able to do this, but if
you really scrutinize every single thing that’s going on, on this planet
and in our worlds, and in our daily lives, it’s all conditional.

I have yet to see where this is a very changeable place of science and
math. But I do think unconditional love is very real and it’s very useful.
And one of the byproducts of forgiveness is heightened intuition. Who
couldn’t use more clear intuition?

Andrea:

Absolutely.

Dara:

There’s so many things to navigate and big decisions to make. There’s a lot
of byproducts. But anyway, I hope I answered your question.

Andrea:

Yeah, I love that. It sounds like moving into a space of maybe being more
contracted to a space of being more open. And when we’re more open, I think
that’s where we’re most open to truth is when we can receive the things
that we need to receive, see the things we need to see, and this is
actively… Choosing to forgive is actively raising your hand for that. And
I think sometimes people think the opposite of that like, “If I forgive,
then I put myself in this box.” And what you’re saying is it’s the opposite
that you’re expanding. Would you agree with that?

Dara:

Yeah, definitely. Forgiveness is about liberation. It’s not about excusing
crappy incidents and crappy behavior at all. Accountability is healthy.
Accountability is important. The world doesn’t move forward in healthy ways
without accountability. I’ve often contemplated the difference between
accountability and blame. blame has an unprocessed emotional component
behind it. But accountability is just the facts. And the facts are that
someone… For example, someone behaved out of integrity. They violated a
sacred contract. These are just the facts. And forgiveness isn’t going to
take away the facts. As I said, it’s just going to help us move forward as
a wiser bird.

Andrea:

Yep. So good. Okay. So just a question or two more and we’ll wrap it up.
But one of the things in your notes was this forgiveness as a delegation.
Can you tell us what that means, please?

Dara:

Yes. Thank you for asking.

Andrea:

Yeah.

Dara:

Yes. So again, there’s this understanding that when we are experiencing
strong emotions over a huge rupture that happened, that somehow the healing
thing to do would be to muster up this incredible holy ability to have
compassion, let go. And it all sounds so great in theory until you’re in
that pit of the strong emotions. And then you realize like, “I don’t have
one shred of me right now that could do that.” That was where I was on that
fateful night in October 2012. I was like, “Okay, I will forgive.”

But then it was like, “But there is nothing in me that can do it.” And so
one of the things I realized that night, it was like, “Oh, when you know
how to access and apply unconditional love, that’s the thing that’s going
to do it.” You don’t have to do it. You need to know how to apply the thing
that can do it.

Andrea:

Wow, wow. Okay.

Dara:

And so I say when I often hear like, “Oh, I’ve tried forgiveness and it
didn’t work. Or, wow, forgiveness is the hardest thing you can do.” So I
hear things like that a lot. And I think to myself, “Well, yeah, because
you’re trying to do it and you’re not enlisting the thing that actually can
do it.” So I’m not Christian, but I’m aware of there’s actually… I
believe in the Bible. I don’t think there’s as many stories about Jesus and
forgiveness as people think, even though he was definitely the one to
popularize it.

But one of the most famous stories is as he’s being crucified, he looks up
and says, “Father, forgive the people who are crucifying me for they know
not what they do.” And so many people cite this story because here he is in
his final moments being tortured, and he somehow has this incredibly
wise… He walks his talk till the very last moment and forgives the actual
people who are killing him. And yes, all those things are true about this
story, but what I find so interesting about this story is that he actually
didn’t forgive them. He asked father, what is called father in the story to
do it.

Andrea:

Wow.

Dara:

And I say, had someone interviewed him at the time and been like, “Well,
why don’t you do it?” And he would be like, “Well, I’m in a lot of pain.
I’m dying. I don’t have it in me to do it right now, but I know something
that can.” So forgiveness is a delegation.

Andrea:

Wow.

Dara:

It’s like having a tax attorney and getting a lawyer. You have to-

Andrea:

That’s amazing.

Dara:

.. enlist the resources that are skilled at these tasks.

Andrea:

Yep. That’s so powerful. Asking for, I could use some support here and
where I have people from all faiths, no religion, but very spiritual or
exploring spirituality, things like that. And I think you said that we all
are innately… Talk more about how we innately can have access to this as
coming into this world. Can you share a little bit about that?

Dara:

Yeah. So it’s the right hemisphere of the brain specifically. There’s a
famous Harvard neuroscientist, Jill Bolte Taylor. Are you aware of her? No.
So she was on the track to become a Harvard PhD neuroscientist, and she
experienced a stroke. And it happened on the left hemisphere of her brain
and completely took it out for… I don’t know how long. It took her eight
years I think, to fully recover from the stroke. But she has this book
called My Stroke of Insight where she went from her entire life being
oriented around achievement and science and math and just jumping through
all the hoops to all of a sudden now having this 100% right brain
experience.

And so it opened her eyes to this whole other part of the human experience
that just doesn’t get the development that the left hemisphere gets. So
we’re born with this, and it has all these abilities that are incredibly
useful, especially when it comes to healing and forgiveness and
spirituality and our spiritual connection. It’s atrophied in most people in
Western culture. It’s really about moving those muscles.

When I teach the course, I am actually having people do a practice every
day throughout the course, and there’s many benefits to doing this practice
every day, but in my mind, I’m really wanting to develop that muscle. I
want people to graduate the course and be like, “Oh.” You know what I mean?
“This neural pathway is forged now. This part of my brain is up and going
and being used now.” And then as I started studying the actual anatomy of
this, I was like, “Oh my God we’re all designed to do this. It is just not
developed.”

Andrea:

Amazing. So powerful, so powerful. It goes to what we hear said that we
have everything in us that we already are a whole, and that there’s just
parts of us that need development, just development. But it’s already
there.

Dara:

Right, it’s there. And think about how empowering that is that we all have
the ability to regenerate. We’re born with it and it’s just a matter of
pressing the buttons and giving it up and going.

Andrea:

Engage, ignite, whatever that is.

Dara:

Yeah, ignite. Exactly.

Andrea:

Yeah. I love it. Well, this has been a really powerful conversation. I know
that it will be very thought-provoking and useful to my listeners. Can you
please, first of all let my listeners know how they can learn more from
you? And if there’s anything else you want to say before we wrap it up?

Dara:

Well, this was a very juicy conversation as I anticipated it would be. And
I really appreciate the work that you’re doing in the world. I’m sure all
the women who you’re helping have immense appreciation for you because yes,
recovering from ruptures, that huge, those betrayals that are that big, we
have to for the sake of everything. We have to figure out how to get
through these times. So thank you for having me and thank you for doing the
work that you do.

Andrea:

Thank you. I appreciate that.

Dara:

So what I typed in October 2012, I typed in how to forgive, and that’s my
domain howtoforgive.com.

Andrea:

I love it.

Dara:

So if you’d like to learn more, I don’t know when you’re publishing this
interview, but I offer the course once every season. It’s a six-week
course, and you can sign up to my newsletter and I send out reminders for
when the next course is happening. I’m on Instagram and Facebook, but I
don’t really do anything there. It’s just kind of like a digital business
card. So to me, the message comes alive in conversation. So opportunities
like this are kind of where I put my effort.

Andrea:

Yep. Perfect. I will have all the information of how to find you in the
show notes so people can start learning more from you there.

Dara:

Thank you.

Andrea:

And then is there anything else you would like to say? Any last words of
wisdom or anything you’d like to share before we go?

Dara:

My main thing is that you are anatomically designed to move forward to
forgive for new beginnings, to regenerate. And in this life or the next, I
hope that you harness and develop this part of yourself. It’s so worth it.
It really makes every aspect of your life better. It just does. It just
when we heal.

Andrea:

Amen, sister. I love it.

Dara:

Amen, sister.

Andrea:

So powerful. So many things to think about. I really appreciate you coming
and sharing your wisdom. I can feel from you that this is very genuine,
that you’ve done this work. You are an authority in it because you’ve done
it, right? You apply how to make it work for you. So thank you.

Dara:

A big believer in walking your talk.

Andrea:

Absolutely. Yep, absolutely. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate-

Dara:

Thank you.

Andrea:

… your time and your wisdom today.

Dara:

Thank you. My honor.

Andrea:

Thank you for listening to the Heal from Infidelity podcast. If you would
like to be kept in the know about upcoming free classes, new podcast
episodes, and other ways of working with me, go subscribe to my weekly
email. You can subscribe at andreagiles.com/lies-about-infidelity/. Again,
it’s andreagiles.com/lies-about-infidelity/. I will see you next time.