 to my program, don't just age, engage. I'm a live coach for and want you to have the best elderhood life you can possibly create. And my question this morning is, whom do you need to forgive? I do personal live coaching and focusing on elderhood. Elderhood, that stage of life that comes at a certain time when particular demands are made from our internal life. And I want to be there to help you work with them, to help you make them those aging transitions, opportunities to make an extraordinary life. Let me show you what the road ahead looks like once you enter into elderhood. When you enter into elderhood, you can grow up or you can just grow old. Either way, both of them are very rewarding. They're very good, wonderful ways of aging to grow up and to grow old. But I'm on the growing upside myself. And what I recognize is that there are five spiritual tasks that ask for our attention as we move through our elderhood. So this program today is for Kupuna, it's for people who work with Kupuna, who have family members, who are Kupuna and who need to have some coaching, some help in navigating the system that our elders experience and navigating the system for yourself or making your elderhood an extraordinary life. I have been a Presbyterian minister throughout my life. I've also been a hospice chaplain and a long-term care patient chaplain. So I've had a wide range of experience of people going through this stage of life. I recognize that we have in our lives a childhood, we have an adulthood, and we also have an elderhood. And looking at this as a stage of life, it has its own particular tasks. It gives us a way of honoring this stage and also of moving through it. So bring up that task, that road ahead once again, and you'll see what I consider to be the five tasks that I've observed in people as we go through elderhood. Breathing, sorting stories, forgiving, preparing, and letting go. Just briefly, breathing and sorting are the two that Think Tech Hawaii, two other programs that Think Tech Hawaii has offered me, and you can find those on our Think Tech Hawaii website, as well as Think Tech Hawaii in YouTube, and you can find those under elderhood. But the one that I want to focus on today is forgiving. And I ask people to be a part of my program so that I can bring in other people's insights. Today I want to share with you my own thoughts about forgiving as a person who has worked with people who are going through this stage of life. And one of the things that I observed is that forgiving is not a mandate, it's not a religious commandment that we have to follow. No religious commandment is involved in this. But what I find is people have, from within this urgency sometimes, to actually reconcile and resolve some of the conflicts that have been in their life. It may come to the fore as remorse, as regret. It can be a very powerful demand on our lives. It may just be something that we feel we've forgotten to take care of, and we want to resolve that kind of minor conflict that we had. I once had a phone call from my mother on a Sunday night, and she made an apology for something that I thought was no problem at all, but for her it was important. And then she died Thursday. So there's some relationship between this clear conscience, clearing out the conscience, and feeling free and liberated and excited. Now, whom do you need to forgive is the question that I'm thinking about. I want to make a distinction for you between forgiveness or the act of forgiving and the act of reconciling. When we often talk about forgiving, one of the things that blocks us, perhaps from forgiving, is we don't think the other person or the other people involved want to be friends again. It may be family relationships that have been broken, seriously broken in the past. And we don't want to forgive because there really is no hope of reconciliation. What I want to invite you to do is think of reconciliation and forgiveness as two options. And it is true that in reconciliation, it's required that two or more people want to reestablish a connection, a relationship that is honest and open and caring and loving. That is what reconciliation means, counsel together again, to build friendship once again. And that is something that some fact that will no doubt involve forgiveness for some people. But it can be done, it can only be done when there's the desire for more than one person to bring about reconciliation, friendship, family relationships again. Both people involved, making that happen, wanting that again. So what that does is leave forgiveness over here as an option for us to consider as independent from reconciliation. Another reason that I wonder that people don't want to exercise forgiveness is because they don't want to feel vulnerable. I do not advocate forgiving without and forgetting. I don't think that's necessarily healthy. I think it's important at times to remember what the incidents have been that have caused a break in a relationship, what has been the behavior of people involved that can come again. Now it's kind of interesting that a neurolinguistic program, which I followed, they are very aware that the middle brain, which is the hippocampus, is what triggers us to have adrenaline flood our body and have life, flight or fight or freeze reactions. So the hippocampus is protecting us from that similar occurrence that threatened us before. The hippocampus is always alert to the situations around us that might be endangering our bodies and will flood us with fight, flight or freeze reactions. But when we move that memory up into our neocortex, we're able to analyze it and look at it and understand it. And that understanding has no, that neocortex has no emotional attachment. So we set the emotional attachment aside and we are able to understand and I think exercise forgiveness. There are a few examples of that. I have a client who just recently spoke about his father as he was growing up. My client is young as a man in the 60s and he's retired now and has this wonderful experience of looking at a truly extraordinary elderhood. And my friend, I won't use his name, but my friend, I consider him a friend now, is described how his father used to slap him as a young man, as a young boy, who was in his elementary age. And his father would slap him side to face, slap him again, slap him again. And as a young boy, you can imagine how he didn't know when it would stop, how he could respond to it. He had no capacity to fend off and defend himself, fend off the attack and defend himself. So all he could do was to accept it and try to figure out a way to avoid it, but he worked hard at doing it. Recently, he told me that he actually finally forgave his father when he was, when he himself was in high school. He says, I was able to forgive my father. I was able to understand that he was doing the best he could with what he had. And I forgave him for all that. He said, I never thought about that again until some 30 years later in a discussion with a friend. So I want to say that he had, this is a wonderful example of how he as a young man, as a boy, as I'm sorry, as a young adult in high school, was able to exercise the forgiveness of understanding his father's situation, his father's capacities, and to set aside that fear that was so prominent in him as he was growing up as a young man as a boy in his father's home. He also had the help of his mother who was very solid and understanding woman support him. So it's things that forgive these, these traumas can, and these offenses and this feeling of desire for retribution or revenge or for payback can bind us up when we hold on to them emotionally. Therefore, I do advocate that forgiveness when you're ready to forgive somebody is a liberating experience. It frees us up to move ahead, to move forward with our lives. And that is exactly what my client friend said, he was able to move forward from that. And he actually became a great success in his business life. Another story of a woman who was at a conference, the leaders of the conference knew her and knew that her life was pretty, pretty terrible as a child. She had been abused quite a bit and they didn't understand how she could possibly have grown up as an adult to be such a success. She was a successful human being and they said to her, how did you do this? How did you become successful? And she said, well, I looked at my past and I had my history and I actually rewrote my history. I rewrote my history as though I had the best parents in the world. And it was out of that new history that I pursued my life. Again, the rewriting of a story like that in a history is a way of shifting the mind from focus on the offense, the hurt, the emotional action, the response to a more analytical way of saying it was great. I could do what I wanted to do. I could be free of the bonds of that suffering that I had experienced. I am not advocating, again, forgetting, but I've gone before, advocating what's forgetting for what that experience was, but I'm advocating realizing and understanding with the strength of our neocortex how it came about. What happened? What can I free myself of just by letting go of understanding and reshaping my reaction to it? I had a similar experience of my own life. Personally, when I arrived in Oahu and Honolulu, I was introducing myself to people. And in small groups, sometimes with a kind of pastoral concern, I would tell my story. And my story was oftentimes about how horrible my life was growing up. And as a teenager, with a father who was alcoholic and a mother who was just really very understanding and very much a model of forgiveness for me. And I realized that I was telling this story over and over and over again about how awful it was, how bad my experience of my father was. And so I actually redid what this woman did at the conference. I rewrote my history. And I wrote my history as though everything had been the best possible situation, best possible dad, best possible mom, marriage that they had. And I found myself free of that anger that I had towards my father, which at one point was a desire to literally kill him, almost threw him out a window one time. And I found myself set free. So I advocate this, there's a very important part of those spiritual tasks that we hear and see and feel arise as we move into and through our elderhood years. I don't know what elderhood when it starts. I don't think there's any formula for determining when that is. I think it begins when you notice that you're doing this and grieving, you're telling stories, you're reconciling or you're resolving some issues in that storytelling. You're feeling a need to forgive, to get rid of the remorse and to exercise that liberating experience, to seek that liberation. That's part of that elderhood process. And so it's very important for me as a coach to enable people to go through that. Here's another example of how I was able to enable one person to do this. And I do tell this story in my book as well, because it's such a powerful story. And if you go to my website, which is www.personalcoachingforlifeandfaith.com. I know it's a long, long website, but once you get it in your search box, you'll be able to return quite easily. Personal coaching for life and faith. And you can purchase my book at that website. The book's title is Don't Just Age and Gage. So please take a look at that. But one of the stories that I tell about in that book is under this spiritual past of forgiveness. And I think this young man for really teaching me something that's quite profound, I think for all of us. Here was a situation. I was in hospice care. And this young man had had AIDS and had lost lower half of his right leg, was in bed, almost emaciated. He'd been a young man my size. And the AIDS had just ravaged his body. So he was lying in bed one day, very broken. And he said to me, faster and need to repent. And I said, well, okay, what do you need to repent? Is it general repentance or is it a specific incident that you want to deal with? And he said, it's specific incident. So I said, sure, okay, we can do that. And I said, does it involve a woman? He said, yep. So he was lying there on his bed. And I said, I don't know. I don't even remember his name anymore. Bob is good enough. Bob, I would like to invite you to see this person at the foot of your bed, standing at the foot of your bed now. You see her? Your imagination, of course. He said, yes. I said, okay, Bob, now you don't have to speak this, but I want to invite you to share with her your concern. And he had a silence for a while. And then he said, will you forgive me? I said, okay, is that all? Are you finished? He said, yeah. I said, now I want to ask you to go imagine yourself at the foot of your bed for years and you're in her place. And you're looking back at yourself in the bed now, right? Yeah. Okay, what do you hear her say? What do you say to Bob? And what now that you've heard him make this statement to you? And he said, I hear her say, I forgive you, Bob. Okay, come on back in your imagination. Now come back into your bed and into your body lying here. Okay. Yeah. Bob, how do you feel? Is that I feel like a weight's just been lifted off of my shoulders. And Bob died three days later. Clearing your conscience seems to be something we need to do. And if we don't pay attention to that, then it can be a just something that sticks with us and that eats at us. And the forgiveness is the only thing that will set us free. Now, who do you need to forgive? Is it somebody from your past? Somebody outside of your family or in your family? Somebody, some friend or some agency that you were part of or program that you were part of? Or is it yourself? Something that you did that you know the impact was affecting other people and yourself. Something that you regret having done or for which you have remorse. This combined you up in such a way that you you don't even recognize the anxiety that it creates the discomfort that you have with yourself. And it's important to be able to release that. Now I have a question from a viewer. What do you do if the abuse was completely unforgivable? No matter how much you warp the abuse, you can't see the bright side from it. Good question. Good question. Thank you so much for sending that in. Again, I'm not suggesting that there's a bright side to everything and that we have to find the bright side. What I'm suggesting and would work with you in is that the whatever the abuse was, the forgiveness is something that you do for yourself. It's not something that brings the relationship back together. Although if the other person wanted to reconcile with you, forgiveness, looking at the terror that was involved, being honest about the impact and the unforgivableness of the abuse would be important in the reconciling event. However, it is possible for you, for all of each of us to extend that forgiveness independent of that reconciliation. How horrible it was. And I want to tell you my sadness and sorrow that you experience such terrible abuse. I also think that we can work together and find a way to relieve that and release that anger, revenge, everything that that's left you with in your suffering. So there is no bright side to some of this. There is no bright side to connect with me. Please know that you can go to my website and personal coaching for life and faith. And on the website, I have, of course, my email address, telephone numbers, and would be happy to respond to you. And we'll do that as quickly as possible. I work online with Zoom, offer individual online one-on-one coaching. I offer also small group development and also some education pieces that I develop and keep providing there. So take a look around and see what's of value to you. Well, thank you so much for joining me and viewing this and being a part of my presentation here today. Taking a look again at the road ahead in elderhood, we have these spiritual tasks that come up and they don't necessarily need to be forced up, but rather they make themselves present to our consciousness. Part of the theory of stage development is these conflicts come within ourselves or these tasks come up in ourselves and the best way thing we can do is pay attention to them, engage them, and move through them. So who is it that you need to forgive? Who do you need to forgive? Thank you so much for being a part of this. I look forward to going through the other two tasks, preparing and letting go two weeks from now and four weeks from now. Come join me again, and thanks so much to Think Tech Hawaii.