I tell lots of my individual clients about this and have written a lot about a clip from a daytime TV show here in the UK that amazed me. I know you may well be asking what I was doing watching daytime TV… It was a lunch break at home and I switched it on - my excuse.

Ok, so we have a daytime show called Trisha - kind of like an English and tame version of Jerry Springer. Anyway, there was a chap on this show who was 54 years old and was telling everyone how sad he felt as a result of how terrible his parents were.

He left home at the age of 17 and by all accounts, his parents were very mean and unkind to him.

The guy was 54 years old though.

At what age does he need to let go of that stuff? Is he going to be sitting around on his death bed thinking "I had a terrible life thanks to my parents"?? At what age does he have to take responsibility for himself and for his own life?

Let me tell you something else…

This Christmas just gone, just before Christmas, while I was on holiday, someone left an extremely violent natured, aggressive message on my office answer phone. It was very intimidating, angry and made some very nasty, frightening threats of harm to me personally.

Whoaa!

A member of my immediate family picked up my messages in my absence (my office staff were asked not to call me while I was away) and was so frightened and worried by it that they had to phone me on my holiday. A holiday that I was taking to rest and recuperate. This member of my family was scared and upset and so were several other members of my family. It caused a lot of distress.

The long and short of the scenario without going into too much detail, is that an individual had misunderstood something that someone else had said in a conversation that they were not even involved in! Then went and took the law into their own hands and decided to threaten me. It was shocking.

I could not believe it. I spend my life dedicated to the well-being of others. I felt wronged and deeply frustrated.

So I had to call this person to resolve the issue. Now once I had spoken to this individual - bearing in mind I had to call them from my holiday resort - they realised that there was actually no reason at all to have been as they were. They knew that they had made a huge error. The entire thing was diffused in a couple of minutes.

There was no apology.

No apology for my upset. No apology for my families upset. No admittance of a mistake made. No apology for ruining my holiday. Not even any acknowledgement of any kind what so ever - despite being totally in the wrong. In fact, the person even showed more defiance by stating that was how things were and I had to like it!

Ok, I may get a little close to the knuckle here for some folk. I can remember being sold on the virtues of forgiveness at my Church of England Primary school. Our morning school assembly where we sang prayers also had a lesson of the day, usually from the Bible. We got taught about the power of forgiveness. It was illustrated with Jesus being on the cross and saying "forgive them Father for they know not what they do."

I can remember - bear in mind I was 8 years old - thinking that if I was the son of God and someone had just crucified me, I’d start laying some serious lightning bolts on everyone in the vicinity! I think that may have been due to my multiple readings of Lord of the Rings at the time and my ultimate hero being Gandalf the grey, the wonderful wizard.

In the New Year, I once again read about the spiritual law of forgiveness By Randy Gage and applied it to this situation I had found myself in.

"If you are holding onto resentment, anger or revenge, you can’t be open to receiving all your allotment of well-being and happiness." Was one sentence I read.

Instinctively, I knew this to be true. I had always known this and usually practiced it accordingly. I spent about 45 minutes in self-hypnosis, asking my unconscious mind for some guidance with the situation. I realized that the individual concerned had behaved that way for their own reasons.

I realised that they had done what they believed to be the best they could, with what they knew of life and the world, and the consciousness they had. They believed they were doing right and as I said before, they were that way for a reason.

As I had been taught to do, I wrote out an affirmation of forgiveness 13 times, I spoke it out loud and I wrote a self-hypnosis script to deliver to my own unconscious mind. I released the resentment and the anger and viewed the person in the best possible light that I could.

And an amazing thing happened… On the very day that I chose to forgive this person for all the upset they had caused my family and I, I got an email from a friend that I had not heard from in a while asking me how I was and telling me that I was missed and loved very much. I also heard from my agent - she told me that the TV Company that had taken so long to make a decision about a major TV project - had chosen me for it based on how much they had all liked my manner, personality and attitude. It came completely out of the blue!

Wow.

Forgiveness is a very powerful thing and if you cannot forgive, you cannot be open to accept abundance, change, happiness in certain aspects of your life. You block the entry of lots of new joy entering your life.

I read some more - "If you are holding on to revenge, love can’t walk in. If you are hanging on to resentment, you are hanging on to being a victim. And if you are holding on to being a victim, there’s no space in your mind to be a victor."

Remember I spoke about creating a vacuum in your life a couple of weeks back? Well here was a prime example. As soon as I let go of the anger and upset caused by this incident, lots of love and opportunity came my way to fill that gap.

You must release the negative feelings, as they only eat away at you from the inside, and prevent more of the good stuff coming your way. Here is a question for you: Who do you think most people have the most difficult time forgiving?

You are quite right, you clever thing - themselves.

I don’t know why so many people have so much difficulty forgiving themselves, but they do. There have been times in my life when I did too.

I came to understand that no matter how bad I thought I was, I had a way to forgive me and that my higher self learned to forgive me. I knew that I must forgive myself and move on, or I would just go on to manifest a life of unhappiness, limitation and lack.

In my therapeutic consultancy this is very often one of the most liberating things people do. Once they forgive themselves, the world opens up to them.

Step One: Close your eyes and relax. Focus on your breathing and engage in the moment that you are in. Ideally, go get my self-hypnosis book and learn how to get into a good receptive trance for yourself, otherwise use whatever trance inducing technique, meditative technique or relaxation method that you know.

Step Two: Once you are in that nice state, imagine yourself in a favourite place - ideally outdoors. Become aware of the sights and colours around you, listen in to the sounds and feel how it feels to be in this safe, secure, favourite place.

Take some time to really develop this in your mind and with all your senses.

Step Three: Think about someone that you believe you need to forgive. That forgiving them is going to be letting go of so many old, unwanted feelings that you don’t want to be carrying around with you any more. However bad they may have been to you, think about how good it will be to be free of the feelings you have been harbouring about them. Notice the feelings that you have when you think of them. Notice the way your body feels. Tune in to your feelings and signal your intentions to yourself.

Step Four: Imagine that you have a cord of some kind attached to your waist that ties you to all the negative feelings you are holding on to with regards to this person. Imagine each negative feeling or thought as a physical thing; you can create symbolic, physical things attached to the cord that represents those feelings and thoughts. Really imagine yourself as being connected to them, even feel the way that they pull on you and weigh on you.

Step Five: Now here’s the fun…Find some scissors or some shears or a sword (ahem… clicking into Lord of the Rings mode yet again today) or just use your mind to cut the ties and watch each of the elements disappear into nothingness. Watch them float further and further away from you, getting smaller and smaller. Notice how much lighter you feel as you let go and release them. Feel the feelings dissipate from deep within you. Let go of some nice, deep breaths too, even have a few nice sighs as you let go.

As you let go of each element, tell that person in your mind that you forgive them. Mean it, really mean it, put your heart into it and let go. Tell them that you forgive them, to make it even more powerful, say it out loud.

Step Six: Think about how you are going to be different this very day as a result of letting go of that and be open to something good coming your way very soon. Then just open your eyes and choose to take some action that is the action of some that has just let go of something they didn’t need any longer.

I even recommend that you consider writing a letter - write a letter to the individual that you believe it is beneficial to forgive. You don’t have to actually send it to them of course, just get it in writing and exorcise those feelings.

If it is yourself that you are forgiving, you can use the same process here, with regards to the specific thing that you need to forgive yourself for, be aware of the negative aspects that you need to cut the ties to and let go of and then go ahead and do that. If you have ever accused yourself of failure or mistakes then be sure to forgive yourself as soon as possible.

Now you may want to ask for forgiveness from some one. Firstly, admitting to yourself that you are willing to do so is half way there. You may want to include mentally asking for forgiveness from the people you have wronged in the past, spread bad feelings toward, or are involved in legal wrangles or other disharmony with. Within step five of the above process, you do the same thing, but when you let go of the negative aspects that you were previously holding on to, instead of stating that you forgive them, you ask for their forgiveness.

Let go of what you no longer need, you don’t want to end up on a daytime TV show holding on to all your pent up anger blaming everyone else for how your life is, do you?