Key's Keys-Forgiveness-Sept 6th, 2025

***I acknowledge that I work, play, dance, heal and create this newsletter on the unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan Peoples***

Hello, beautiful soul! This is the last newsletter sent from Beehiiv!

This week’s newsletter carries the theme of forgiveness.

• "To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you." — Lewis B. Smedes

• "Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies." — Nelson Mandela

• "Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it." — Mark Twain

Forgiveness is a block that many people bump up against on their path to return to love. If you want to BE more loving, you must be able to see yourself clearly. You cannot forgive what you cannot see and do not know, or have blinded yourself to via bypassing.

KEY’S KEY

Forgiveness is not about letting someone off the hook- it is about reclaiming your sovereignty and acknowledging your own responsibility for the energy you carry and create with. When forgiveness manifests, we begin to see the other not simply as the one who hurt you, but as a soul acting out of their own wounds. The shamanic path teaches us that all beings are on a path of learning, and sometimes the teachings are painful and can re occur in cycles as an attempt to recalibrate closer to Truth. We don’t condone harm when we forgive- we call our soul back to us and return the burden to spirit so it can be transmuted. When we stay tied to anger and resentment, fragments of our soul are trapped in the past and held there until we can create the emotional and spiritual safety in which to hold more of our soul essence. ‘Healing’ is actually a return to wholeness, a state of being that depends entirely on seeing yourself clearly and without distortion so that you can take full responsibility for your happiness. We are inherently whole….it is our commitment to holding the stories we have created that blind us to this truth. When we love ourselves deeply enough, we find a way to forgive and let go of the past. The pain of holding the story and the poison it carries becomes a deeply unloving act towards self.

Here is what has been helping me on my spiritual path this week:

In alignment with this week’s theme, I’ve included an incredibly impactful post that hit home for me in so many ways. If you have experienced trauma, and have struggled to forgive your perpetrator for years, or decades even, you are not alone. This post was impactful for two reasons:

1) It speaks strongly to our individual responsibility to separate our past from our present, and in the time between the two, recognizing that if we still harbour anger and it still holds us back in life, we are not free.

2) It teaches that you have likely attached an identity to stories and limitations that have only hurt you, and kept you bound deeply to false limitation because it is highly unlikely that the person that hurt you is living in constant shame the way you are living in constant anger and resentment.

The abuse was real. But the decades of shame, guilt, and self-punishment are stories we continued to replay. More here:

rebuildtoday

419K followers

View more on Instagram

WHAT I’M DEEPENING INTO

Or…. ‘The Importance of Experiencing Polarity in this Duality Based Human Existence’.

This is a beautiful take on why our lives experience duality and friction- which allows our soul to integrate into the body and have a relationship in which to experience itself: the contrast of the soul experiencing a body gives us the appearance of risk, and the contrast drives the lived experience. By facing the body’s alarm (fear) and not collapsing, it reminds us that what our soul knows to be true IS true, despite appearances. Duality and being embodied create the contrast for us to move through false directives and return to truth, but to get there, many of us have lived a very challenging life. Click the link below for a profound explanation of this:

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO

If you’ve been following me for a while, you will know that meditation changed my life. I studied Vipassana which means “to see things as they really are” as an intense practise in my early 20’s and it completely transformed my life. I had multiple spiritual awakenings arise from it and while that was an incredible side effect, I was most impacted by the way the practise helped me strengthen my focus, and thus my mental capacities and ability to consciously choose my responses to things, rather than react. Meditation taught me how to manage my mind, and harness the mental strength I inherently embody while showing me major weaknesses that if acknowledged and tended, could create immense healing and freedom in my life. This is a beautiful podcast, please enjoy:

AN IMPORTANT CHANGE I’M MAKING

We need to put down our phones.

One of the reasons I am leaving social media (yes, this includes both Instagram and Facebook) is because they encourage competition, performance, and comparison. It gives me the ick. This negates all of our human effort to be authentic, and express from a place of compassion, non judgement, and creativity. Social media literally strips us of our innate essence. When I realized how much time we spend on our phones, and when placed in the context of the amount of my life that I could be creating rather than scrolling, I made the final decision to transfer my personal work elsewhere (here on Substack). As with everything, nothing is entirely good nor bad, which is why I now use social media to educate, inspire, and motivate myself for positive change, rather than doomscrolling my life away. It’s why I include impactful clips in this newsletter, but even my research and scrolling now is limited to 3 hours per week.

If you feel intuitively that social media is leeching something from you (your sovereignty and attention which is the most powerful resource you have), then I hope this clip motivates you to make the same changes I did:

QUOTE I’M CONTEMPLATING

“A woman who heals and keeps her softness intact isn’t just strong…she’s rare, radiant and utterly unshakeable.” ~Author Unknown

***Please note- not all of my writings will show up in your inbox because I do not want you to be bombarded by material you may not want to read. I will include recent articles in this newsletter each week and the links to access them, so you may peruse at your leisure and not be overwhelmed by too many things sent to your inbox. Key’s Keys will always be delivered directly to your inbox with love every Saturday morning!***

Here is the link to my substack main page so you can peruse my work:

www.keyskeys.substack.com

Here is a link to my most recent article:

Thank you for being here! I’m so grateful for your time and if there is something you would like me to write about on Substack, please email me with your requests at [email protected]