The International Institute for Radical Forgiveness and Leadership (IIRFL) has been borne out of the Institute for Radical Forgiveness, which was developed by Colin Tipping in 1997. In 2018, Colin chosen Godfrey O’Flaherty to be the Custodian and owner of the Radical Forgiveness work. Godfrey has bought all the Radical Forgiveness Intellectual Property, as well as the business of Radical Forgiveness, as a Global Enterprise from Collin Tipping.
The Institute’s mission is to raise consciousness through expanding forgiveness across the globe. The IIRFL is the official international body which will govern all the work of Radical Forgiveness, globally.
Radical Forgiveness has been translated into 9 languages across 51 countries. The IIRFL accredit and register coaches across the globe, to add to its already thriving body of coaches and students.
Additionally, IIRFL will continue to expand its global reach, as it recently set up the Africa Institute Affiliate for IIRFL. The Africa Institute will work throughout the continent in the field of forgiveness and as a bridge-building institution for individuals, organizations and communities.
Training and Development
Under the direction of Godfrey O’Flaherty, we are establishing a Centre for Research, to focus on coaching research about the impact of forgiveness and healing of the body, mind and soul. The Institute is in the process of refreshing our current Radical Forgiveness Coaching and developing other future programs, including:
The IIRFL will house the Colin Tipping Foundation, in loving memory of Colin and his incredible work. This foundation will be a philanthropic organization, managed on behalf of funders. It aims to create projects and programs run under the Radical Forgiveness banner that will facilitate emotional healing around the world. Using the Radical Forgiveness methodologies, projects will include developing youth leaders, addressing gender base discrimination and guiding communities globally on dealing with social challenges. (Using the Radical Forgiveness technology, example projects include developing youth leaders, empowering woman and dealing with social challenges faced by communities around the world.)
IIRFL seeks to play a more active role in the education space. We aim to equip the youth globally, especially from disadvantageous communities to deal effectively with the challenges these communities face. With this aim in mind we strive to contribute constructively to the emotional wellbeing of young learners, throughout the world. The Colin Tipping philanthropy foundation will fund these international systemic forgiveness projects. The mission of the Colin Tipping Foundation is to facilitate emotional wellbeing, living with awareness and resilience which will enable learners to embrace, advance and develop their full human potential.
Finally, leadership development is also at the heart of the Institute’s future focus. With the IIRFL, Godfrey seeks to use his passion and experience in leadership development, by creating programs that will help leaders in communities, organizations and all walks of life to rise above their own egos and in so doing being released from their shadow that derails them from their purpose. In this way, the IIRFL aims to bring reconciliation and promote healing through Radical Forgiveness programs.
The International Institute for Radical Forgiveness and Leadership looks forward to partnering with you on this personal growth and development journey
Welcome to the first video in Module #17 which is all about relationships. In this video, we seek to answer the question: what are relationships for?
Now, at first blush, this would seem a dumb question. We don’t usually give much consideration to whether relationships even have a purpose beyond that of leading to happiness if they are successful or misery if they fail.
The idea that the purpose of relationships is happiness has kept thousands of book writers, magazine publishers, and video producers in business, not to mention workshop leaders and the entire advertising industry. All of them keep us believing in the myth that the purpose of relationships is happiness and that all we need to do is learn the secret formula for the ideal relationship, and that it will make us happy.
But, as a Radical Living Master Coach, you know better. You know, and we know that the true purpose of any serious relationship is not happiness but, according to the Soul’s Journey model, anyway, the means by which we fulfill our need to experience separation, even if it is only during the pre-awakening phase. We come together in relationship to provide each other lessons in separation, creating it for each other in a wide variety of forms, such as abandonment, rejection, discrimination, abuse, violence, and so on, so we can learn and grow.
After the awakening, however, the purpose of relationship changes dramatically. Hopefully, anyway, it will become one where, instead of creating separation, we come to experience within the relationship the qualities of oneness, wholeness, unconditional acceptance, freedom, and equality, giving and receiving to each other in equal measure. We can, of course, expect happiness to arise if this happens and that’s wonderful, but the real purpose is to expand our capacity to love unconditionally. And, that is a challenge.
Making this transition from the pre-awakening phase to the awakened phase is by no means as easy and straightforward as it sounds. It is tempting to imagine that once we have begun to remember who we are and to see life through the lens of spiritual perfection, life becomes easy and full of unimaginable joy and our relationships become blissful. While it is true that the potential for perpetual joy, happiness, and a sense of peacefulness is there, it doesn’t come automatically.
It has to be learned and practiced, especially when life becomes really challenging. People need the tools that you can provide to help them stay in the vibration that they’ve entered into. They need the help and support of a Radical Living Master Coach in staying awake and acting in a very different way towards their partners and loving them unconditionally.
Of course, in the beginning, when your client comes to you with a relationship issue who is in Phase 1, she/he will almost certainly believe that the purpose of relationships is happiness, not learning about separation.
And, you will have to go along with their belief system at first, until the time comes to explain how things really work at the spiritual level, at which point they will see what is really going on in their relationship and, with your help, will know what to do about it.
For some people, this is simply too big a jump and, even though they may have awakened and concede that this is the ideal way to be in relationships, they remain together, but basically, revert to their old ways of relating to each other.
Others don’t even make it that far. A lot of relationships come apart at this point, especially if one partner does not awaken to the same degree as the other or completely resists accepting the new way of relating for fear of losing the advantages that they had prior to the awakening.
This is where you can step in and make a difference. If you see where things are going in this respect, you can help a couple completely renegotiate their relationship, so they really do make the transition together and survive — or not. And, if not, you can help them break in a loving and supportive manner.
However, most of your clients are going to be those who are still in the pre-awakened phase but are just starting to awaken. These are going to be your best clients because they are realizing that relationships are about more than happiness and are searching for the kind of answers that you can provide. You might even become the catalyst for their awakening.
How much drama of separation your client would suffer before coming to you for help would depend on how much each partner has set as their goal prior to their incarnation. But, at this time, for most people, the awakening doesn’t usually occur much before middle age with perhaps multiple marriages along the way.
Then again, you might get a younger client (usually it is the female) who is at the beginning of the pre-awakening phase and is just beginning to discover that her partner is not quite the perfect soul mate she thought he was. She’s confused and scared that things are not working out as she expected. However, because of the honeymoon period she and her partner will be sufficiently hooked into the relationship to make escape very difficult, so she comes to you for help.
It is usually around the 2-year mark that the dynamics of separation begin to take over from the honeymoon period. Behaviors like domination, control, inequality, exploitation, selfishness, co-dependence, narcissism, abuse, neglect, rejection, etc., are beginning to begin to feature in the relationship. That is to say that the divine plan is beginning to work. That being the case, your job is to get them to the point where they understand what that is and how to navigate through it, using the tools that the Tipping Method provides.
As you know from the Soul’s Journey model, the awakening is usually preceded by some kind of crisis or breakdown experience such as an affair or a divorce, even. Their wake-up call, if you will. Your clients won’t know what it is, of course, but you will have a pretty good idea that this is what is happening. They will be confused, hurt, afraid, and probably very angry. They will be feeling victimized, believing themselves to have been abused, betrayed, and discounted, and so on. But you will carefully bring them to the point where they see that it was exactly what needed to happen for the good of all involved.
When they reach the point where they have realized the true purpose of the relationship (and all those that have gone before, of course), and are able to look along their timeline and see that every bit of drama had a purpose and was all part of the divine plan for their life, you will need to steer them into doing Radical Forgiveness worksheets on every one of the situations that occurred prior to the awakening.
That’s because the energy that was tied up in each of those events, no matter how far back, is still in the cells of the body and needs to be purged. There will also be a need for them to do Radical Self-Empowerment worksheets in order to release the residual guilt that they harbor in their bodies.
A lot of the clean-up work they will need to do on each person that they thought victimized them at that time, is to help them undo their projections. Not only will this remove the anger and other toxic energies that they repressed and projected onto those people, it will allow them to see that what they were projecting was their own self-hatred. And that’s when you can use the Embracing My Shadow Worksheet to heal their shadow.
There is also likely to be a need to go back one, two, or even more generations to heal the patterns of pain and suffering created in the distant past. These patterns keep on getting repeated from generation to generation, even though their original purposes have expired.
Another thing to watch for is people carrying the pain that is not their own but have taken it on. It usually turns out to be their parent’s or grandparent’s — pain that they’ve taken on and made their own. You can understand why a young person would see their mother in pain and volunteer to carry it for her until she was strong enough to carry it herself. But, they forget to give it back, become attached to it, and make it their own. You will need to help them to release them from that burden. It is not their pain.
It takes a lot of commitment to do this clean-up work, but you can help your client do it over a period of time. You will see mentioned in Chapter 2 of Expanding into Love Through Radical Forgiveness, which is also required reading, that there a number of subsidiary purposes that are more specific, while still being part of the overall purpose of healing the misperception that we’re separate. Some come into play more after the awakening, while others are activated during the pre-awakening phase or both:
Because old wounds and the beliefs we made up about them may have been repressed and forgotten, we need relationships to resonate those issues for us so we can bring them to the surface for healing.
As part of that healing process, we attract others into our lives to do something ‘nasty’ to us, so we have someone to blame and feel resentment towards. Sometimes we play the victim role, while at other times we play the perpetrator role. We have to have both; otherwise, it wouldn’t work. On the surface, it will look like we are sworn enemies, and the relationship often gets acted out in this way. It can get very ugly. But, the truth is that we are soul partners in an enterprise in which the goal, eventually, is for both to awaken and expand into Love. This happens, upon awakening when we recognize that our enemies are our healing angels, generously providing the means by which we reach that goal.
The notion here is that we may have made a number of contracts or agreements with certain souls, prior to our incarnation, to do certain things for us at particular times in our life’s journey to give us the experiences that we want. Obviously, such soul agreements could not be fulfilled without our having the necessary relationships occur in our lifetime.
Energy of any kind always wants to find its point of equilibrium. It is always seeking balance. This is true of human energy also. We’re constantly trying to balance various energies that we are holding within us, especially those we create through acting as either victim or perpetrator, whether in this lifetime or another.
We agree in advance of our incarnation to do certain things in our life that will give it meaning in real terms, and that will contribute in some way to the process of ‘healing’ humanity. The point here, however, is that it is through relationship that our missions are fulfilled, whatever they are.
Ok, that’s it for this video, but since it is anyway required reading, we suggest you read the Preamble to Part 3 of the book, 25 Practical Uses for Radical Forgiveness. It expands on some of what we have skipped rather lightly over in this video. You might also read Chapter 2 in the Expanding into Love Through Radical Forgiveness book and have your client do the Exercise on page 38.
It the next module we will describe the four main stages of a long-term relationship.
We’ll see you then.