Review: Forgiveness – 21 Days To Forgive Everyone For Everything – Iyanla Vanzant

This book has potential but could
use some formatting changes
Title: FORGIVENESS – 21 Days To Forgive Everyone For Everything (INCLUDES CD)

Author: Iyanla Vanzant
Published: 2013
Publisher: Hay HousePages: 323

Price:  £10.99 ( Paperback Purchase HERE)

           
USA Hardcover : $17.95 (Purchase HERE)
 
Genre: Self Help
 
 
 
There comes a time in your life when forgiveness is the next step in transformation and change. This book could not have come at a better time for me. I did the entire 21 days.
 
Iyanla Vanzant is a brilliant author and puts a real sense of heart into everything she writes. As someone who has lived a challenging life, this always comes across through her words. She has been there and well and truly bought the t-shirt. This is what I like in an author, someone who’s real, authentic and has passed through darkness and into the light.
‘Forgiveness – 21 Days to Forgive Everyone For Everything’ offered a great perspective and potential for future self-healing and self-acceptance, although the format in which it was presented made it more difficult than it should have been.
 
What Did I Think Of It?
 
The topics were brilliant, all very worthwhile reading. The stories, by Iyanla herself and her friends, helped me understand how important forgiveness is in my life. I particularly liked the prayers at the beginning of each chapter. They brought me into my heart before I began the EFT tapping process. 
 
The CD was clear and beautiful to listen to. I enjoyed listening to Iyanla say the prayers, as many of them brought me to tears. However, as someone who has practised EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) for a few years now, I found the format of the sections on tapping was very disjointed. It didn’t flow well.
 
The chapters on forgiveness by Iyanla on topics such as ‘Forgiving My Mind For Judging’, ‘Forgiving My Mother’, ‘Forgiving My Relationship With Money’, had great promise for me, yet some of the sections had pre-written scripts for tapping and a lot did not. So without a great knowledge of EFT, it would feel very challenging for the beginner to understand. I spoke to a friend who was working through the book at the same time as me, who was new to EFT, and he found it quite confusing.
 
I got a lot out of some of the chapters. It moved a lot for me and I was able to open up to forgiving some of my relatives and to forgiving my judgements that I had been wanting to make peace with for some time. Although this was more from my own understanding of mirror-work and things clicking into place internally for me. Although this book was a very good trigger for that mirror-work.
 
Overall, this would be a brilliant book if it were tidied up a bit and displayed differently. The thickness of the book made it impossible to tap on the scripts without doing it one-handed. The space to fill in your own statements did not work at all because of the thickness of the book, and being able to open the book to write in was impossible. 
 
So if I were to recommend any changes, it would be to make this book ring-bound so that it’s a useful book to write in, which would encourage people to go deeper into the forgiveness process.
 
Because of this, it took me a lot longer to go through each section. I had to write all the questions in my own notebook first. And I felt I needed to go back through the 21 days again, so 21 days was not long enough to forgive. Many of the topics needed to be clearer and needed to encourage people to forgive others before they could forgive themselves. This is standard EFT. You can’t run before you have walked with processing deeper issues.
 
While Iyanla recommented writing in a notebook, it was not clear if her book was part of the notebook process, so I feel that statements like :

‘I forgive my mind for thinking I am weak because….’

either needed to go into a ring-bound book so that people could fill in the blanks or cut the book in half and leave out the ‘fill in’ sections. This would make it easier to open and read.
 
I loved the script on forgiving mother, and if a similar script had been included for all of the chapters this would have helped beginners greatly.
 

Who Would Benefit From Reading This Book?

 
 
People ready to forgive
 
People who want to use EFT as a tool for forgiveness
 
 
 
Summary
 
Great potential, excellent for triggering deeper healing. Gives a beginner a place to start with forgiveness work.
 
 
Needs re-formatting and completely changing for it to be practically usable. And 21 days is not long enough when you have to write out all the questions before you begin so to me the extra size of the book was wasted as it was too difficult to fill in the blank spaces with topics to tap on.
 

 

 
*Post Disclaimer: I received ‘Forgiveness – 21 Days To Forgive Everyone For Everything’ from Hay House Books in the UK for review. All opinions are my own.  
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Kelly Martin
Kelly Martin

Kelly Martin, author of ‘When Everyone Shines But You’ is a dedicated writer and blogger who fearlessly explores life’s deepest questions. Faced with a decade of profound anxiety and grief following the loss of her father and her best friend Michael, Kelly embarked on a transformative journey guided by mindfulness, and she hasn’t looked back since. Through her insightful writing, engaging podcasts, and inspiring You Tube channel Kelly empowers others to unearth the hidden treasures within their pain, embracing the profound truth that they are ‘enough’ exactly as they are.

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2 Comments

  1. February 5, 2014 / 6:13 am

    I tend to carry around a lot of emotional baggage. I really try to not think about the people that have hurt me in one way or another but maybe forgiveness would be an easier way to put demons to rest.

  2. February 5, 2014 / 8:31 am

    Hi Donna, its so easy to do. I am new to forgiveness work but by forgiving some of those in my life so far, with the help of the above book, a new sense of love has come through me. It's hard to explain but I just see the other person in a different light. Good luck hun, it gives a great sense of freedom, forgiveness.

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