Copyright 2001, Colin C. Tipping

Taking the Opportunity
Any time someone upsets us, we must recognize this
as an opportunity to forgive. The person upsetting us
may be resonating something in us that we need to heal,
in which case he or she gives us a gift, if we choose to
see it that way; that is, if we care to 
shift our percep-
tion
. The situation also may be a replay of earlier times
when someone did something similar to us. If so, this
current person represents all the people who have ever
done this to us before. As we forgive this person for
the current situation, we forgive all others who behaved
likewise, as well as forgiving ourselves for what we
might have projected onto them.
An example of this appears as a diagram on page 36.
Here, Jill’s story is represented as a time-line on which
appear all the opportunities she had been given to heal
her original pain arising out of her misperception that
she was “not enough.” When she finally saw what was
happening in the situation with Jeff and forgave him
(healed), she automatically forgave and healed every
previous occasion - including the original one with her
father. Her entire story, including those connected to
her previous husband, collapsed in an instant as soon
as that light bulb went on.
166

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This is why Radical Forgiveness requires no therapy
as such. Not only does forgiving in the moment heal all
the other times the same or similar thing happened,
including the original situation, but you don’t have to
know what the original situation was. That means you
don’t have to go digging up the past trying to figure out
exactly what the original pain was. It is healed anyway,
so what’s the point?
Shifting Our Perception
The following chapters contain processes that shift en-
ergy and offer opportunities to 
change our perception
of what might be happening in a given situation. This
change in perception constitutes the essence of Radi-
cal Forgiveness. All of these processes bring us into
the present moment by helping us retrieve our energy
from the past and withdraw it from the future, both of
which must be done for change to occur. When we are
in the present moment, we cannot feel resentment, be-
cause resentment only lives in the past. Neither can
we feel fear, because fear only exists in relation to the
future. We find ourselves, therefore, with the opportu-
nity to be in present time and in the space of love, ac-
ceptance, and Radical Forgiveness.