This blog entry is the third in a series of four entries on the book Radical Forgiveness by Colin Tipping. I think that this book is one of the most life-changing books I have read, so if you can, I suggest you read three entries in order, beginning with “Jill’s Story of Radical Forgiveness.”
In my last blog entry, I wrote about the Five Stages of Forgiveness, the process for forgiving that Colin Tipping created. I ended the entry by saying that Tipping believes that there is something spiritual going on when we find ourselves in upsetting, hurtful situations that give us an opportunity to forgive.
Do you believe that what we, as human beings. take in with our senses is all there is, or do you believe that there is something bigger than us? I have always struggled with what people mean when they say “God,” but I’ve always felt that there is something bigger than me, something transcendent. When I was young, I called it my Higher Power. As an adult, I’ve referred to it as the “Universe”. Tipping uses the term “Spiritual Intelligence,” which I like a lot.
After I left my high school teaching job, and when I became a career counselor at 60, my life was completely changed. One of the ways I changed was that I became more spiritual. It began with my spending two years (one weekend a month) in a spiritual direction program, but what really changed my life was when I started to be aware of all the experiences of synchronicity I was having. I once read that if you notice that there is a lot of synchronicity in your life, you’re on the right spiritual path. I don’t know if that’s true, but it feels true for me. I would love to share several of the experiences of synchronicity that I have experienced and that have changed my life—I talk about it a lot—but I’ll just share one here. It was synchronicity that led me to “conscious aging” and “sage-ing.”
In my first blog entry, I wrote about how I discovered the book Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life by Richard Rohr just at the right time, when I was retiring. First, someone I was playing golf with on Wednesday evening mentioned how excited she was to be going to a conference led by Richard Rohr, and then on the weekend, I went to an enneagram workshop, where he was mentioned again (He’s also an enneagram teacher.), so I looked him up, and I found Falling Upward. In this book, on the very first page, Rohr tells us that it’s possible to have a “second half of life,” a “second half” that is different than the first half. I couldn’t wait to find out what that meant.. Reading this book was just the first step in a series of synchronistic steps that led me to Sage-ing International and to becoming a Certified Sage-ing Leader, which has totally changed the way I see aging and my life.
I was excited to see that Tipping writes about synchronicity in Radical Forgiveness. He says that it was because of synchronicity that his sister Jill came to see him at the same time that she was so upset with her husband Jeff that she was thinking of leaving him. She only came to Atlanta from England because her brother John was going. She says she never would have done it on her own, (274), And Colin just happened to be working on the idea of Radical Forgiveness at this time. If Jill had not visited Colin, she might have divorced Jeff.
Tipping writes: “Where once we thought things happened by chance and were just coincidences, we are now willing to think that it is our spiritual intelligence making things happen synchronistically for our highest good. It is these synchronicities that lie embedded in our stories, and once we see them as such, we then become free to feel the truth of the statement: ‘My soul has created the situation in order that I learn and grow.’” (277)
In Radical Forgiveness, Tipping also takes this idea a step further to say that as souls, we choose to incarnate, because we want to have a human experience, but he says that we don’t have to believe this (40) for the Five Stages of Radical Forgiveness to work. As I said in my second entry on this topic, one of the reasons I see this book as life-changing is because Tipping actually gives us a process we can use to forgive instead of just telling us what a good idea forgiveness is.
In my last blog entry, I gave you the first three stages of the Radical Forgiveness process. In my next entry, I will give you the last two, and then I will write about the really important topics of self-forgiveness and what Kristin Neff calls “self-compassion.”
