PHASE TWO: Description of Activities
Day of Forgiving Workshop
Southeast Anchor Library, Baltimore City
Nearly 40 people from all over the Greater Baltimore area attended our Day of Forgiving workshop in the Highlandtown section of downtown Baltimore. Maria Broom began the day's work with guided meditation and large and small sharing circles to frame our forgiveness needs. Reverend Bernette Jones from the One God One Thought Center presented "how to" forgiveness techniques, including a powerful visualization activity and The Release Technique. Dr. Dorothy Holley and Deirdre Osiomwan closed the workshop with a profound forgiving ritual that included a meditative centering activity, a writing ritual, and an energetic "forgiveness dance" to release all tension with African drumming and movement.
One of our participants was inspired to write a poem about forgiveness:
Forgiveness Is Love's Best Expression
Forgiveness is love’s best expression
Opens up my heart
Lets me see us both as human
Has lessons to impart.
You’ve brought me so much pain and sadness
Yet I know it’s true
That you could not have hurt me so
Had someone not hurt you.
I’m stuck inside old feelings
Trying to get out
Living in the present
Is what it’s all about.
The bitterness devours me
Makes body weak and sick
The courage of forgiving
Restores the candle’s wick.
It doesn’t mean my pain no longer matters
It doesn’t mean I have to want you now
It’s just my way of saying yes to living
The magic of forgiving shows me how.
Forgiveness is love’s best expression
Forgiver is set free
Forgiven might not change a bit
And that’s all right with me!
Susan Bullock © March 2008
Thoughts from other Day of Forgiving participants:
Thank you MPT for helping me be FREE, free, free
Thank you so very much for the campaign of love & forgiveness – THIS TRULY CHANGED MY LIFE!
A great experience of sharing. I truly am free & I am open to the flow!
Taking away courage (after 40 years) and strength.
Thank you, MPT for being a leader in peace & forgiveness.
Inspired; need more events like this. Am so happy that I came here today!
Great Job MPT – More of this – The rippling effect of a healing consciousness is coming to a critical mass.
MPT, thank you sooo much. This is greatly needed in our community. Please continue these efforts. You are changing lives through your consciousness!
It has been a great pleasure to be a part of such a helpful hopeful event. Many of us could not have come had it not been free. Many blessings to you!
They created a warm, safe environment for openness. I like the ritual and the dancing!!!
We so often talk, think, discuss learn – Thank you, thank you for bringing dance and movement into this process. I was able to embody forgiveness.
I am countless steps closer of letting go of the pain I’ve been holding on to for the last year. I am fortified with an abundance of new tools and support.
PHASE ONE | PHASE TWO
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