Thank you for joining us for episode 446 of Live Happy Now.

This year, as you're shopping for the perfect holiday gift, why not put forgiveness on your list?

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and today I'm sitting down with Barbara J. Hunt, a forgiveness

specialist, speaker, workshop leader, and best-selling author of

Forgiveness Made Easy.

Barbara is here to talk about how forgiveness is one of the best gifts we can give ourselves

and how we can use forgiveness as a practice to help us navigate those often tricky

holiday gatherings. Let's have a listen.

Barbara, thank you for joining us on Live Happy Now.

Thank you for inviting me. Pleasure. This is a topic I love to talk about. We haven't addressed

it really enough on Live Happy, but forgiveness is so important and such an integral part of

finding a balanced happy life. And, you know, I love a good origin story.

So could you tell me what made you decide to start studying forgiveness to begin with?

Sure. Well, I did grow up in the Christian faith. So I had came into a Catholic family.

And so it was always part of our original tradition.

And so that was always sort of in the field, but very much in a sort of traditional way,

like forgive your sister when she hits you, that kind of thing.

And then I got really interested in personal and spiritual development from about the age of 15

when I discovered Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

I don't know if you know that book. Beautiful book. And I kind of just wanted to ask the deeper

questions about life. And so I did some personal development trainings and particularly with the

Mortar Life Organization, who were back in the day called The Life Training, and they were an American

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