The Fifth F: When Forgiveness Feels More Like Exhaling Than Surrender

The word forgiveness was as foreign to me as learning my first Albanian words. From the rhythmic pronunciations to the tone, trying to uninstall everything I knew from other languages to pronounce ‘Qa bone,’ felt unfamiliar.

As unfamiliar as forgiving myself.

I’ve been thinking about blue jays recently. Once upon a time, when I was tucked in a mountainside cabin, I fed the blue jays whole peanuts. Placing shelled peanuts on the balcony to watch the hierarchy feast. My city lungs, accustomed to swallowing exhaust fumes and other people’s expectations, took to adjusting to such clean air.

Each breath felt like I’d stolen something too precious for someone like me. That’s when the realization struck like lightning: We acclimate to poison so gradually we forget we’re being killed.

In my hypnosis practice, I witnessed this slow poisoning daily. Clients arrived carrying entire lineages of shame in their bones, whole histories of “I should have known better” metastasized between their vertebrae. They were like me, I just like them.

Their bodies spoke in code: jaws clenched from unuttered apologies, shoulders hunched from invisible judgments, tense foot flickers from decades old mistakes. Sometimes in sessions, it was as if I was the one in the chair. The one seeking guidance to find the parts of myself that somehow got lost along the way of life.

THE LIES WE MISTAKE FOR OXYGEN

Without oxygen in our bodies, we cease to exist. Instead of allowing oxygen to saturate my soul, my body became a living monument to “not enough”. Not grateful enough, not obedient enough, not worthy enough of unconditional care. By the time I recognized these as conditions rather than sacred, my nervous system had already built an entire economy around lack.

Asthe child of refugees, I learned early that love often arrived wrapped in barbed wire. Affection came with disclaimers: if you’re good, if you’re quiet if, you make yourself small enough.

My body’s memory outlasted my mind’s by decades. I’ve seen clients in their sixties flinch when recalling a parent’s disapproval from childhood. I’ve felt my own stomach clench at an echo experience. We store these moments not as passing memories but as buried shrapnel, old wounds we keep checking for continuous bleeding.

THE HEALER’S CONTRADICTION

It was easier for me to offer compassion to my clients than myself. It’s always like that, isn’t it? Words gurgled from within me when I first tried speaking to one of my inner children.

I sat on the floor, with my eyes closed and my palms over my heart’s center.

There were so many times I wanted to but couldn’t, remember parts of me to tell her how proud I was of her.

Instead, I froze. Freeze, fawn, fear, fight but the fifth ‘f’ has always been forgiveness.

I….you….I’m sorry….

So many times, so many parts that needed me. Tears streamed down my face as my hand reached out to her. One of her, one of me.

In my mind’s eye, I opened my arms to embrace her, to tell all the things I’ve always wanted to do. To remind her of how lovable she’s always been.

If you asked me how many times I’ve done this for clients, too many to count. If you asked me how many times I’ve done it for myself? Not enough.

Never enough. Getting my tools to lay someone on the healing table was automatic, and then there was me. The hesitation.

Hesitation has left my body so that I can land softly into love.

Woodpeckers don’t apologize for drilling into bark. The blue jays don’t whisper their cries. They take up space. They move on.

I am not fleeing but arriving, into a place that feels like a soft exhale.

Mountain air doesn’t ask what you’ve done to deserve it. It just fills you.

Maybe that’s what forgiveness is, not a reckoning, but a release. The next exhale.

This is any healer’s dirty secret; We become experts at directing traffic away from our own emotional disasters. I could draw astral maps of others’ pain while pretending not to notice the gaping voids in my own foundations.

THE PRACTICE OF RADICAL REMEMBRANCE

It feels like lifetimes I’ve traveled to get to a point where remembering past events didn’t sting like it used to. Now, I can redirect my energy and focus to not only the past pain but also the past strength that carried me through it. When old familiar ghosts with their not enoughs come rising up from the void, I engage in what I’ve come to call radical remembrance.

I place my palm over my chest to tell myself:

“We’re safe now.”
“I am safe in my presence.”
“I am safe, here, with me.”
“I am safe enough to stop surviving. I am ready to live.”
“I’m allowed to stay here, this is what safety feels like.”

This is my radical remembrance. Remembering the parts of me that protected me during my most tumultuous times. My calling to place my palm over my heart center was to integrate all the parts of Self who forgot how loving we truly were.

To remind myself that shame clings to our wounds and compassion heals them.

Venturing back to my inner child, I realize I am now the grown-up version, the higher Self, operating on the same timeline. This is me remembering I can be the most compassionate person to the one who needed it the most. Myself.

THE CLEARING

Forgiveness was never about changing history. It was always about changing your relationship with history. This is the fifth ‘f’ of the four ‘f’s of trauma. Fight, fawn, freeze, flight, and then there was forgiveness.

That mountain air shocked my system not because it was superior, but because it revealed how much poison I’d normalized. The woodpeckers knew what all nature understands:

There’s no virtue in carrying weight that isn’t yours. No glory in holding your breath the longest. The moment you stop, truly stop, the universe rushes in to fill the space where your suffering used to be.

Not because you earned it. But because it’s what love does when we finally stop building walls around it.

In the end, we don’t achieve forgiveness. We remember our way back to it.

Shaman Dao is the creator of The Quantum Why Meditation, an effective blueprint for discovering another level of self-greatness and awareness. Subscribe to her email list to access valuable insights and to read more of her private thoughts.