My heart was made of stone last week, figuratively speaking. When my spiritual mentor asked me if I had practiced the H’oponopono prayer, which is a forgiveness mantra, I said ‘no’. I couldn’t do it. The words stuck in my craw. I wasn’t ready to forgive and forget anything.

All that’s changed since I lay on the floor and received the energy of a water plant from a modern-day Shaman who was in Portugal at the time. As I write this, it just sounds so utterly crazy, but the fact is, it worked.

My heart is open now. Forgiveness sits easily with me, so much so, I have made a long long list of all the petty resentments I’ve held onto for years. The plan is to visualise them, remember the feelings they sparked and say:

I FORGIVE YOU

I AM SORRY

THANK-YOU

I LOVE YOU

To each and every one. I started with my old English teacher Mr Kinnemont. Why? Because when I was 15, I wrote a poem for homework. I was a pretty pleased with it and when he asked to see me after the lesson, I assumed he was going to heap praise upon me.

I was beaming with pride, for a second…then he said: “Where did you get this poem from?”

“I wrote it Sir.”

“Which book did you copy it from?”

“It’s mine. I made it up.”

My cheeks flushed red. I must have looked guilty, but I was angry. How dare he, but what made me even more furious, was that he marked it as 8/10. If it was so good he thought it had been plagiarised from a book of PUBLISHED poems, why didn’t he give me 10/10? He didn’t believe me. I wondered if that was because he had never seen promise in my writing before, perhaps I was rubbish and the poem was a fluke.

The incident is as clear as day in my mind and I wonder if it is at the root of my failure to succeed as a novelist, playwright, scriptwriter etc. In the back of my mind, I never think my writing is good enough. Now, there may be more to this than Mr Kinnemont’s mistake, but surely it can do no harm to let the damn thing go after all these years!

Anyway, the list is a long one and it may take some time, but I have an inkling that I am going to feel an awful lot better about life when I’ve worked through it, so if you have wronged me, please know that I forgive you, I am sorry, thank-you and I love you. Mwah!