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About this episode

Are you stuck in a cycle of blame and resentment, wondering why forgiveness feels so elusive even though everyone says it’s the key to inner peace? Many of us hear that forgiving others will set us free, but when we try to let go of anger or seek justice for betrayals and hurts, practical steps are hard to find and genuine relief can feel out of reach. What if forgiveness isn’t just about pardoning or forgetting, but something deeper—something that could pave the way to real healing and even deeper intimacy?

In this episode, listeners are invited to re-examine forgiveness from a fresh, practical, and spiritual perspective. Instead of relying on vague promises or traditional definitions, the conversation delves into tangible steps for breaking out of the blame loop, nurturing the parts of ourselves most in need, and using unconditional love as a powerful tool for restoration. Whether you're dealing with everyday resentments in a long-term partnership or coping with a profound betrayal, you'll walk away with actionable insights and a renewed sense of personal empowerment to move from conflict to true connection.

After studying psychology and alternative spirituality for most of her life, an unlikely turn of events pointed Dara McKinley toward the forgiveness path. Examined through the lens of her previous knowledge, she discovered that forgiveness is actually much bigger than one’s ability to pardon as well as a healing modality. Feeling called to help those deterred by mainstream forgiveness definitions, today Dara guides people beyond popular forgiveness understandings and into a practical spiritual process that restores peace.

Episode Highlights

07:02 How mainstream forgiveness definitions can fall short.

11:28 Vindictive energy, justice, and the personal cost of resentment.

14:40 Dara’s turning point: Discovering a practical forgiveness path.

17:12 Redefining forgiveness beyond pardoning and mainstream expectations.

20:13 Spiritual versus relational love: Navigating conditional and unconditional experiences.

24:09 Three sources of love.

27:19 A journey of self-responsibility and tender attention to the inner wound.

31:13 Practical steps for applying unconditional love to inner healing.

33:51 The negative narrative loop and how forgiveness restores personal power.

36:00 Forgiveness as an alchemical process and shifting perspectives in relationships.

39:59 A case study on resentment and forgiveness in long-term partnerships.

44:50 Boundaries, agreements, and the transformational effects of love.

Your Check List of Actions to Take

• Redefine forgiveness: Let go of the idea that forgiveness means pardoning or condoning wrongdoing. Instead, approach it as a spiritual process that restores your own peace.
• Take time to locate and connect with the sources of unconditional love in your life, whether through relationships, self-love, or spiritual practice.
• Acknowledge and honor your feelings: Don’t bypass your anger, grief, or need for justice. Recognize these emotions as valid before moving forward.
• Notice if you’re caught in repetitive, vindictive thoughts or narratives, and gently choose to set them aside, even if just temporarily.
• Apply love to the situation: Experiment with deliberately “blessing” the difficult circumstance or person with the highest love you can access, even if you don’t feel loving toward them.
• Turn compassion inward: Direct unconditional love and compassion to the broken or hurt parts within yourself that have been impacted by the emotional wound.
• Make forgiveness a regular, practical process. Return to these steps whenever you notice old resentments or emotional loops re-emerging.

Mentioned

The Space Between: The Point of Connection (*Amazon Affiliate link) (book)

Shifting Criticism For Connected Communication

Connect with Dara McKinley

Websites: howtoforgive.com | daramckinley.com

Facebook: facebook.com/DaraMckinley108

Instagram: instagram.com/daramckinley/?hl=en

Connect with Dr. Jessica Higgins

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Instagram: instagram.com/drjessicahiggins 

Podcast: drjessicahiggins.com/podcasts/

Pinterest: pinterest.com/EmpowerRelation 

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/drjessicahiggins 

Twitter: @DrJessHiggins 

Website: drjessicahiggins.com  

Email: [email protected]

If you have a topic you would like it to be discussed, please contact us by clicking on the “Ask Dr. Jessica Higgins” button here. 

Thank you so much for your interest in improving your relationship. 

Also, I would so appreciate your honest rating and review. Please leave a review by clicking here. 

Thank you!  

*With Amazon Affiliate Links, I may earn a few cents from Amazon, if you purchase the book from this link.

Episode Transcript

Dara, thank you for joining us. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Thank you for having me, Jessica. I'm honored to be here.

Yes, I am very interested in your perspective on forgiveness and particularly how this relates to intimate relationship. Before we get started, is there anything that you would like to share with people who are getting to know you, and also how this became of interest of yours?

Well, I can say I was born a very spiritual little girl, and had a lot of Catholic aunts and uncles orbiting me. My mom was the youngest of 10, and she always questioned Catholicism and actually had a hard time because she wasn't allowed to question it. So she intentionally brought up my sister and I to be seekers, and she very much protected us from being indoctrinated into a religion. She wasn't against it. But she said, I want you to decide for yourself what your spiritual truth is. I was so spiritual that I actually wanted it. I remember being nine years old and thinking to myself like: Wow, if this Bible can explain this feeling I have, I want to know. So they bought me a children's Bible, and I think I got 40 pages into it, when all of a sudden, God became punitive. I thought: Oh, this doesn't resonate with the feeling that I have of love—again, that I just, for whatever reason, was born with.

So I was always curious about forgiveness. But whenever I actually tried to make it work in a practical way—that's another thing to know about me, I'm very spiritual and I'm very practical—I could never make it work. So I kind of just chalked it up to an interesting spiritual platitude. Then, in my early 40s, I hit an incredibly rough spot, and that's when it came to me, kind of demanded that I understand it. So I can go into that story at any time.

Yes, I am sure people listening are very interested. I am interested. I also just want to acknowledge that that seems to be a common experience around forgiveness, that it has this very elusive quality that isn't always really that clear. So one might feel: Oh, I want to forgive, or I feel like I should forgive. But what that actually entails can be quite confusing.

Right. So I guess we can begin by making clear my perspective, which is that I don't define forgiveness as pardoning. I don't define it as having compassion. I don't define it as miraculously ceasing anger, or letting go. Those are actually the four mainstream definitions of forgiveness, and they come with a promise. We are, in Western culture, hearing about this promise from as soon as we are able to think and understand. In some form, someone is going to tell us that forgiveness is the key to feeling peaceful inside. That all we have to do is, pardon cease anger, let go, and have compassion for difficult things or difficult people in our lives, and that's the key to our inner peace. I have read about people who have survived wars and atrocities, who swear that pardoning their enemies has set them free, and I believe these people.

I believe that those definitions of forgiveness do work for a lot of people. I am representing the people that it doesn't work for. I have people come to my work from all religions and spiritual perspectives, but specifically those who identify as spiritual but not religious are the people who resonate with what I have to say the most. It's interesting, because spiritual but not religious demographic has very specific traits. One of them is that we're very logical. We don't want to believe something just because someone told us to believe it, which, swinging this back to my mother, that was my mother's issue growing up, is that she questioned it and wanted it to be logical, and was told: No, you're just supposed to believe what we tell you. So that she could never get onboard with that.

So if you look around, if this pardoning definition was 100% complete, there would be a lot more people forgiving, considering how it's probably one of the most popular spiritual teaching alive and circulating. But if you look around, you would see that so many people struggle with this definition. So that's the group I'm coming forward to help. So I'll put it right up there. Now, if pardoning works for you, I believe you, and excellent. I think we're all different. If you have struggled with this definition, I have something to add that I think could be helpful.

Yes. Well, I'm curious what you would say, and I appreciate just your voice of honoring that people might have a different experience and this has really offered something really important for some, and that for others, perhaps it isn't quite complete, as you're going to be helping share more.

I experienced with the pardoning, perhaps a coming into some equanimity with the suffering or the difficulty in allowing it to be. That there's this sense of: I want this person to be punished, or I want them to have some negative consequence, to have some justice, to have some retribution of some sort. Like, I want there to be a righting of the wrong, and that can occupy a lot of energy. Now I don't think that that is an incorrect feeling of course, or impulse. Yet, if we are in a place where we don't have any ability to affect how that justice is negotiated, we could potentially be in a cycle of spinning in this hoping and wishing for someone else to experience something, or that we're caught in a bind with them in some sort, when we might want to cut those cords metaphorically.

I'm curious if you see it that way at all. Forgiveness, I've not done a deep, deep dive. I mean, I know I shared with you before we started recording, that in my master's program, I did a research project, and I think it was more confusing than it was helpful, in that there were so many definitions of forgiveness. I did pull out some things of it that I felt was helpful, and I do have some things that I work with. But what would you say about this struggle to accept the injustice or, as you even said, atrocities in some cases?

Right, there's a hundred different angles that I could answer your question from. One, on a very basic level, vindictive energy or the desire for fair retribution and justice, I'll admit it, one of my big credentials for why I think I'm a great person to be doing this work is because I am prone to a lot of vindictive thoughts. So I am very high-minded, and there's also an aspect of me that's very petty and wants justice. It's interesting that you even asked the question. Because about an hour ago I was thinking about this, about what is the real issue with being vindictive? We all just saw Kendrick Lamar just do something very vindictive to Drake. So he wrote a song that dissed Drake, and it was kind of like a very petty and vindictive thing. But that brought this incredible show and actually addressed somebody who has really questionable behaviors, Drake does. So anyway, in general.

I'm sorry, I'm not as into the know-how, but I do remember.

I follow Hollywood, there's another thing you can know about me.

So with that said, that's basically what brought me to the forgiveness path, is that I got involved in a business relationship that went sour, and I lost my share of the business. It was a huge loss for me at the time. But I was a trained therapist and had been studying psychology and spirituality for two decades. So I thought: Okay, this is an immense loss, but I have the skills to move forward. So I focused on my relationships, I processed my emotions, I recreated my life. Three years later, I still noticed myself having a negative/vindictive narrative looping through my head. This started to parallel a mystery illness of fatigue, insomnia, anxiety. I had a 3-year-old and a 6-year-old, and I started freaking out essentially that something was really wrong with me. Because the doctors couldn't figure it out.

One of the benefits of having this spiritual connection that I was born with, if I arrive to these very down on my knees moments, I typically can get a very vivid message or intuitive information that's very clear. So I arrived at one of these moments, and the message I got back was to forgive. What I'd like to point out in this moment is, I did not like that message. To me, immediately, it meant, pardon these people and you'll feel better. I thought: Oh my goodness, this can't be the answer to my problems right now. So I tried to blow it off. But within an hour, I was like: Dara, that message was so clear. This is 2012 when this happened to me. I said, get online, Google, whoever has written the five-step how to forgive recipe, go find it. You like to try new things, give it a shot, see what happens. So I googled how to forgive. 99.9% of what came up was why a person should forgive, and there was nothing about how. Then I found, the teeny bit I could find is some lone person on a forum, crying out like I wanted to. But wait, how do you do it? What they were getting back was, you just do it.

So I closed my computer and I thought: Whoa, there's nothing out there about how to forgive! I can't just do this. Like, I really do need step-by-step instructions right now. So that is the spiritual but not religious practical side of me that's like, really give me the 1, 2, 3, 4 here. So I thought to myself: Well, Dara, you've been studying psychology and spirituality for two decades, figure this out, see what you can come up with. The first question I asked myself was: Okay, wow, I've been spinning a negative narrative of injustice for three years. What's the opposite of doing that?

Well, you're victimized in that story.

Right. So the opposite, and my answer to that question was: Oh wow, I would bless this entire situation with the highest love. By answering that question, I took my first step onto the forgiveness path, and other things came to me over the next 72 hours. It was this very dramatic, cathartic weekend. Three weeks later, I was completely free of resentment. I had two thoughts that I didn't know at the time would change my life. The first one was, wow, forgiveness is for real. So I'm in my early 40s now and had been hearing about forgiveness since my earliest days, and it never added up. So all of a sudden, I thought: Oh my goodness, wow, this thing is for real, and it's a legitimate healing modality. My second thought was: That wasn't pardoning, why does everyone say forgiveness is pardoning?

That was that, and I just thought, whew! Got through that one and didn't think much of it. But then over the next two years, I would have conversations with colleagues and friends, and I also started to watch. This is when the internet was just booming social media. I was watching the collective understanding and conversation around forgiveness, and I started to see how the pardoning definition was actually a huge obstacle to people stepping onto the forgiveness path. So that's when I realized: Wow, I have an angle and an understanding now that actually could be useful, because it really is a legitimate healing modality.

If I can ask, in this narrative previous to this spiritual experience, and also working with forgiveness in a deep way that really changed your experience, it sounds like the invitation was to love it and to honor it, if I'm understanding what you're sharing here right now. Also, that it wasn't okay, and that it wasn't like I wouldn't have wished that to happen or I didn't want it to happen.

Yeah, what happened wasn't okay. I was betrayed. I'll never—well, never say never—I don't think I'll ever get an apology. I think this is a really strong point also, is that often people don't get the apologies that they deserve. Even sometimes, the people who they need an apology from isn't even alive anymore. So are you out of the forgiveness game in that moment? No, you're not. Because forgiveness is actually sourcing from a spiritual connection. So when I say I was born a very spiritual little girl, what I mean is I was born with a very innate experience of unconditional love. I just felt it. I wouldn't say I'm an unconditionally loving person, but I had this very vivid experience of unconditional love.

So when I had that thought: Oh, I'm going to bless this with the highest love. For whatever reason, I have a connection to the highest love that I can reach for it, and it's right there. I know that not everybody has as vivid of a connection as I do. So I can also talk about the different ways that unconditional love is coming into everybody's life. But it is present in everyone's life in one form or another, and it's a matter of really identifying how it's showing up. Once you can see how it's showing up, it's actually a medicine that you can use. So I did not love these people that betrayed me. I enlisted something that could. It was a very interesting moment. Because when I reached for it, I had a vivid experience of the negative narrative inflaming. So I stepped forward to bless these people with the highest love, and the negative narrative just went ballistic and said: No, no, no, you can't do that, they screwed you over.

You need to hold the line.

Yes, exactly. I had this very strong moment of awareness where I saw it clearly, and I turned to it and said: Hey, I've been listening to you for three years, I'm not getting anywhere, and you're potentially making me sick. So I actually need you to step aside, and I'm going to try something new. If what I'm about to try doesn't work, you and I can talk again. But right now, I really need you to step aside. Then I was able to step forward and take that first step, which is, how do you soak a situation? People really can soak, saturate, merge. These are all the different words I could use. How does a person merge something that's difficult with unconditional love?

Thank you for saying that. I am reminded it's more related to intimate relating. I don't know if you remember, I believe he's passed now, John Wellwood, he writes a lot about spirituality and intimacy. I remember him talking about love is perfect, the quality of love that we're all wired up or connected to, and humans are imperfect. So I was like, that's such a good distinction. Because this notion of like, love will conquer all, and yet we are, as humans, imperfect. So it is this interesting thing to be acknowledging both.

Right. Just to take that point a little further, how I like to describe it is that we're in a conditional existence. Humans are conditional beings, and our relationships are conditional. So many people like to use unconditional love in a relational way. This is something that you and I could probably dive very deep with. I think that relational love is conditional.

Absolutely.

Yeah, thank you. But so many people use unconditional love in the relational realm, and then they struggle with it. So what I like to say is: Hey, it's love, what's happening in the relational realm, absolutely. It's human love. But unconditional love is spiritual love. Yes, we have spiritual love, because we are spiritual beings having a human experience. We have spiritual love, as John Wellwood said, pumping through us. And that love is perfect. It is unconditional. It really has zero ability to withhold itself from whatever gets put in its path. So it's something that we can use and do our best to embody. But we're always going to flail, because it's the human experience.

Yes. I would say the unconditional love has opportunity to exist and to be present and, to your point, be embodied and shared in intimate relating. Is that the only source of love? No. I mean, this kind of relates to what you're describing, and help me. Because the word surrender often is used in a more religious, spiritual context, and could even be a spiritual experience. That if human relational dynamics are operating in a way of disconnection or betrayal, that we have choice around, again, can be deemed unjust or awful or bad, however we want to put a label on that to identify that. Also, it seems as though what you're saying is that we have choice around whether or not we participate in that, or that we don't have to continue to be in that dynamic and we can potentially still be accessing this unconditional love. It's perhaps not ours to control or shepherd or be a part of, but there is this spiritual, unconditional love that is operating.

Right. So I put it in three categories. I say there's three sources of love on this planet. One is relational love, and that includes nature, that includes dogs, that includes rock. Anything that you can be in relationship with, that's relational love. But more often than not, it's humans. That's actually the most provocative love. It's the one that most people are seeking out. It's the one that makes people think they'll feel most secure. And it's actually the one where we will experience the greatest challenges from.

The second one is self-love. So that what brings people to the path of self-love is when they realize how volatile relational love can be. Then all of a sudden, they go: Oh wow, I need to be able to give these things to myself.

I think that that's an incredible one to be able to pull out of your back pocket for when the other two are not up and functioning as we would like them to be.

Yes, thank you for just identifying. I think they can all be interrelated too. I remember, I don't know if you've studied at all with Susan Johnson. She basically, with her colleagues, developed the Emotionally Focused Therapy.

Oh yes, I love it.

It is really based in the attachment work and helping people really be operating more in that secure functioning. But I do remember hearing her talk about, when one didn't grow up with parents that were providing consistent, safe enough environment and relational bonding, that spiritual relationship or higher power can be a source of secure relating or functioning. So I thought that was really interesting. I wanted to learn more about her if she ever did research around that. But that we can access higher power spiritual connection as a source of feeling this secure, all the things that we would in relationship.

Absolutely, yes. Spiritual belonging can really help us. I think it's huge in helping the human race move forward. I think as you've also pointed out, is that we ideally want all three, all three plates spinning. That's the ideal situation. But as the human journey unfolds, we are always going to hit moments. I've talked to people who have had severe betrayals and losses, and they're completely severed from unconditional love. They don't feel like God exists, or that anything bigger exists. So you can be severed from each one at certain points of your life. But ideally, you really do want to be shooting for all three.

Yes. So if we can go back a moment, when you talked about this more justice part of you, I can appreciate even thinking about parts work. That there's a part of you that's wanting to feel safe and wanting to feel protected, and again, like that was not okay, and perhaps has a voice around that. How it was manifesting maybe wasn't serving your highest good. Yet, the real intention there was to perhaps have learning and safety and protection. I don't know, would you agree? Or tell me, I'm totally putting that on your experience.

Well, I felt broken hearted about the loss, and I had the fantasy that should these people experience some form of justice, that would soothe my broken heart. Again, being part of Western culture, and this is a phenomena of Western culture, we're a culture that, as soon as we hit academia, or especially when once we hit the academic world, we are looking outside, and that's what we're trained to do. I think, again, this is what perpetuates so much suffering, is that as you also articulated in the beginning, there can be so much emphasis that if the external world changes in A, B, C, D, E, F, G, then I won't have to feel the way I'm feeling. Because that's how the logical mind is trained to function. There's a problem, and let's go figure out how to fix it and change what needs to get changed, and then I'll feel better. 

So what a lot of us end up finding out is that it's not going to change, we can't bend reality to make ourselves feel better. So when we hit that truth, then what? It's like: Oh, well, actually maybe I can tend to what needs to be tended to on the inside myself, and maybe I can restore that and not be dependent on any external reality changing. I mean, as an intimacy therapist, you know that the more someone takes responsibility for their inner realm, the easier the time they have in an intimate relationship.

Well, they can send clearer signals, and there's not as much distorted projections or interpretations and all the miscommunication. I mean, it's extremely vulnerable, and yet it does offer a lot more opportunity for seeing and finding one another. But to stay with you, am I hearing you, is that it offered an opportunity to tend to your broken heart?

Right, that's exactly what happened. I couldn't even see that my heart was broken, I was so captured by the negative narrative. Once I stepped it aside and said let me do this instead, all of a sudden, the grief of what I had lost came forward. So when I introduce someone to the forgiveness path, I teach them how to first identify unconditional love, and then I teach them how to apply it. So what do you need to apply it to? You need to apply it to the circumstances of the rupture. It's typically people. But it can be accidents, it can be illnesses. You truly can forgive anything, and there are so many variables that can cause us severe distress. But then the crux is, how to identify the parts inside you that actually need the unconditional love? Not only is that just relevant and practical, it also liberates unconditional love to circulate in a much more stronger way.

Unconditional love is going to circulate, infiltrate, saturate, no matter what. Because it doesn't have an ability to do anything but that. However, when we do place the part of ourselves that are holding the energy, the strong energy, in its path, then you have really gone 2.0 with it all, and you will get much more bang for your buck in those moments.

Yes, so important. I want to ask some follow-up questions, and I just also want to respond to your second point. I am very moved and touched by just how often the normal tendency is to protect or protest. The narrative could have been a protest. This wasn't okay, and the justification for that and how to validate that. It wasn't okay. Yet, the part of you, and again, I don't know, I'm just hearing based on right here, right now, but if I imagine myself in your situation, really turning towards the part that feels that broken heart and the grief, that's so much more direct access to my pain, and then the vulnerability, and also allowing that to be tended to with the unconditional love and the circulation of that. That's reparative. If I'm continuing, for a certain amount of time, perpetuating, while that might be true, it is going to be in this holding pattern perhaps.

Right, and it's gonna be steering your life and driving your car.

It's the focus, yeah.

Right, you're actually not going to be in charge. That thing is going to be in charge.

No kidding. It's like, that's not the most interesting thing, that's not the most important thing about you, that that happened. But yet, that's where all the focus goes.

Right. Once you restore that part of yourself, then your mind becomes liberated. So much negative narrative and negativity out there is coming from something about you that's needing to be loved. So that's another thing that I love about it, is that it liberates people from a lot of negative thinking. I'm very aware of negative thinking these days, with everything that's happening in the world, and negative narratives. So I very much pay attention to, there's actually a somatic piece that fuels all that.

Oh yes, and I feel like we could talk a lot more too about that. I want to get to relationship here too, and I know it all is interconnected. But I'm aware, in intimate relating, oftentimes we have an unconscious picker, if you will, and we will be attracted sometimes to circumstances or dynamics that are replicating a previous pain or injury unconsciously, without our real intention to do so. But it's in effort to heal those parts. Sometimes we can actually participate in the thing that's not okay. To turn towards the part that's hurt and really look at what's happening there for me gives so much more opportunity to look at, like: Oh, I think I've been actually choosing this, or I've been playing a part of this, and having an opportunity for healing there.

Can I go back one moment about the number one and the unconditional love for the circumstances? Is there a bit of surrender around that's not mine? I don't need to be the judge. I don't need to be the one to try to make it right in the world. Like, that's not mine to do. Help me, how does that unconditional love work in circumstances that are unjust or not okay?

Well, I can only speak from my experience. I think it very much releases compassion. So many people use compassion and forgiveness synonymously. But I actually think I'm a very compassionate person, I'm not an unconditionally loving person. When I meet somebody, I'm an empath. I can see everything that's behind them. I can feel their emotional world. So I don't have a lack of compassion. When I think about the people who I felt betrayed by—back in 2009 is when the rupture happened, and 2012 is when I found forgiveness—I see them.

Their limited place of functioning.

Yes. However, I think a lot of people really have trouble seeing the back-end of other people, and I think forgiveness really releases that. I think, for a lot of people, it precedes compassion. That once you start to infiltrate something that your logical mind swears is unlovable and not okay, once you all of a sudden go: Wait, well, what if I actually douse this whole scenario in the highest love? It radically changes everything.

I'm getting a whole paradigm shift. Like, actually, my vantage point completely changes, and I can relate to it very differently.

Right. I don't ask people to have compassion. So when someone's experiencing a rupture, they are having a lot of strong and acute emotions. This is another issue I have with the mainstream narrative out there about forgiveness, is, here someone is really juggling some of the strongest emotions that a human can experience, and now all of a sudden, they need to be unconditionally loving. So I very much say, forgiveness is not your ability to be unconditionally loving. It's your ability to enlist unconditional love. So it's very much like AA. AA is kind of the closest thing about surrendering. So there goes the word surrender, like giving it up to a higher power. I've never been in AA. But what I can say is, I really want people to have a very tangible experience of what it is to put a rupture or an adversary within the path of unconditional love, and to feel that.

Well, it just seems the distinction I'm getting between surrender and what you're describing is not this passive. Like: Oh, they'll do them and they'll deal with their own, almost like karma. People are like, they're karmic. But it's kind of just releasing it. But what I'm experiencing from what you're describing is almost, it reminds me of the meta kindness loving meditation of really being in a place of like, can I enter into a different state of consciousness or paradigm with this, or vantage about loving this, and evoking or invoking the unconditional love, even as an experiment of what happens? I can go back to the narrative, but I can also see what that would hold. Tell me.

Yeah. Even though that night when I stepped forth, my first step was to merge these people with unconditional love, my ex-business partners with unconditional love, what I've come to find out, as I've been now deep diving into the world of forgiveness for over a decade, is that really, just as you said, you need to give it to yourself first. Then once you feel it pumping through your cells, then you can then pass it on to the next person, or to whatever needs it. As I said, we're using the right hemisphere of the brain in my course.

So I'm getting people using those muscles and realizing that we are anatomically designed to restore and heal and be spiritually connected. It's just something that hasn't been emphasized in our culture of survival and gain. So once people then access that part of themselves, it's a whole universe in there.

No kidding! It's like an alchemy process. I will say, as it relates to intimate relationship, when I have had experiences that might be in the neighborhood of what you're describing—and I'm not talking betrayal, but just hurt feelings—and I can attend to myself and I can hold a different perspective, even if I don't know, it feels more like curiosity or wonder and love, but also like releasing my interpretation of things. I can approach a dynamic with my husband, and I'm like: Oh my gosh, I was off on a totally different world that wasn't maybe even true. Yet here, I'm experiencing something so much more healing, and I'm much more able to be open and accessible to him and feel myself.

Creative and forward-moving, as opposed to competitive and draining.

And also, humbling. Because I'm like, I was so wrong, but boy did I think I was right.

Right, beautiful.

Well, I know we're winding down here. But I'm sure people listening can apply this to their intimate relating or relationships, just as I was kind of contemplating. But is there anything you would like to say?

Yeah. So once I had somebody in the course, to bring it back to intimate relationships.

So this woman, she wanted to forgive her partner who she'd lived with for about 30 years and just felt a mountain of resentment towards him, even though she loved him and saw his goodness and there was so much to appreciate about him. She knew that he was actually never going to do the forgiveness work. She really just wanted to take this on, on her own, and to see what happened.

Exactly how you just illuminated, she went down the road of blessing him and blessing herself with the highest love over a consistent period of time, and really going deep into herself about the parts of her that really needed tending to. She was astounded how, all of a sudden, her perspective towards him, the whole resentment dissolved. She never had to involve him, this was her complete own little project. She was able to continue on and hold his hand and go back to appreciation. So I think there's a lot of different ways it could manifest in intimate relationships. But I really love that story and I love that example, especially because she was in her 60s when she took this on. So it's never too late.

Yes, exactly. To your point, how it might not need to be a huge monumental betrayal, that what might feel unfair or agreements that didn't get upheld, the accumulation or the division of labor, and how these things can accumulate and lead to resentments that build a bit of disconnect and wedges. And how she really took it upon herself to really look at that, the narrative and how she was holding it and focusing on it, and what that gave life to. Again, I think you would agree, but I want to ask. It doesn't mean that we don't learn and we don't implement being an advocate for agreements or fair relating. It's just how we're focusing on the injustice and all the things we said. But we can also bring in the part of like: Oh, I'm going to be conscientious about what interactions or business deals I engage in.

Well, when we're filled with love, I think that creating agreements and placing boundaries down, we're just more effective at doing that, than when we come to it filled with resentment or anger or fear. Then that becomes a very clunky, clumsy, potentially aggressive process. That's one of the cruxes of your work, I imagine, is to get people to stop doing that.

Or we're unconscious, or we don't know. Or we hope, but we don't really know. When we've lived a little, we can have that unconditional love for self and other, and then perhaps with the information or the logic, can have up-leveled. Because again, if it's a deal, if it's not a win for you, it's not a good deal. If it's not a win for either one of us, that's not a good agreement.

Right. So I think it makes the whole process more creative and smoother and easier. So I teach an online course.

Yeah, because this is the thing that I'm getting from you. Let's go here, I want to hear about your course. Just that we don't get taught this, there's not a lot of support in the world to really help bring the focus and attention to what you're describing, both for self and others. So please tell us about your course.

Yeah, and it's really exciting. Because I think healing and emotional intelligence and spiritual connection is having its day, and it's a very exciting time. So I typed in that night, it was October 2012, I typed in how to forgive. So a couple years later, I thought, is that domain available? There it was, waiting for me. So my domain is HowToForgive.com, and that's what I do, is I teach people how to forgive. You got a lot of information about my perspective. But I do a lot of energy work within the course, because I just feel getting the energy circulating is key to unconditional love circulating. So that's definitely my bent on the whole thing. So it's five weeks long. There's five sessions, there's five audios, and then five live energy sessions. I teach that course four to six times a year. I just basically do it as often as I can, whenever my schedule allows. There's a ton of information on my website, which is HowToForgive.com.

Lovely. Just for people listening, four times a year, so you viably might have one going throughout the year?

Yeah, definitely once a season. But I try to just get it in as often as possible.

Awesome, wonderful! You mentioned social media. Are you doing social media?

Yeah, a little bit. I mostly do podcasts, but I have a social media presence. But I don't teach on social media. But you can find some inspirational things on there. So on Facebook, it's DaraMcKinley108, and on Instagram, it's @DaraMcKinley.

Okay, but your main place to really connect with you and what you're offering is HowToForgive.com.

Right. Then I also have my own website, which you'll find the same things on there, more about me.

Excellent. Well, thank you for all that you've shared today. I really enjoyed having you on the show.

Thank you for having me. This was a really rich conversation, and I loved all the questions. I appreciate it.