Welcome to another episode. Happy Friday. Thank you for being here with me. This is going to be a short episode. I just got off a call with one of my one-on-one clients, and it’s time for me to make lunch for my babies. But I didn’t want to miss this week’s episode. I think it’s really important that we build. 

Today, I want to just talk to you about how forgiveness frees you? 

A lot of people think that forgiving is an act that you do for others. 

A lot of people think that forgiveness is something that lets other people off the hook, and it’s not true. It’s not true at all. Forgiveness is something that frees you. It unlocks freedom for you so that you can live a peaceful, a blissful, an unbothered life.

You do not forgive others for them. You forgive others for yourself, okay? I’m going to say that one more time. You do not forgive others for them. It’s not about them. It’s for you so that you can move forward with peace, so that you can show up and live your best life happily, peacefully, and authentically.

When the Ancestral Medicine Woman who come into my program, when they go through and grow through the initiation period of the program, the initiation process, they got to address and acknowledge and overcome all of that trauma.  They got to unpack all of it. We got to open the closet, we got to clean it out. We got to unpack the backpack. We got to do all of these things before they can go on to help anybody. This is because when you don’t heal your trauma, when you don’t address your trauma and you are constantly triggered, it’s really hard to help people effectively, ethically, intentionally and expertly.

There are so many people who let their traumas and their triggers keep them from being their greatest version. 

I want you to think about who you could be if you are not a slave to your trauma, who you could be if you were not constantly angry or reliving the things that happened to you, and who you could be if you were not wasting most of your day being angry at your abusers or resenting them from happily living their lives. 

I got to tell you all, somebody, like many, many years ago, somebody who hurt me when I was six, a child, right? When I was a child, somebody who took advantage of me, who was supposed to be like family. They were out living their life. They didn’t have a care in the world. They probably don’t even think about me or how I had to overcome all of that trauma. But years ago, when I had still had a really nice amount of followers, and I say followers as followers on Instagram, I had a lot of followers and a lot of people buying my medicine, and my business was very successful, which it still is, but this was, like the hype when I first started to just really gain momentum in the Apothecary business. 

This person who took advantage of a six year old decided to just comment on my post, like, we were family, like nothing happened, and was like “Oh, my gosh, I’m so proud of you.” And I was like, “Were you proud of me when you were taking advantage of me when I was six?”

I had to regulate my whole nervous system because the audacity, like, how dare you? But I realize now that even the people who intentionally hurt us, they hurt us. They are free. 

We are the ones that keep that hurt. We are the ones that keep that pain. We are the ones that keep and continue to relive that experience over and over and over again when they just forget it. The only person that gets hurt when we do that. is us. The only person that hurts when we do that is us. 

This means that when you forgive others, you are not freeing them. You are not letting them off of the hook. You are freeing yourself because the only person that gets hurt when you drink poison is you.

When it comes to navigating holistic health, when it comes to pursuing this path professionally, ethically, you got a divine responsibility to address your trauma and leave it at the door. You got to unpack it, you got to take care of it. You need to heal from it. You need to overcome it so that it does not show up in your work. It does not show up in your interactions with clients. It does not show up and stop you from helping your patients or your clients get to where they need to go.

It is an ethical responsibility and I will continue to remind you of that because you’ll never be able to help somebody heal fully and to the best of their ability until you do this work.

I love you so much. I know this is a short one this week, but I think it’s potent enough to hold its own. I want you to sit with this. Listen to it again if you need to, listen to it four more times.

Remember that forgiveness is a tool that frees you. 

When you seek freedom, especially as a black woman, as a woman of color, as an indigenous being, know that you have the power to give yourself freedom. You do not need to seek it outside of yourself. 

Everything that you desire, you already hold the key to. You might need some guidance, you might need some help in unlocking it and accessing it and witnessing it or seeing it, but it’s there. That’s what I help my students do. Okay. 

If you’re ready to do this, if you’re ready to get this, if you’re ready to do this work, come see me. Right? 

We’re opening the doors for the program again soon. Make sure you’re on a waitlist, and I’ll see you on the other side. I love you. Peace.

• Trauma as Medicine- Beating Your Child is NOT discipline – Ep. 8
• How Chronic Constipation & Dehydration are ruining your health – Ep 7
• How to have a healthy vagina (Part 2) – Ep 6
• How to have a healthy vagina (Part 1): Things that disrupt the Vaginal Ecosystem – Ep 5
• Why Body Odor is a Sign of Disease – Ep 4