Grace of Forgiveness
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Forgiveness: The Journey
Forgiveness: After the Fire
Forgiveness: After the Fire
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Forgiveness: After the Fire
Forgiveness: After the Fire
Forgiveness: After the Fire
Soul Lessons from God: Grace of Forgiveness After the Fire
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How Ducks, Raccoons, and Time Taught Me a Gentler Way to Heal
Forgiveness has two lives.
The first is the one we claw our way into — raw, trembling, disoriented. The kind that feels like ripping out old roots with our bare hands. The kind that arrives only after years of rage, shame, and the belief that holding onto pain will somehow protect us from ever being hurt again. That was the forgiveness I wrote about the first time — the moment I realized I had been poisoning myself with hatred and calling it justice.
But forgiveness has a second life.
A quieter one.
A softer one.
A life that doesn’t come from breaking, but from becoming.
This is that story.
When I first forgave the person who betrayed me, it felt like a shock — like a door I didn’t know I had the strength to open suddenly swung wide. I felt lighter, freer, unburdened. But I also felt exposed. Forgiveness stripped away the armor I had worn for nearly a decade, and beneath it was a heart that didn’t yet know how to live without the weight it had carried for so long.
The rawness faded, but something else took its place — a kind of emotional quiet I didn’t recognize. I wasn’t angry anymore, but I wasn’t healed either. I was in the in‑between, the place where the wound is closed but the skin is still tender.
And that’s when the animals began to appear.
Not in the dramatic, symbolic way of my God in the Wild stories — not as messengers of thresholds or omens of transformation — but as gentle companions to the softening that was happening inside me.
The first were the ducks.
I saw them on a morning when my heart felt strangely empty — not heavy, not hurting, just… unfamiliar. They glided across the water with a kind of effortless peace, their bodies barely disturbing the surface.
Ducks carry the symbolism of emotional restoration. They move through water — the realm of feeling — without sinking into it. They reminded me that emotions are meant to move, not drown us. Watching them, I felt something inside me settle. A quiet reassurance that peace doesn’t arrive all at once; it arrives in ripples.
Then came the raccoon.
It was dusk — that liminal hour when the world softens and shadows stretch long. He crossed my path with a slow, deliberate confidence, pausing just long enough to look at me. Raccoons are the keepers of emotional truth. They navigate the dark without fear. They teach us how to reclaim what was stolen — not from others, but from ourselves.
In his gaze, I felt a message I didn’t have words for yet:
You don’t have to be afraid of your own shadow anymore.
The ducks taught me peace.
The raccoon taught me reclamation.
Together, they taught me the second life of forgiveness.
Forgiveness, I realized, isn’t just the moment you let go of the person who hurt you. It’s the moment you begin to return to yourself. It’s the moment you stop defining your identity by the wound. It’s the moment you stop rehearsing the story of what happened and start living the story of who you are now.
The first forgiveness freed me from the past.
The second forgiveness freed me from myself.
I no longer needed the anger to feel strong.
I no longer needed the shame to feel protected.
I no longer needed the story to feel justified.
I could simply be.
And in that being, I found a softness I didn’t know I was capable of.
Forgiveness now feels like a warm hand on the heart.
It feels like breath returning to places that had been tight for years.
It feels like compassion — not for the person who hurt me, but for the version of myself who carried that pain for so long.
It feels like ducks gliding across still water.
It feels like a raccoon meeting my gaze in the dusk.
It feels like choosing peace because I finally believe I deserve it.
Forgiveness didn’t make me weaker.
It made me gentler.
And gentleness, I’ve learned, is a form of strength I never had access to when I was angry.
This is the grace of forgiveness after the fire —
the grace that arrives when the wound has closed,
when the heart has softened,
when the soul is ready to live again.
Not as the wounded one.
Not as the avenger.
Not as the survivor.
But as the woman who forgave —
and became someone new because of it.
Soul Lessons from God: Forgiveness on the Spiritual Journey
The Journey Within
When my journey began, I spent the first month doing a lot of research, trying to figure out exactly what was happening to me. It didn’t take long for me to realize that what I truly needed was a path to healing. It was during this time period I received my first Soul Life Lesson in forgiveness.
Eight years prior, I was betrayed by someone I trusted. This was a huge deceit and one that I still carry the physical scars. Throughout these eight years, I felt nothing but hate, rage, and vengeance towards this person. I even visualized ripping this persons heart out with my Bear hands and shredding it.
During that period, nothing anyone said or did would have changed my feelings on this. That is, if I was not so humiliated to share what had happened to even approach any kind of support from anyone.
I chose to embrace my Saboteur shadow archetype- my Cooper’s Hawk shadow spirit animal and my shadow kings, the Five of Swords and the Knight of Swords as I continued to separate from others and hold this secret inside out of shame and humiliation.
As I embarked on the spiritual journey, the first thing I realized was that not forgiving someone is like living in a prison, hidden away from others out of shame, ingesting large doses of poison filled with the hate and anger you feel, yet secretly hoping that it is the other person that dies a slow, painful death.
When you realize all the hate you felt for so many years was just your own and it literally had no impact on the other person, it gives you quite a jolt back to reality. Unforgiveness is a prison of our own creation and one that only we hold the key to unlocking. Forgiveness is not about forgiving the other person, it’s something that we do for ourselves. It is about freeing yourself from the anger, depression, guilt, shame and humiliation of the experience.
The day I realized all of this was a profound experience. Suddenly, for the first time in almost a decade, I felt that I could forgive and let this go. I was baffled at how easy it was to do this, but I also knew it was because of the discoveries I had made that this was truly all my own making. I created my own reality as a result of my own fears and insecurities.
Forgiveness is connected to Self-Love, our ability to love ourselves. Part of self-love means caring enough about ourselves to forgive the people that hurt us so the wounds from the past can no longer cause pain and chaos in our lives. Our wounds do not hurt the other person, they only hurt us.
When we forgive, we open our heart to empathy and we can begin acting out of love, compassion and understanding. Forgiveness liberates our heart and soul and provides clarity. It gives us the ability to let the pain from the situation go and find the lesson the experience is trying to teach us. On the surface, the lesson may be forgiveness, but as we dig deep and peel back the layers, we discover it is also a lesson in love, compassion, emotional and spiritual healing.
Forgiveness is a Soul Life Lesson that we all share. Throughout our lives we all must learn how to forgive others as well as ourselves and learn to release the pain of the past and our lesser need for self-determined justice. Forgiveness can be complex, at times we need to forgive another person for the hurt they caused us, or we may need to forgive ourselves.
Self-forgiveness is just as critical as forgiving another. As we learn our lessons on the inner work path, we discover just how brutally we have treated ourselves. From negative self-talk to controlling the narrative of all things, we discover that we treated ourselves in this way to suppress our emotions, to attempt to protect ourselves from the pain.
To forgive someone who has betrayed us is not always easy, especially if there was a difficult or painful childhood. When we are children, we are unable to stand up for ourselves, we must trust and rely on the support of the adults in our lives. Many times, we may end up in physically or emotionally damaging situations and the wounds and scars run deep as a result, especially when it is related to family bonds.
When we are unable to forgive ourselves or another, this enables the Wounded Child archetype to emerge in shadow form. The Wounded Child is part of the Inner Child Archetype and is an archetype we all share, and this archetype holds the damaged, stunted patterns of our childhood, including traumatic memories, negative attitudes, and dysfunctional self-images.
Until we address the Wounded child within us these patterns will manifest as fears in our adult lives such as fear of abandonment, rejection, or judgement. All of which will cause damage to our physical bodies, emotional relationships, as well as our personal and professional lives.
Each one of us holds the power of forgiveness in our hearts. Although it may not be possible to contact the person who hurt us, either because they have transitioned, or it could cause further damage, there are ways to heal.
We first need to set our intention to forgive, to call our spirit back from its negative mission and then release the pain from the experience. We can choose to speak to someone we trust, speak it out loud to ourselves or write about the experience to release the hold it has over us.
Forgiveness opens our Heart Chakra to our emotions, to love, empathy, compassion and understanding. It paves the way to liberation from fears, self-limiting beliefs and negative behavior patterns so we can live a more balanced and harmonious life.
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