Dara McKinlay - How to Forgive

[00:00:03] Hi I'm Dr Russell Thackeray and welcome to Resilience Unravelled, a podcast with new ideas, new thoughts and new thinking about resilience. Guests with remarkable stories, products and services that can really power up your own mindset and resilience. You can also go to our site for more information, to ask questions or to access some of our resources at www.resilienceunravelled.com. Let's get started!

[00:00:32] Hi and welcome back to Resilience Unravelled. And tonight a guest with me called Dara McKinlay. And first of all, welcome Dara, how are you? I'm well, thank you, thank you for having me. How are you? Good, good. I'll just see you. We're both glasses wearers, so I was just watching you putting the glasses on and off there for a second. So I thought it was very interesting. Well, you sound by the accent to be over the waters. Where in the world are you? I'm in New York City in Brooklyn.

[00:01:02] Oh, okay. Very good. Yeah. Most people are in Manhattan, aren't they? What's the attraction of living in Brooklyn? Oh, Brooklyn is kind of the second most popular place to live. It's very close to Manhattan. You know, you just hop on the train. I mean, it's, I imagine if you lived in London and you got the opportunity to live in the next coolest neighborhood outside of London, you could just pop into London. That's what Brooklyn is. Oh, right. Well, I shall pop in and see you. So I'm in New York in a conference in March. So there you go. Oh, cool.

[00:01:30] I'll knock on the front door and say hello, it's me. I've come for forgiveness. Yes. Well, look, tell us a bit about yourself. Tell us a little bit. So I have been studying spirituality and psychology for most of my life. And I have mostly studied alternative spirituality and psychology and, you know, naturally have had been hearing about forgiveness from my earliest days.

[00:01:57] You know, my, my mother comes from a Catholic family. My father comes from a Protestant family. So it was a word. I mean, in the Western world, we're all hearing the word forgiveness, you know, from our earliest days. And so it was something as a very spiritual person who's into healing modalities and into people recovering. It was always something that I was curious about and interested in and wanted to understand more.

[00:02:20] And so, but whenever I actually I'm very practical and whenever I actually tried to do it or understand it in a very tangible way, it just always slipped through my fingers. So I kind of wrote it off as like, oh, it's, you know, some spiritual ideal that doesn't really have, you know, a practical application.

[00:02:41] So, but then in my early forties, I was recovering from a relationship rupture and I felt like I had to check out forgiveness. And so that's kind of the, the initial thing that brought me to the path. And when I did, there's a whole story there that I'm happy to get into. But when I did, I was blown away by how effective it was.

[00:03:06] And I also was really struck by the fact that I had heard my entire life that it was one's ability to pardon others when in fact, that's not what it was. And so here I am. You can't leave a cliffhanger like that. So if it's not pardoning others. So I actually, I'd actually love to begin with three disclaimers that will help the conversation flow forward. And the first one is that I have forgive.

[00:03:37] The definition that forgiveness is pardoning is deeply embedded in Western culture and is actually used in a lot of beautiful ways. And that we're pardoning each other all the time and forgiving each other all the time for all like the minor to moderate things that happen between human beings, you know? And so the word is pardoning. The definition is legitimate in a lot of ways. So what I like to say to people is that I'm adding another definition.

[00:04:06] Like most words in the dictionary have multiple definitions. Let's give, you know, forgiveness an additional definition here. Because when circumstances were very, very strong. Most people, a lot of people find forgiveness impossible.

[00:04:21] And so once I had kind of crossed the threshold with forgiveness and arrived to the other side, I looked around at popular culture and popular understanding and who was forgiving and who wasn't forgiving and who had something to forgive and who wanted to forgive. And I all of a sudden saw this huge demographic of people, most of them identified as spiritual but not religious, who wanted to forgive, but they felt like they had no practical path in front of them.

[00:04:49] And people who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious are very, very practical. That's kind of one of the reasons they land into that category. So, so I want to say that like, yes, if forgiveness is pardoning, even though in this conversation I'm going to propose another definition.

[00:05:06] The second thing I want to say is I've also read stories of people who have survived atrocities, wars, really, really horrific things that do swear that it is pardoning is what got them past it and brought them an inner peace. And I want to say that I believe these people like their healing modalities, you know, there's, they're different strokes for different folks and for some people the pardoning definition does work and I'm representing the people that it doesn't work.

[00:05:36] And then the third thing I want to say is my story involves a health issue. And so people get really excited like, ooh, can forgiveness resolve their health issue. And I do think that if your health issue has a strong emotional component, that of course it's going to help because forgiveness relieves emotional burdens from the body. However, not all health issues have a strong emotional component. So, you know, I don't want to sit here saying forgiveness solves health issues.

[00:06:03] It definitely is going to create less burden in your body and that's only going to benefit your health. But I don't want anyone thinking that I'm spreading this message that forgiveness is the answer to our health issues. Okay, so where was the cliffhanger? So, good. Well, let's unpack a few things first just so we're all clear. So first of all, you talked about this coming from a spiritual place and then you've just mentioned spirituality without religion. So how are you defining spirituality in this sense?

[00:06:31] Is it part of religion, nothing to do with religion, something separate? Yeah, spirituality is just your own internal connection with something that's greater than you. I see. Good, that makes a lot of sense. You talked about it coming from the sort of healing tradition or that you were part of the healing tradition. So is that part of spirituality? Is forgiveness part of spirituality or is it all part of healing or is it all mixed up together?

[00:06:55] So forgiveness happens to be a healing modality that uses one's spiritual connection. Good. Very good. And so you talked about very different types of forgiveness there and you've linked it to pardoning, which is odd because I've never heard it linked to pardoning before. Well, what did you grow up hearing about forgiveness? Well, so I think forgiveness is there's two things about forgiveness. One, which is that there's an issue and then there's a reaction to something.

[00:07:24] So something happens and then one has a reaction to that. And forgiveness can be for the issue it happens, but also for the reaction that happens afterwards. So some of it's about forgiving someone else, but some of it's about forgiving yourself as well. Because a lot of what we carry around with us is, you know, emotional pollution coming from our own reaction. The fact that we need to forgive anybody means that something's happened, which we interpret as being horrible.

[00:07:47] And of course, changing that interpretation, changing that mindset or paradigm about whatever that thing was, is the key to letting it go, isn't it? Because in a sense, forgiveness is the beginning of a process of moving on, I suspect. Yeah, definitely. It's a path for moving forward and having a new beginning. Yeah. So you said that you went through a relationship and then, you know, you had this eruption and such like, and then you sort of, you used it then almost, not for the first time, but you certainly used it then very effectively.

[00:08:17] So can we unpack that a little bit, please? Yeah, sure. So I had a business idea in the early 2000s and I kind of rushed into creating this idea with business partners who would ultimately, we would be incompatible in our personalities, but the business took off. And so we kind of endured each other for as long as we could. And then eventually everything fell apart. There was a rupture and I was pushed out of the business and lost, you know, the whole thing.

[00:08:46] And at the time I was half relieved because these relationships were so stressful. I was like, oh, you know, even though this is hard, I'm so glad to not have to, you know, be dealing with this anymore. And I was half heartbroken because this was my creative idea. And, you know, I put so much into it and now it was, and it brought me a ton of joy. And that now it was gone. So at the time I had two decades of psychology and spirituality. I have a degree in Buddhism and psychology.

[00:09:14] I have, you know, I'd been working in community mental health, you know, individual psychotherapy, meditation retreats. I had been doing all of that. So at this moment that I arrived, I was like, okay, Dara, this is difficult, but you have the skills to move forward. So you will process your emotions, you will lean into significant relationships, you will recreate your life, you will focus on the good, you know, all these things. And I did all that.

[00:09:40] And three years later, and I have, I guess, my Buddhist background to thank for my ability to be aware of this. Three years later, I noticed a negative narrative looping in my head, you know, because in Buddhism, they very much teach you to watch your thoughts. So I knew I wasn't over it.

[00:10:00] And at the same time, I started sliding into a health issue that was insomnia, fatigue, and anxiety. And the doctors couldn't figure it out. And I had a three-year-old and a six-year-old, depending on me. And I started getting extremely upset, you know, that like something was terribly, terribly wrong with me. And like, I needed to figure it out. So I was born a very spiritual little girl. And I would never in a million years describe myself as psychic.

[00:10:30] But people who are very, very spiritual from the get-go typically are very intuitive. I describe myself as very intuitive. And so I kind of like had this moment where I went into a deep place of prayer and truly was like begging, like, I need to be led out of this. I'm so afraid. Like, please show me the way out of this. And the message I got back was to forgive. And I, like a lot of people in this moment, did not like that message.

[00:11:01] I felt like I was letting these people off the hook. I felt there was something about the word give. I felt like I was giving more to this situation than where I had already lost something. I felt like it was me losing, you know, all the things that so many people think of when they hit that word. And but because I was in this desperate situation, I said, OK, I'm a practical person. I can follow directions. Let me get online. It's 2012.

[00:11:31] I said, let me get online and find whoever has written the five step how to forgive, you know, directions. And I will follow them. I will give this a try and see what happens. And so I typed in how to forgive and 99.9% of what came up was why a person should forgive.

[00:11:53] And the little teeny bit I could find about how was, you know, someone like me in some forum going, but how do you do it? And the response they got was you just do it. Yeah. So I couldn't just do it. I needed I needed a step by step. And so I thought, OK, Dara, you have two decades of psychology and spirituality behind you. Like come up with your own step by step.

[00:12:19] And so the first thing I asked myself, I said, OK, I've been running this negative narrative in my brain for three years. It's gotten me nowhere. It's potentially making me sick. And I just want to say right now that actually there was something else that my health issue did end up getting resolved. I don't want people to think that, like, I forgave and my health issue completely went away because a lot of people make that assumption. So I said, OK, Dara, what is the opposite of doing that?

[00:12:50] And my answer was, oh, I would bless this situation with the highest love. And with that answer, I took my first step onto the forgiveness path. And then for me, forgiveness is a process. And like, I don't think it's like a one time decision. Maybe for some people it is. But again, I'm representing the people who like definitely need to go through a process of disentangling from what happened.

[00:13:18] So three weeks later, I felt an inner peace I hadn't felt in three years. And that's when I had those two thoughts like, wow, like forgiveness is a legitimate healing modality. You know, this is effective. And then the second thought being like, and why does everyone say it's pardoning? And then over the next few years, I really saw like, wow. And this pardoning definition is keeping so many people from doing it. Yes. And it's interesting, isn't it? Because nearly all situations we experience in life, we are part of the situation.

[00:13:48] And I think often what we're doing here is we're not being accountable for our part of it. So we often talk about relationships, don't we? And we sort of blame the other person, don't forgive them for things that happened. And we forget our part of it. So we, you know, we do that thing where we're blaming and that stops us moving on because we haven't forgiven ourselves for our part of it. Because we're entitled to make mistakes because we can only make the decisions we make at the time. Right. Because of all the things which are going on. Yeah.

[00:14:15] My mother has a beautiful quote and it's looping back to blame that what you're doing to someone else, you're actually doing to yourself. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think that's part of it, isn't it? I don't think people realize that when they're hanging on to blame, they're actually hiding from the accountability of what, you know, what they did as part of that relationship or part of that scenario. And accountability is so, so, such a big step for people to take.

[00:14:43] But once you get there, it's so liberating. Like you get to see like so vividly how draining blame is. Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes part of the resilience toolkit we talk about, which is forgiveness, obviously, is part of it. And, you know, part of that is to be accountable for what you've done. You know, how many times have you sat in a relationship and you said, I'm stuck in this relationship. I'm a victim. I'm this, I'm that. But actually, you know, you're part of it. You have choice. You have agency.

[00:15:11] I mean, it can be beaten out of you, trained out of you, all that sort of stuff. But you have to own that bit. Otherwise, you can't forgive. And if you can't forgive yourself, that's even more tricky in a way. Sometimes, I don't know what you think about it. Sometimes it's easier to forgive someone else than it is to forgive yourself. Well, so here's my, like, spin on it. I actually, like, I'm in complete agreement with you. I love radical self-responsibility.

[00:15:37] I think blame is one of the most draining, you know, low vibe things happening on the planet. So I'm completely with you on all of it. And what I teach people is to establish their own embodied spiritual connection. And for a lot of people, it's right there. Like, I don't know. Do you feel like you kind of have a sense of something greater that's happening? No. I may be the wrong person to ask on that. No. Okay.

[00:16:07] That's fine. And so I guess what I would say is, like, if you were in my course, and I do this for everyone who's in my course, because I know, like, I have a very, as I said, innate experience of this. And it's been there from birth. But I know that a lot of people don't. And so I invite people. It's like, where does unconditional love appear in your life? And it can appear with family, with friends, with our passions. A lot of people experience it in nature.

[00:16:33] A lot of people get out into nature, and there is, like, some undeniable, like, otherworldly thing that happens when we're immersed in the natural world. And so I start off by having people examine where unconditional love appears in their life. And then once they see it, understanding that that's actually a medicinal force that can be applied to life's previous ruptures or to something that you...

[00:17:02] It can be applied to anything. It is unconditional. The word is for real. So is that unconditional love that you're giving or you're receiving, would you say? I would say it's unconditional love that you're accessing. Okay. And when you access it, once you know how to access it, you can apply it to yourself or to others. Whatever you want to apply it to. So basically, there must be a process of enlightenment to find that in your way.

[00:17:31] Because actually, if it's something you're accessing, it must always be there, but you don't have a way of accessing it. I actually don't. I think it's actually for the unenlightened. Yeah. That's what I mean. And this is why. Because I say that forgiveness is not one's ability to love unconditionally. Forgiveness is one's ability to enlist unconditional love. So I don't know if you're familiar with AA, like Alcoholics Anonymous. I don't know what they have. Yeah.

[00:18:00] So one of the first step is to surrender to a higher power. So it's similar to that in the sense that when you are in the aftermath of some huge loss, right? Like you're dealing with huge emotions. So to expect a person to love unconditionally or to have compassion or to just let go and just decide to let go.

[00:18:26] And these are the mainstream definitions that are pumped into people that almost make us feel like can make a person feel in those critical moments, kind of like a spiritual failure. Because they truly do not have any ability in those crisis moments to do all that higher mind stuff. So what I teach people is like, right.

[00:18:47] Like I'll say right now, that night that I Googled how to forgive and decided to check this out, I did not have anything inside me that could do it. You know, but I, because just however I was born, I had access to something that could. Because I have this spiritual feeling, I'm not an unconditionally loving person. I have petty thoughts. I have judgments. You know, I just, for whatever the reason, have access to this thing that came very easily to me.

[00:19:15] So when I reached for it, it was right there. So, but I teach people how to reach for it. So it's actually this thing that you can, you can grab for when you don't have anything inside you that feels holy or spiritual or enlightened. Yeah. So it's interesting because obviously I can see you and nobody else can, but I'm seeing you gesturing up to you, up, upwards and to your left.

[00:19:38] So you're actually seeing it as being almost in a place to access, almost like there's a cupboard, a mental cupboard up there or a spiritual cupboard up there that you can almost open and access. I think it's, I think it's, I think it's a current that runs through everything. But I think that, again, when you're in really difficult moments, it's most helpful to think a bit of something that's outside of yourself that you can access.

[00:20:07] You know, a lot of people, like, I don't know, have you ever done a lot of heavy meditation? Yeah. Yeah. So have you ever had the experience of merging with something bigger during meditation? I've experienced all the meditative things, but, and that's fine. I don't get me wrong. I'm not, I'm, you know, I'm a fan of this. So I'm just taking a devil's advocate place. I love it. Yes, I have. So I do believe there is, you know, there's no. So there it is. Right. There's a vibration, certainly, that you can access.

[00:20:36] There's no doubt about that. So, so very, so people who've had near death experiences, you know, record merging with a, you know, huge unconditional love meditators. One of my favorite things is to ask devoted meditators, like, have you ever merged with unconditional love? Because most of them are like, yeah, I absolutely have. And it's actually like, it's so profound that it initially throws them off when it happens. But it's interesting. It's interesting.

[00:21:06] And I love what we're talking about here, because I think a lot of people, not being skeptical, we just want to understand. It's, I would say that you're merging with something like an inner peace rather than an unconditional love. Now, we may be describing the same experience, just differently using different words. And I get that. But I'm, but I'm interested in the thought that as part of forgiveness, that you saved us and had some extreme trauma, that you reach for unconditional love before you do anything else. So, but, but I may have misheard that.

[00:21:33] So I just want to check that part of your process out again, if I may. Say it again. So you seem to be reaching for unconditional love first as part of your forgiveness process. That's where, when you started to describe your first step. And I guess that's what I'm struggling with. Where, where, why would, would that be the place to start? As opposed to what? Oh, well, anything else. It's your process. I'm just intrigued why you'd go there first.

[00:21:59] Oh, well, because that's the medicine. So I describe, so I define forgiveness as a spiritual process that heals. And the spiritual process has two parts. The first part is one's ability to access unconditional love, call forth, enlist, invoke, whatever word you want to use. And the second piece is to identify exactly what needs it. Right. So that makes sense. Yeah. Okay.

[00:22:29] That makes a lot of sense. And so you talked about that as part of your process. And you talked about having five steps. And you were obviously using that as an illustrative thing of saying you're looking for the sort of five steps. But you started talking about your own process. Are the steps as part of it? Or is that it so far? Right. So, I mean, what I teach people, the first thing from the gate is I teach them how to identify how unconditional love is operating in their lives and that it's something that they can apply.

[00:22:58] And the second thing I teach is that, and this is, you know, I imagine in your work that you're familiar with this science that the right and left hemisphere of the brains, you know, are constantly dancing. But they actually have two very distinct operations. And how I like to explain it to people is the left hemisphere of the brain helps us navigate the external world. And the right hemisphere of the brain helps us navigate our internal world.

[00:23:27] And, you know, when you hear people talk about the right and left hemisphere of the brain, they'll say the left hemisphere of the brain is responsible for executive functioning and organizational and, you know, yada, yada, yada. And they'll kind of say, and the right hemisphere of the brain is creativity, imagination, emotional intelligence, you know, and they'll kind of like just throw it off as like that's just this, you know, given thing that's floating around there that we have.

[00:23:50] And the right hemisphere of the brain is what we have. And the right hemisphere of the brain is not really getting the do for what it's capable of. And all the things that a person needs in order to forgive are actually located in the right hemisphere of the brain. So I teach people like this is the part of the brain that we're going to be using in this course.

[00:24:18] And this is the part of the brain that knows how to apply the unconditional love to this thing that happened to you, whatever it is that you would like to forgive. Then I teach people how to move stuck energy because that's often at the root of unforgiveness. Like if someone is like to me, when I hear blame, I see a stuck emotional system.

[00:24:44] Like I see someone who like there's something about their emotional world that hasn't been seen and thus is stuck and trapped. And to me, and also when I hear about when I hear negative narratives and I get like our minds definitely affect our bodies, but our bodies also affect our minds. And so when I hear negative narratives, again, from my perspective, I see a stuck emotional world. So the third thing is I teach people how to get that moving.

[00:25:14] And I really just want it to be as mundane as brushing your teeth. You know, a lot of people have a lot of misunderstanding and a lot of fear and a lot of confusion about emotions. And I get it, you know, like if you have a lot of strong emotions, they can be very, very scary. But I really try to be like, look, we're all in this. We all have an emotional world to deal with. It needs to be tended to just like every other anatomical system of the body. So I get people tending to it.

[00:25:40] And once they start tending to it, it typically moves and creates space and makes more room for unconditional love. Then the fourth thing. So once those skills are in place, then it's like, OK, now what is it about what happened to you specifically that needs it?

[00:25:59] And that's where that kind of, as you brought up when we first started talking, that fine line between forgiving yourself and forgiving others and how those two worlds are, you know, kind of just two sides of the same coin gets revealed to a person, you know. And so and then once they see that clearly, it's like, OK, now you have open highway. Interesting. And obviously you're talking here about a course.

[00:26:24] So it'd be it'd be sensible to tell people a bit more about the course itself and how they can find out more information about it. Yeah. So my my domain is howtoforgive.com, which how to forgive, which is what I typed in that fateful night when I was wondering, oh, my God, how do you do this?

[00:26:42] And, you know, I once I kind of crossed the threshold myself, I was initially just like happy I had figured it out and had somehow relieved myself of this, you know, trapped state I had been in for three years. So I was just like, oh, you know, glad I figured that one out. But over the next couple of years, as you can see, I'm someone who engages in meaningful conversations with, you know, everyone.

[00:27:05] And so over the next couple of years, that plus watching what what what the understanding was, the mainstream understanding was I was like, oh, wow, there's so many people who need a how to. Like, I'm not the only person here who had, you know, who wants to forgive, but it's just lacking this practical path. So that's when I decided to teach it. And I and then, you know, but so this was in 2014. I began teaching it. And over the last decade, you know, it has taught me.

[00:27:37] And and I just keep taking it deeper and deeper and deeper. And, you know, again, like for the person who for some reason, when they hear, you know, at least in the States, the word that forgiveness is pardoning. If you were in an auditorium of people and you said, raise your hand if forgiveness is pardoning, you know, 95 percent of that room would raise their hands and say, yes, that's what forgiveness is. But as I said, like people who are in really strong situations that feels unhelpful for a lot of them.

[00:28:05] Yeah, I agree. No, it's absolutely brilliant. And I love what what you talked about here, because there's a very sort of trite. And I think you've alluded to this already. You talked about the fact that a lot of people say, well, just just forgive people. We'll just do it. And it is actually and there is a cognitive processes, whereas a spiritual process attached. And I think that's really interesting to hear a different perspective. And that's what I love about being on a podcast, because I listen to listen to people who have different views of my own.

[00:28:32] And and that's really interesting. So I'm guessing at some stage you've got to write a book about this because, you know, it would be rude not to, don't you think? It would be rude not to. Yes, that is that is on the list. But the website was how to forgive.com. And then I offer a course once a season except for the summer. So it's a six week course. And yeah, there it is. And are you on socials and all that sort of stuff?

[00:28:56] I am on social, but this is kind of like these conversations are, you know, where you'll get the most out of me. Like, I don't I don't do that much on social. No, it's and also it's just become such a bun fight, isn't it? And cesspit of nastiness at the moment. Right. And as you can see, like what I'm doing, like, like what requires it's so open to misunderstanding and requires a lot of discussion. And you can't convey that over social, you know, so like and yeah.

[00:29:25] So I prefer to have nice conversations with nice people like you. Yeah. Oh, well, that's very kind of you to say so. I'll take that. Well, look, it's been a joy to talk to you. And it's been absolutely fascinating. People, please have a look at your website. And of course, as you said, three times a year. It's tons of information and it's been an absolute pleasure. And I'm going to do a bit more investigation myself on your side. Thank you so much for having me. Dig in a little bit more. That's great. Thank you for having me. It was an honour. Pleasure to meet you. You take care.

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