Mettre fin à la guerre intérieure - Dialogue avec Olivier Clerc

We have a rather predominant voice in our head that spends its time telling us everything we've missed, everything we've messed up, where we're bad at, where we're worthless, and so on. And people tend to call it, well, it's not me who invented this term, our inner judge. When we talk about a judge, what do we think of? We think of a courtroom. But in a courtroom, there's not just the judge, there's the judge. Yes. Up there, but on one side, there's the prosecution with the prosecutor, then on the other side, there's the defense with the lawyer. And at one point, it struck me to say, "But how does this happen in our own inner courtroom? Do we have these three figures, or in the end, is there only the prosecution left? And we only have one voice that spends its time, in the end, accusing us of reproach and then moves from accusation to execution, meaning punishing us and finding all sorts of inner punishments to make us undergo because we're not up to par. And forgiveness is freeing oneself from that. Forgiveness is freeing oneself from that. Yes, we blame ourselves, we are too hard on ourselves, we judge ourselves with great cruelty, and we don't realize it. I think that's one of the major problems. And to talk about it in this episode of Dialogue, I'm hosting Olivier Claire, who has just published a book on how to learn to forgive oneself. Because in the end, forgiving oneself, you'll see, is an extraordinary way to stop blaming yourself, to overcome resentment and shame. I am Fabrice Middal, a philosopher, author of many books, and the latest one, which I hope you'll want to read, is "Preventing the World from Falling Apart: 19 Lessons in Resistance." And now, welcome to Dialogue. You'll see, it's fascinating to learn to have a little more affection for ourselves. Hello Olivier. Hello Fabrice. We're going to talk about forgiveness, about forgiving ourselves, and it's much broader, much more radical than anything listeners might suspect. Exactly. It's been your commitment for a very long time. You say in this book, which is a bit of a summary of decades of reflection, work, and exploration, that of all you've tried, experimented with, and gone through, this is the most radical and what you see as helping people the most profoundly. Exactly. Why? How did you get there? And if you can, tell us a bit about the different attempts you've made and why something so radical is at play here. Well, I fell into personal development and spirituality like Obelix, very young. I was 17 during a year in the United States, and from then on, I never stopped testing methods. It was very intellectually and mentally oriented at first, in the very early 80s, and then it took me time and quite a few detours before I came across books, authors who made me realize that it actually went through there, it went through the heart. First, with the encounter with Marshall Rosenberg, whose book I had translated and published in French the following year. I can just say for those who don't know Marshall Rosenberg, he's the author who invented the idea of Nonviolent Communication. Exactly. So it was a stroke of luck to cross his path and to make his book known. The following year. Another stroke of luck, I discovered Miguel Ruiz thanks to M. de Selne. I also, and this time it's me who translated his book and published it, and then met him. The Four Agreements. The Four Agreements. Exactly. That's already quite a lot, two pillars that have changed the lives of many people. But before that, what was your initial desire when you were 17? Where does this interest in what you call personal development and spirituality come from? What makes it so? I think at the beginning, at the beginning, I had two fascinations. All human potential, everything that allows us to develop our abilities beyond what we imagine. So, for example, memory, I came across books that allow you to develop an extraordinary memory, and then the whole paranormal side. Yes, I was completely into parapsychology, the unsuspected abilities of the brain. That's how I entered spirituality. At first, spirituality fascinated me because potentially, maybe we could develop telepathic powers, clairvoyance, and so on. It's fascinating. That never interested me. So it's really interesting to see how people can get into these questions, but gradually, that's no longer what will interest you. Well, one last nuance. In fact, I've been obsessed with the question of death since I was 16, wondering what happens afterwards. In my Catholic church where I was raised, they told me we live only once, and then we are either to the right or to the left of the Father, depending on what we have experienced. Believing that doesn't work for me. I need to experience it. And in a book, "The Out-of-Body Experience," believe it or not, I learned that you can leave your body, and I thought, if I can leave my body, it means there's something, consciousness, that survives death. And that's what will actually determine my first readings, my first experiences, because I need to live things, and it will make me realize that indeed, what the human being is, what we are, is much vaster than what I was taught until then. So, how do you arrive at forgiveness? And why is it such a profound change compared to everything you've tried before? Well, I arrived at forgiveness by the greatest of chances, because I was translating Miguel Ruiz's "The Four Agreements." As is often the case, a book is good, but meeting the man, the woman behind it, is still very interesting. And so, reading this book, I thought, wow, if I ever have the chance to meet this man, I'd like to see if he's this kind of ball of love that I seem to perceive through these lines. Then the opportunity arose the following year, and so I flew to a 15-day retreat organized by M. de Selne in Mexico, New Mexico. And I went there to deepen the Four Agreements and to meet Miguel Ruiz. But I still kept the flyer for this retreat. Nowhere was there any mention of forgiveness. So it really fell upon me completely by chance. That is to say, on the second day, when we were at Teotihuacan, Miguel made me experience forgiveness without any warning, without any indication, without anything, which changed my life. There was a before and an after this experience, which had nothing to do with what I thought I knew about forgiveness from my religious upbringing. What do you discover at that moment? Well, I discover several things. First of all, I was told that forgiveness is a gift we give to others. If we are kind, if we are nice, if we are very spiritual. And there, I discover number one, that it's an incredible gift we give to ourselves. That is, it's a huge weight we let go of. It's air, it's space inside. I was amazed by the effect it had on me, in my life. At 38, I felt like I was discovering for the first time what true forgiveness is. First thing. Then the second, and it's very paradoxical, is that in the experience Miguel gave me, which served as the basis for the forgiveness circles I developed 10 years later, he didn't teach me to forgive; he put me in a position to ask for forgiveness. And at first, it's completely counterintuitive because, as much as we all want people to apologize for the suffering we've experienced, we want them to ask for our forgiveness, we want them to make amends. And moreover, we believe that if they don't, we'll never be able to heal. And in this reversal of posture, which consists of asking for forgiveness in four successive steps, I actually discover a power, a freedom, a responsibility that I hadn't seen before. And to be completely honest, it took me years to understand the profound magic in this reversal of posture, in what my friend Minagol calls inverted forgiveness. Finally, you say in your book that you've had many people who have had many experiences, but they only change superficially. That there's something more radical about forgiveness. Yes. Why? Well, perhaps quite simply because I like to remind people that anatomically, the heart is located between the head and the hands. So the capacity to feel, to love, is located between thought and action, and therefore plays a key role, and if that's blocked, well, I won't have very clear thoughts, I won't be able to think positively, and moreover, I'll have a devastating impact on my body. And today, that's one of the extraordinary things: after having been in religion, after having moved into the psychological field 30 years ago, forgiveness has now been studied at Yale, at Stanford, and elsewhere from a medical point of view. What happens within us, in our head, in our heart, in our body, depending on whether we are in revenge mode or forgiveness mode? And there, the results are extraordinary, because what I've been saying for 15 years in my books is now validated by medical studies. That is, it does us good. So, as forgiveness touches the heart, on the one hand, it transforms the quality of my inner emotional experience. On the other hand, it frees up my thoughts. I'm not constantly rehashing the same stories. It does me good physically. It acts on the body, and moreover, it opens up a dimension of transcendence that makes me say that in the end, forgiveness is a key that opens four doors. What did you have to forgive yourself for, for it to be so powerful at 38? What were you blaming yourself for? Well, I would say that the first time I had this experience, of course, I felt things in self-forgiveness. But I think the first times, it was mostly all the tensions related to others. Self-forgiveness, it's not for nothing that I'm writing this book 27 years after meeting Miguel Ruiz. It took me time to realize that it wasn't complete, that I still had some left. So at first, it was forgiving others that was the shock in this experience. Yes, it was forgiving others. Who were you blaming? Oh, well, many people. There was, yes, there were many things related to myself because, as I entered spirituality very early on, I had set myself an inaccessible ideal to be an enlightened person, always serene, no matter what, and so on. And I could see that I was far from it. So there were many things related to myself. It's already huge to forgive yourself for being human, in the end. Exactly. Because in the end, that's the big trap of all the discourse around spirituality. It's supposed to help human beings become more human, but most of the time, it makes them guilty of not conforming to an image of enlightenment, of perfection, of serenity, as you say. It's one of the most formidable poisons of spirituality, but also, one could say, of capitalism in our time. There's a sort of strange collusion between the two, because in capitalism, you always have to be stronger, more perfect, more more. And so, in the end, forgiveness, the experience you're talking about, is the discovery that we have the right to be as we are. Exactly. It's about reconciling with our own humanity. Yes. Having the right to be imperfect, having the right to be human, having the right, yes. But I spent 11 years in a spiritual community. 11 years is not nothing, you know, from 24 to 35. And I had this ideal. Yes, one day I will have mastered this, I will have controlled that, and then you have that. That's what freed you. Here, I think, we're getting to the heart of your experience. Oh yes, and I'm always happy to say it. Most spiritual discourses poison people with this ideal, which is a real catastrophe. Yes. So I consider myself incredibly lucky. I left that community in January 1997, and a year later, I came across Miguel Ruiz, and suddenly, I saw an author who, for me, is a spiritual author, not a personal development author, Miguel Ruiz, but who talks about love and about loving oneself and about how we poison ourselves by judging ourselves, by blaming ourselves. And there, I received a message that touched me somewhere that the spiritual path I had been following until then hadn't led me to. It was, well, I often think, what would my life have been like if I hadn't come across this being and his teaching at 38? It's a real tragedy of our world. Yes. That this path, which in the end, the heart of spirituality, is a profound act of love, a profound reconciliation, being loved without reason. It's still a bit like the message of Christ, the message of Buddha. Yes. And it's strange that this is what is least understood and least audible. And what you describe about your beginnings, I think most people, when we talk to them about spirituality, have the same delusion you had when you were young. Exactly. It's a way of being super powerful. We'll find a way of being super powerful instead of making peace with who we are. With this paradox, I don't know if you agree, but by making peace with who we are, we transform ourselves. That's the paradox, isn't it? Well, because we release incredible energy. Imagine the energy we put into being at war with ourselves, demanding this, wanting that. And when all of a sudden we let go of that to say, "But in fact, I'm a human being like any other." I use an image in my book: the tree. The tree has a trunk, but it has magnificent branches with fruit, but it has roots underground. We have a self, we have an ego, we have a shadow, and being human is about composing with all of that. And the day we finally reconcile with that, wow! It's magical! We stop the war. We stop the war. Yes. People engage in paths that only reinforce the war. Exactly. I should be calm, I should be like this. It's, you show in your book, and I think it's important for everyone listening, that many people don't realize they blame themselves. That is, they say, "I'm worthless, I'm a bad person." It's very striking that the suffering we experience turns against ourselves. And in the end, forgiveness, we'll describe how to do it later, but in the end, this practice of forgiveness, what you show, is that it responds to this unseen suffering that contaminates most human beings on our earth today. We blame ourselves, we blame ourselves. But in fact, it's because we've internalized the judgments we've received. And when I say that, it's with the best intentions in the world, as we know, parents, adults, teachers, everyone around us has assigned us a whole lot of judgments. You're bad at math, you're worthless, you should make an effort here and there, and we don't have to wait until we're 10 years old to internalize that voice within us and do the work ourselves. That is, we spend our time denigrating ourselves, judging ourselves, blaming ourselves, telling ourselves we should be better than this and that, and so on, and ultimately making our own lives a hell. You say, and I find this a profound insight, that we confuse our actions with who we are, and that's one of the sources of our suffering. Yes, of course. But but how many people have this idea of saying, "But there is within each of us, I call it a divine spark, a soul, a spirit. Everyone uses the word they want, but something that is so great, so sublime, and then there is the character, and there is our way of living it. And to incarnate, well, it means coming into such a family at such a time, taking on all sorts of stories, beliefs, things, and managing to break through that to find a semblance of consciousness and light. Well, for most of us, it takes time, it takes work. But there comes a day when we touch that, when we touch that essence within us, and then we also perceive it more and more in others, and then we stop focusing less and less on the actions of others, including the most reprehensible ones, because we have discovered within ourselves where our own clumsiness, our mistakes, our faults, so to speak, come from. So it's as if there's a space that grows internally, which is a space of compassion, which is a space of understanding with a good dose of humor too, because fortunately there's humor sometimes to laugh at ourselves and at the blunders we continue to make despite all our good intentions and all our workshops and meditations and so on. But forgiveness comes from the understanding that I am not reducible to my actions. I may have messed up, I may have done things I feel guilty about, but in the end, I am not reducible only to my actions. And in the end, that's the mistake the child makes. The child we were makes, we say, "You did that wrong," and he understands, "I am bad." That's exactly it, one of the knots, it's almost a cognitive error that makes our lives difficult, which you return to a lot in the book. Yes, and it's true that the judgments we make about ourselves are more often about us than about our actions. We are given labels that affect our being instead of saying, "Well, you did that badly, but you could do it this way." And so, we ourselves become champions of reducing ourselves to our actions, especially to the most botched, the most failed actions that we have committed. Can you give one or two examples you've encountered in all your forgiveness circles to make it a bit concrete, the difference between the two? Well, there's an important clarification to make, and that is that one of the reasons, I think, why forgiveness circles have been so successful is that people don't need to. There is no space for telling what we've experienced. So, people who have experienced very difficult things, abuse, trauma, who have themselves made mistakes, it's not a place where you come to deposit that. There are places that exist for that, and there are narrative practices that lead to forgiveness. What we offer is a ritual that leads to a firsthand experience of this healing of the heart. But whether it's the two-day workshop I lead or the two-hour circle, that's not necessary. Often, in fact, I learn things about people because they'll tell me a word or two before, after, out of context, but not within the framework of the. But they have a story that you could tell to make it more understandable for people, because, for you, the difference between what we've done and who we are is very clear, but I'm sure there are many people listening for whom it's not so clear. Yes. Well, it's true that I have many strong forgiveness experiences that are linked to quite extreme cases. Go ahead. But it's good if you want to tell one or two. Well, people like Jean-Paul Sampoutou, who experienced the Rwandan genocide. His best friend killed his entire family before continuing the rest of the genocide. Jean-Paul Sampoutou found himself completely devastated by this. Moreover, his first reaction was to consider suicide, saying, "But my life no longer has any meaning." And what's beautiful and what touches me in all the people I see going through a process of forgiveness is that they transform lead into gold. That is, they perform an alchemy of the worst events, and that results in people who distribute glitter. Today, if you meet Jean-Paul Sampoutou, you see him singing on stage with his guitar in six different languages. You see a man radiating joy, radiating hope, radiating confidence in our ability to heal, even from the worst, even from what we wouldn't wish on our worst enemy. Well, fortunately, most of us haven't experienced that. But what's incredible is that we are capable of judging ourselves for things we did 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago because we said such an unfortunate word to an ex or to our children, and we continually punish ourselves instead of saying, "Okay, I did that, but I'm not just that, and I'll grow from this experience, and I'll gain more humanity from it, more understanding for others, and I'll move forward." You note that forgiveness works on all these strange mechanisms that make us denigrate ourselves, lack self-confidence, blame ourselves, and you describe quite precisely a form of inner judge, if you'd like to try to describe what it is. Yes. Well, indeed, we have a rather predominant voice in our head that spends its time telling us everything we've missed, everything we've messed up, where we're bad at, where we're worthless, and so on. And people tend to call it, well, it's not me who invented this term, our inner judge. So, we often talk about the inner judge. And in writing this book, it helped me, it was important for me to realize that this name was actually wrong. It's funny because Yes, go ahead, go ahead. Because in reality, when we talk about a judge, what do we think of? We think of a courtroom. But in a courtroom, there's not just the judge, there's the judge. Yes. Up there. But on one side, there's the prosecution with the prosecutor, then on the other side, there's the defense with the lawyer. And at one point, it struck me to say, "But how does this happen in our own inner courtroom? Do we have these three figures, or in the end, is there only the prosecution left? Is there only one left, in fact, the prosecutor has taken the judge's place, and the lawyer has been dismissed, and we only have one voice that spends its time, in the end, accusing us of reproach and then moves from accusation to execution, meaning punishing us and finding all sorts of inner punishments to make us undergo because we're not up to par." Yes, that's very important. I'm smiling because it's something I often say: it's not a judge at all, it's a prosecutor. Yes. And but we don't see it. What's very important to emphasize is that we ruin our lives because we don't notice that there's this prosecutor. We have the impression, as you say very well, that it's just our conscience, yes. That it's at our service. Yes. And then, having been raised in the Catholic religion, before distancing myself from it and embarking on my broader spiritual path, I was struck to think, "Well, in this religion that was mine, they talk about God being love." And I thought, but in fact, the God or this voice of conscience that I have in my head is not a God of love, it's more the image I have of it. I'm not saying it's that, but in the Old Testament, of a God who is law, who is severity, a God who can get incredibly angry, wanting to eradicate all of humanity overnight. And I thought, that's interesting, despite 2000 years of Christianity, many of us still have in our heads a voice that we think is the voice of conscience, that we think might even be the voice of God, but it's a terribly judgmental voice. And forgiveness is freeing oneself from that. Forgiveness is freeing oneself from that. Yes. Yes. It's really about regaining a message of unity with oneself. You know, I quote a sentence that touched me greatly from Simone Weil, which I came across while writing the book, which says, "It is not because God loves us that we must love him. It is because God loves us that we must love ourselves." And I thought, wow, that's masterful, but who are we, ultimately, to judge ourselves as we do? Someone also said, "To judge oneself is to place oneself above the divine plan, above the source, whatever name you give it." We have something that supports us, you and I, we are alive. So life carries us, life supports us, the source supports us. And who are we to place ourselves above that and say, "I want nothing. I'm worthless. I'll never forgive myself for doing this. I'll never forgive myself for doing that." But what is this voice within us? It's worth asking the question: who is this voice truly within us? And what you say, which I find very, very accurate, is that this voice is not natural; it's constructed. Yes. Yes. That is, a child is not born with this inner judge. So, yes, you tell a story about a child who can fall, make mistakes, but doesn't condemn himself for it. No, but if there's a parent who says, "Oh, how clumsy!" Well, little by little, he'll internalize that and then this figure of the ruthless judge will form inside him, the judge who is within us. What happens when we don't forgive ourselves? Well, many consequences, first of all, we make ourselves sick, because when we talk about psychosomatic illness, I think we don't say enough that it's our emotions, much more than our thoughts, that intoxicate us, that poison us. And it's not a metaphor; it's literal. We have medical studies today that show this. So we poison ourselves, we make ourselves unhappy, we ruin the relationship we have with ourselves, we damage the relationships we have with others, because obviously our inner war will be reproduced in couples. And then, if we happen to be the CEO of a company or have a strong political role, we will reproduce our inner wars on even larger scales. And then another perverse effect that Miguel Ruiz also mentioned in "The Four Agreements," I reread it years later, is that the more I am merciless with myself, the more I mistreat myself, the more I tolerate being mistreated by others. That is, I would tell myself if someone speaks to me badly, if a boss behaves badly towards me, if my partner treats me badly, I would tell myself, "I deserve it. Anyway, I'm so worthless that, well." So, the lower our self-esteem and self-love are, the more we leave the door wide open to being mistreated by others. So loving oneself is fundamental, and forgiveness, forgiving oneself, is a way of learning to love oneself. Exactly. In the three definitions I have of forgiveness, the third one, I say, is the rebirth of love. So forgiveness and love are intimately linked. Forgiveness is what will bring healing to the heart and allow us to love again, to experience joy again, and not remain prisoners of the past, of what we have done, of what has been done to us, to be able to fully live here and now. So, generally, when we talk about forgiveness, we talk about forgiving others. One of the unique aspects of your book is that you talk about forgiving yourself. Yes. Yes. Because it's said, "Love your neighbor as yourself." And in the book, I joke by saying, "Well, some people, I don't really want to be loved by them as they love themselves, because they love themselves so little." So, restoring a healthy self-love, which has nothing to do with narcissism, of course, but being able to appreciate who we are, what inhabits us, what manifests through us, being able to accompany ourselves in a beautiful way in life. But it's essential, because the more I restore a harmonious relationship with myself, the more, spontaneously, I will offer the same quality of presence, acceptance, openness, compassion, and empathy to others. So, I don't see how we can do without that. Now, in reality, we know that it's also the most difficult forgiveness for most people. Why is it harder to forgive oneself? Because, at least in my experience over all these years, I think there's a level of self-judgment, self-hatred, self-contempt, lack of self-respect in a large part of our contemporaries. It shocks me, especially when we talk to people and see why they judge themselves, we say, "But this is what leads you to have such a disastrous relationship with yourself." I mean, if we had killed someone, stolen, committed acts, but sometimes people blame themselves for things that seem trivial to us. It's really striking to have a society where there is so little self-esteem, self-respect, and self-love. It's abysmal. It's abysmal. Yes. And what's also striking, and I often come back to it in many dialogues, is that most people don't realize it. That is, people blame themselves, don't love themselves, are hard on themselves. But just realizing it is a huge part, isn't it? What do you think? Ah, I completely agree. And what we don't realize is that the environment in which we grow up as children seems normal to us. It's our norm. So if we grew up in violence, if love was linked to verbal or physical violence, then in our child's psyche, these two things will go together. And it will be very difficult as we grow up to say, "In fact, there's a way to experience love differently. There's a way to experience relationships differently. We don't have to go through conflict, violence, mistreatment to feel love." So there's a path that is sometimes long before one day, and that's the magic of encounters and reading, one day to say, "But in fact, what I experienced was completely toxic. What I experienced was a disaster." And to say, "Well, now I'm going to start repairing, I'm going to start transforming to gradually move towards a quality of life, of relationships, of presence to oneself and to others that changes." But sometimes the path is long before just, as you say, saying, "But in fact, what I experienced was completely pathological." Yes. And what we experienced as children, and then the whole social environment where we are always guilty of not doing enough, of not being perfect enough. Yes. So we've internalized that, and so we think it's normal. Exactly. Well, then it seems silly. It's idiotic. It's difficult to see that loving oneself isn't being naive. It's not being soft, it's not being unexacting, and all these confusing detours. Yes. So, I think we've come a long way, because for me, it's been what, 45, 47 years since I fell into this world of personal development and spirituality. When I see where we were then and where we are today. Now, I'm not talking about everyone, but I think there are more and more people who are on this path.

who who uh including with excesses where it falls into the cult of the ego and the most absolute narcissism, but there is never evolution without having its number. But globally, I find that today, there are more and more people who are on the path to this, who are restoring a healthier, more balanced relationship with themselves, who are reprogramming the stories, the beliefs they have received. But globally, I hasten to say that we still live in a society that is globally of an impressive level of toxicity. That is important. We live in a society that has a high level of toxicity. And it's not so easy to see it because it seems like the norm. Yes. And because we confuse, in the ideology of our time, loving oneself, forgiving oneself, is seen as something not very serious, not very responsible. Yes. Then with the great risk, we will slack off, we will do nothing, we will not make efforts, we will not move forward and so on. Which is not at all the reality. I like to compare it, you see. There are plants here. I like to say you don't insult a plant for it to grow. You don't pull on its leaves, on its stem, you give it water, you make sure it has good soil, that it has enough light and depending on the species, it varies and then you know that at its own pace, it will grow and that an oak will not develop at the speed of bamboo. So you let each of your plants grow and develop at its own pace. Humans, deep down, are the same. They need light, warmth, and good soil. Light, well, knowledge, education. Warmth, well, it's obvious, love, affection. Good soil, well, it's the soil of relationships. First family, then all the soil of relationships we build. And if we are given that, what is within us will emerge, will grow, will develop, will flourish quite naturally. without needing to judge ourselves, to accuse ourselves, and to make ourselves undergo all sorts of things. But that's a significant change in thinking, to say that in fact there is something that only asks to develop in the human being and that, given the right conditions, it will happen. We won't go into all the details of what the circle of forgiveness is. Perhaps we can just say what the four steps are. Yes. So, the four steps are the four that I experienced, so originally with Miguel in Mexico. He first led me to ask for forgiveness from others. There. So whether we do it in a circle of forgiveness or whether we do it as I describe it in my book as an inner meditation, it's about seeing all the people. Individually, let's say, the first step, all the people I resent, with whom I am at odds, with whom I am angry. The second step concerns our scapegoats. That's more collective, it's pharmaceutical laboratories, it's the rich, it's the bosses, it's this when globally we stigmatize an entire category of people because they belong to such a culture, such a race, such a religion, and so on, and we make them responsible, the scapegoats for everything that is wrong in society. And that's an interesting process to undertake, to do this work of forgiveness on these great collective figures. How do we do it? Well, the paradox, as I said earlier, is that in this ritual, in this way of doing things, it consists of asking for forgiveness. And why would I ask for forgiveness from my scapegoats? But because I use what they are, what they do, what they say, or simply what the media tells me about them, to keep my heart closed. That is, I read the newspaper in the morning while drinking my coffee. I'm told that I have to hate today, and then they offer me a lot of them. They are the bad guys, they are the ones who are not well in the world. And in fact, I use what I read in the newspaper or what I see on television to spread hatred, anger, resentment everywhere around me. I think if we could see ourselves in the invisible and see what comes out of our heads and our hearts when we watch the media and unconsciously give in to this desire to hate, it reminds me of Orwell's 1984, the Ministry of Hate and those sessions where everyone gathers to hate and despise together. But on a small scale, we all do that. And at a moment of asking for forgiveness from these scapegoats, not for what they have done, because what they do belongs to them, and their karma, if there is any, belongs to them. But me, Olivier, what do I do with what I read in the newspaper? What do I do with what I'm told on television or on the internet? That is my part of freedom. And I can choose, like the one who wrote "You will not have my hate." I can choose not to get into that. I choose to say, "Okay, this is happening in the world, but what happens in my heart, that belongs to me." And I don't see why we would put organic food in our stomachs and garbage in our hearts. We also need to put organic food in our hearts, meaning to carefully cultivate the feelings, the emotions, the things that I let cross me. But does that mean there is no evil? No, I'm not saying there is no evil, but I think that hating evil makes it grow. So sending, isn't there, isn't there, between hating and forgiving, isn't there a world? Can we, without hating, not want to forgive? Well, the interesting thing is that, once again, I didn't learn to forgive, I learned to ask for forgiveness. And in doing so, I realized that deep down, it's something I've only said for a short time, maybe only 2 or 3 years, I don't think we are capable of forgiving, but I believe we are capable of creating the conditions within ourselves to be touched by forgiveness. In the same way that we are touched by life, so we are alive. We are touched by love and we can fall in love. Forgiveness is much bigger than us. And the question is not to ask ourselves if I should forgive Saddam Hussein, Hitler, or whoever. The question is to ask ourselves if my heart is capable of loving. Is my heart in joy, or is it fragmented, divided, torn? It has cysts, it has abscesses, and I am the first to suffer from having a heart that is completely sick. In the "Course in Miracles," there is a rather striking phrase. All forgiveness is self-forgiveness. This means that deep down, and Leonard Laskow says it in "Energetic Ou," Dr. Fred Luskin says it at Stanford where he studies forgiveness. Forgiveness, deep down, only concerns us. My heart is divided, my heart is torn, my heart is suffering. Forgiveness is the medicine I will use to regain a heart, and the magic is that if my heart is healed, my mind will think much more lucidly, much more clearly, much more justly. And if I have decisions to make in the face of evil, in the face of violence, in the face of the world's madness, these decisions will come from a clear mind and not from a mind that is overwhelmed, as they say, by its emotions and therefore with a completely distorted vision. That seems very enigmatic to me. Yes, it's true. Yes, I find it very, very enigmatic. The third is to ask for forgiveness from something greater than oneself. There. Exactly. Miguel told me to ask for forgiveness from God. When I developed the circles of forgiveness, I said to myself, God is a word that closes many doors. And I wanted these circles of forgiveness to be accessible to everyone. So, something greater than oneself, everyone puts what they want behind that. It can be God for some, the Source, the Universe, Love. To truly ask for forgiveness from God, because if we look around us, there are many people who resent life, saying life is poorly made, or who resent God, saying where was he in the concentration camps? Where is he when a woman is raped? So, in the representation we can have of something that is beyond us, something greater than us, there is the idea that this world is poorly made, that if we were God, we would have done better. And there is something within us that is not at peace with this greater than us, whatever we call it. And the day we let go of that, the day we do healing work in relation to something greater than ourselves, we regain a form of faith. And faith, for me, I define it very simply: it's trust in life. It's trust in something that surpasses me so much that wanting to understand it is like wanting to put the ocean in a thimble. At some point, things are made to pass through us, and I think understanding comes to us when we open the doors wide within ourselves. But when we hold grudges, when we are closed, when we are judgmental, the floodgates are not open, and so we close ourselves off from understanding, we close ourselves off from many things. There is an element of acceptance in forgiving what is greater than oneself. Clearly. Clearly. I don't understand, but I accept what is, because fighting against what is will never work. Exactly. And acceptance is a step that allows us to be connected to things. If I don't accept, I am cut off from what happened to me. I am cut off from what is happening in the world. And because I am cut off, I cannot understand. To understand is to take with, etymologically. I cannot understand what I do not accept. So acceptance is the first step, and it is not resignation. Acceptance is very different. And then comes the moment when we manage to reconcile ourselves, finally, with our lives, with our childhood, with what we have experienced. One of the beautiful definitions of forgiveness given by Lily Tomlin, often attributed to Jack Kornfield, but it's from Lily Tomlin, she said, "To forgive is to renounce all hope of a better past." In other words, to forgive is to mourn the ideal childhood, to mourn the perfect adolescence, the perfect parents. And it is to accept, to reconcile with what was truly offered to us. Then to say, "Okay, my life is this now, here, now, what do I do with it?" I know people who have experienced incredible dramas, tragedies, and thanks to this acceptance, thanks to this work of forgiveness, they are people today who are, for me, inspiring, touching, overwhelming. And the last step, which is what you talk about in this book, is to forgive oneself. And what is a bit singular is that it is the last step. Well, it's singular, yes and no. When Miguel made me experience it, just before the 4th, he warned me, he said, "Now, it's going to be the most difficult." Why does he say that? Well, because he knows very well that we are so judgmental towards ourselves, and I think that if I hadn't had the three steps before, that is, forgiveness with others in that group, then forgiveness of my scapegoats, then forgiveness of something greater than myself, and each time like an inner lock releasing, I was ready. I was ready to say to myself, "But in fact, he's right, I'm not going to spend my life being my own worst executioner, my own worst judge. We should all, deep down, be our best friend." And then, all of a sudden, it seems obvious, and for the first time, I am capable, internally, I close my eyes, and I ask myself for forgiveness for all the clear Oliviers I have locked away in a closet or in the cellar or in the attic that I try not to see because they haven't lived up to the ideal I had of who I should be. You give quite a few, well, some accounts from different people who tell how it transformed them. I wanted you to come back to Marky Bureau. Yes. Because I find it quite educational to understand what self-forgiveness might be. Well, I don't have all the details of his testimony anymore, but it touched me a lot. First of all, because Marky and I have known each other for 10 years, he is a facilitator of circles of forgiveness, and he indeed talks about the difficulty it was for him. He's about my age, in his sixties, growing up at the time, he grew up discovering his homosexuality and all the difficulties that entailed with others, but up to the realization, finally, of everything that was at play concerning himself, that is, this refusal, this division, this judgment of who he was, and the way it ultimately affected his whole life, to the point of reaching this acceptance, this forgiveness, to be able to symbolically, I want to say, hug himself and say, "But there is nothing false, there is nothing wrong, there is nothing inadequate in who you are." And what's magical is that when someone does that, when we gather, there are no more cracks. And because there are no more cracks, the criticisms, the accusations of others, can no longer penetrate us as they did before. What I find beautiful in what you say about Mark Bureau is not at all that he forgives himself for being homosexual, but he forgives himself for having believed for years that he was, deep down, guilty of being who he is. Yes. So I find that very precise. To forgive oneself is to see all these judgments that we haven't seen, that we have ended up integrating into ourselves, and which mean that, deep down, there is a part of ourselves that we resent. Yes. And he was, yes, he was a homosexual who accepted himself, who lived with it, but by doing the forgiveness, he discovered that deep down, through his history, he had integrated a part of that negative gaze that was on him. Exactly. And you see what's interesting. Fred Luskin, who is someone I adore, one of the first to study forgiveness 30 years ago at Stanford University, in a recent talk, he said, "Forgiveness, deep down, is simply changing the story. Another story is what it is. You experienced a bereavement or a marriage, you experienced a promotion or a layoff, that won't change. But what story do I tell with that? What story do I weave with the events of my life?" And in Marky's example, as in that of all the people I know, at some point, with exactly the same elements, they went from a story that was a tragedy to a heroic story. At some point, everything that was previously a source of judgment and unease, suddenly, you read Harry Potter, you read Spider-Man. The lives of all the great heroes, damn, they went through difficult things, but it remains the life of a hero. And in forgiveness, there is a moment when suddenly the story I tell about myself, the story I was telling until now, it transforms, and with exactly the same events, everything I did well, less well, and so on, I manage to write a story that is a beautiful story and a story that I can be proud of because I can say, yes, I came from there, I went through this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this, and with all that, well, I am the man, the woman that I am today. Now, many people say, "If I forgive myself, I will trivialize what I have done." What do you answer them? Well, it's such a vast subject. I address it particularly at the end of the book by saying that forgiveness is not there to be an easy solution, to say everything is okay, everything is fine, we erase the slate. When we have committed ugly or illegal or criminal things, of course, self-forgiveness can be desirable one day, but there is also an important notion, which is the notion of reparation. I have done wrong, I have caused harm. How can I repair it here and now? And here too, there are absolutely moving examples of people who have done terrible things and who, at some point, became aware of what they had done and then undertook this path of reparation and healing for themselves and for the other. A documentary that I almost always show in my workshops is called "Beyond Forgiving," which tells the story of a woman in South Africa, Jane Fuy, whose daughter, at 23, was shot by "terrorists," so to speak, who entered and shot indiscriminately. And she was devastated. She tells how she cried, screamed for over a year, but she wanted to meet the people who had committed it, to understand. And what is moving in her testimony is that she, who is initially a victim, loses her daughter in a terrorist attack. She goes to meet the black South African who commissioned these attacks. And she understands so much about the life journey of this man that one day it leads her not only to grant him her forgiveness, but she even finds herself asking forgiveness from her village, from her community, for all that white South Africans, of whom she is a part, committed for decades in South Africa. And then they spend years, they create a foundation together and travel from country to country around the world, she was brought to France, to spread a message of peace, reconciliation, and forgiveness. So there is something quite extraordinary in the sense that she gives this man the opportunity to transform his life. And imagine, together on stage, a woman, a man, a white person, a black person, he commissioned the act that killed her daughter, and together these two people transmit a message of peace, forgiveness, and reconciliation. They did extraordinary work to raise awareness. But there is this work of reparation, meaning that through this, the perpetrator, his name is, he worked to transform things not only in South Africa but in many African countries, in Israel, elsewhere. They did a lot, a lot for years. And I think that when this message is embodied like this, it has a rare strength. Why our interview? I would like to emphasize what you say throughout the book: it is a practice. So it's not something we have to succeed at, it's something we have to do and redo. Exactly. It's like a shower. I call it the heart shower. And a shower, well, you don't take one on January 1st saying it's good for 2026, because every day, we experience things that make physical hygiene necessary. And I like to ask people, what about heart hygiene? What about emotional hygiene? Don't we have old emotions that don't smell very good and are festering in a corner of the heart? Don't we need this shower? So yes, it's a practice, it's a journey, and in the same way that, well, our health, we take care of it daily, our physical health, well, the health of the heart, the state of the heart, is also something. Perhaps one day, the heart shower will seem obvious to us, just like the body shower today. And that didn't happen on its own, you know. At one time, people used more perfume than soap. You've said it several times, but I think to understand that it's a practice, it's worth revisiting, because it's not so simple to understand that we don't learn to forgive, we learn to ask for forgiveness. Yes. We learn to create the conditions within ourselves so that I really have an aquatic image of forgiveness. It's like the water of love, it's like the water of life. It's something that passes through us and cleanses us. We create the conditions, we open a breach within ourselves to be touched by it, and that's what heals us. What advice do you give to get into that state? Well, first of all, what you need to know is that the exercises proposed in the book, I have recorded them in audio so that people can really experience these four steps, these four successive requests for forgiveness. But what I see with 15 years of hindsight now is that even by doing this alone at home, very strong things happen. If you experience it in a circle of forgiveness, and there are many today everywhere, it's even stronger because you're not alone, you're in a group. But whatever the way you experience these four steps, I have sometimes made 500 people experience this in a conference room, with their eyes closed, in 20 minutes flat, and people are stunned to see the magic of these four words. "I ask for your forgiveness." It's as if something is released in the ego, in that part of us that thinks, "I am right, you are wrong, I am a victim, you are a scoundrel." Here, something is released, and forgiveness is very close to letting go. You have dedicated a part of your life to forgiveness. Are you still forgiving yourself? What is your relationship with this practice? Well, this practice has allowed me to delve into it, to deepen it, it has done me immense good. I think that when I was 20, I would never have imagined that one day I could have the well-being that I have today most of the time. Of course, I'm human like everyone else. Sometimes complicated interactions with loved ones, with a stranger, there are those too. But first, I realize that I have an inner buffer space 100 times larger than before. Things that used to make me jump, react, want to retaliate. Today, I manage to listen, to welcome, to see where the emotion or the other person's things come from in a much easier way. And when I am nevertheless touched, because we have our difficult areas, well, I know that I have a practice, I have a ritual, I have something that will allow me not to keep it inside me and to be able to dissolve in the waters of forgiveness what has touched me. I believed at one time when I was younger that one day I would fix everything. I would fix these wounds, these vulnerabilities, these problems. And then one day, I think of Chiron in Greek mythology, the wounded healer. I tend to think today that there are wounds within us that we will carry all our lives, but perhaps they are also part of our richness. Perhaps it is thanks to them that we are sensitive to the wounds of others, that we remain human, and I don't necessarily aspire today to fix them, but to be able to continue living with them without blaming myself for having them, nor wanting to be anything other than what I am, but to be well with what I am, as life has made me. Well, thank you infinitely. I refer everyone to your book, which is a very practical book that really takes people by the hand and shows them how to embark on this path. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you for following this episode of Dialogue. It's truly a big thank you because it's really precious that you have watched this episode to the end, that it speaks to you, that I do this for you. So it's truly an exchange, and I am truly aware today that around Dialogue, there is truly a community of people for whom taking care of the world, taking care of oneself, taking care of others matters a lot, and it's truly wonderful to see that we are such a community. So don't hesitate to share, to like. It may seem like nothing, but it's really very important. It's part of a sort of happy contagion that our world really needs. Well, I embrace you and I thank you again.