Forgiveness is Freedom: Live Out Loud!

Forgiveness is Freedom

Live Out Loud!

Shannon Marie Buckley

Copyright 2012 by Shannon Marie Buckley.

The book author retains sole copyright to her contributions to this book. All rights reserved.

Published 2012.

No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other – except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published 2012 by BookCrafters, Parker, Colorado.

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Edited by Heather Boylan, Phd.

Cover design by David Bahm.

Print copies of this book may be ordered from online bookstores.

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Dedication

This book is dedicated to God, my parents, my brother and his family, and all of my relatives. I also dedicate this to Mary Amore: without you this book would not have been possible.

I would also like to acknowledge all of my new brothers and sisters I have met over the past few years. Brian Klemmer and the students, staff and facilitators of Klemmer and Associates: in fifteen months I have raised my quality of life by at least 500% with your help.

Thank you to Debra Gano, Ken Lesser, Emily Hoch, The Hellwig Family, Lali Kakar, Lexi Becker, and the Tisdall family for everything you have done for me over the years.

To all the individuals out there who are looking for the answers outside of yourself, I pray that reading this book helps you turn within instead. At first it is kind of scary, and then it gets really fun!

Moms are forgiving LOVE. - Me

Table of Contents

Preface

Prologue

Chapter 1 Resentment Against My Family

Chapter 2 Something Is Missing

Chapter 3 Connected to My Dream

Chapter 4 Life Is Meaningful

Chapter 5 Journey to Humility

Chapter 6 Fame vs. Purpose

Chapter 7 The Gratitude Adventure Begins

Chapter 8 Judgment and It’s Connection to Freedom and Forgiveness

Chapter 9 Focus on What You Want!

Chapter 10 Wholeness

Resources

Preface

Holding others responsible for the quality of your life ends up hurting others and - most of all - yourself.

I am writing this book to tell a story about how previously, my life was full of emotional confusion, isolation, pain and a feeling that I was going to have the same problems forever.

Since I got connected to my true self I feel so alive! Each day is filled with amazing experiences, spiritual discovery, and extraordinary opportunities, because I now have the aptitude of a winner in every area accompanied with the persistence of someone who chose to overcome. I am no longer struggling.

I am writing this story as the final expression of forgiving myself for becoming entranced with the material world and the results of that choice. Also it is my prayer that telling this story will bring some peace to my family. Even though the past is just that, the past- I know through my actions I brought shame to our family. Now I ask for your complete forgiveness, knowing I plan to live in a way that will make you proud and bring our family a good name - living with humility and gratitude towards for our Lord Jesus.

This book you will teach you about excellent principles for success; what my life looks like now because I use them; and how you can benefit by incorporating these simple tools into your life as well!

Also, we will take a trip down memory lane. This journey will illustrate how I used to be in the victim mindset. By writing Forgiveness is Freedom I am rewriting my story from the stance of personal responsibility. My life challenges are not my parents’ or anyone else’s fault!

Life is full of choices! What a gift!

Used to want a lotta things

All the stuff that’s on TV

Education, cars, and clothes

Fashion lights and jewelry

(Focused on the wrong stuff)

Now I got my eyes on you

And now I know that

God is enough

- Lacrae

Being able live life fully while appreciating each moment and attracting what we want is so much fun! Join me, please!

I know that ultimately, acceptance is only between myself and God.

Forgiveness is Freedom: Live Out Loud! is also a bit of a scrapbook to remember many wonderful events in my life and to remember where I have come from. This story is also a powerful way of contributing something valuable to my community, my country and the world.

In the thirty years of my life so far, I feel my largest victory is in achieving healthy relationships in a society where we are programmed to become buying machines... I believe this is an extraordinary achievement!

I look at this journey as climbing to the top of Maslow’s hierarchy - from survival mode to self-actualization and actually experiencing life as opposed to reading about it in a sociology text book. I realize that this is a bold statement; to me, it’s the truth.

I have always been blessed with abundance and opportunities to be a part of AWESOME things. I was born into a family who held good moral standards and made healthy financial decisions. The plague that was eating me up inside, however, is that I felt completely alone while I was doing these awesome things.

Thanks to my incredible parents I found myself on a cruise ship in the Western Caribbean; traveling to Japan, Hawaii, Canada, Mexico, and California; sharing my artwork; snowboarding... Even though I was in beautiful places and there were beautiful faces around me- I always felt detached and alone.

Anger in my heart was holding me back from connecting with others and being able to completely enjoy myself in these beautiful places. This phenomenon not only affected me while on vacation, of course. it was present in my everyday life. Even though I was often surrounded by beautiful, happy and successful people, I still felt unable to be accepted if there wasn’t something super exciting or dramatic happening around me.

My story of transformation describes a person who changed her circumstances because she changed herself inside. As my friend Mary says we are made from the inside out!

This is a story of confusion, struggle, isolation, transformation, and acceptance. It is a love victory. If you can relate to feeling separated from those around you and not understanding why; or perhaps have a million reasons why based on what happened to you in the past, this story may really resonate with you.

This issue of resentment interfered significantly in my relationships when I was young. As I grew up and needed to make decisions for myself, my resentments became a serious problem.

While I lived with my parents and they were responsible for my livelihood, my relationships were failing. As time went on, my academic performance began to suffer as well.

My parents attempted to teach me the things I needed to know in order to be successful on my own, yet I was so angry at them that I hardly heard anything they said. All I wanted was a chance to do things my own way. I chose not to listen to them and do things my own way because I lacked respect for the relationships I experienced in our home growing up. I concluded that my parents should be written off completely because they didn’t have the information or the resources I thought successful people should have. Now I realize that my parents are just people; we all have our own imperfections.

As I begin to write this story, I had to look at my tendency to do and say the things I thought others wanted to hear. I had to remind myself that if I write from a place of what I think other people are going to want to read, I am going to get stuck in an old emotional cycle and this novel will not be completed. I am going to write how I write and the right audience will understand and be moved by this manuscript.

As a youngster, I thought my life looked all right from the outside, I had a million acquaintances and I would just sing and dance for them. In many photos of my young self, I have much too big of a smile on my face - as if I had to be super happy for others to like me.

I didn’t know how to have close friends, so I just did what I thought other people wanted me to do, always showing up with a smile, hoping to make them laugh or listen to their problems... Over time I learned that this is not actually what any true friend would want. Many of my relationships existed only on a surface level; I felt uncomfortable when anyone tried to get to know me better and would run the other way.

My comprehension of what a true friendship involved was limited until I took responsibility for learning this important concept. I’m sure that this information would have come my way sooner, quickly and easily, if I had been open to it. Instead, my concerns about what I DIDN’T want, caused my friendships to end up being exactly how I didn’t want them to be.

Living with the mindset of fearing what we don’t want results in our dreams going unfulfilled, and a collection of excuses to explain why those dreams elude us. This negative perspective also propelled me straight into a victim mentality where I felt like I was only responsible for certain aspects of my life as opposed to the whole thing. So I acted out my fears and frustrations financially and through partying.

Before I truly learned the lessons described in this book, I paid greatly for decisions I made that I knew at the time were the wrong ones. It is my prayer that by sharing this powerful story of resentment to forgiveness I am able to inspire those who may be questioning, in need of a friend and who may be lost on a path that they know is not right for them.

I don’t want to limit the audience for this message, however. I would love for the whole world over to be transformed by this true story of how unlocking my heart opened up the door to freedom and my ability to live my dreams. If I had chosen to stay angry and resentful for things in the past, many of which were out of my control, I believe I would have lived a very short, lonely life.

When I changed my victim mindset to one of responsibility, I then faced the task of forgiving myself. To me, this means that I am now living fully in the present moment, I am consistently practicing principles of success and I’m committed to being me 100% of the time!

This book is a realized dream, and such a privilege and honor to be able to write. I have always wanted to tell my story, and now that I am in a beautiful space, it’s a story that I am going to enjoy telling and I believe many readers will appreciate.

The result of choosing to hold others responsible for our own quality of life is immense, costly, ineffective, and in the end, the person it damages the most is ourself. I truly believe that holding others responsible for our happiness is the primary thing preventing all of our dreams from coming true.

The purpose of my life is to share my story of forgiveness. By doing so, I hope to give others the opportunity to experience forgiveness in their own hearts! This book is the beginning of sharing with a larger audience the fantastic adventure packed full of blessings I call