The Silent Poison of Unforgiveness with Hanna Kok

In today’s episode we're opening up a real and vulnerable conversation...: The Silent Poison of Unforgiveness. 

So many people in their second half of life carry deep emotional wounds — often quietly — thinking time will heal them. But what if what’s really needed is not more time, but intentional release? 

To guide us through this powerful topic is the wise and wonderful Hanna Kok. 

Hanna is a coach with over 30 years of experience in the body-mind-spirit connection. She’s a qualified Educational Kinesiologist, Allergy Practitioner, and Medical Intuitive, and she’s the creator of the iThrive web app — a beautiful tool that’s helped countless people experience real transformation in their mental, emotional, and physical health. 

She brings both heart and science to this conversation, and I know you’ll feel her calm, grounded wisdom as we explore how to release resentment, shed victimhood, and reclaim our energy. 

Transcript

Speaker Dar: 

In today’s episode we're opening up a real and vulnerable conversation...: The Silent Poison of Unforgiveness. 

So many people in their second half of life carry deep emotional wounds — often quietly — thinking time will heal them. But what if what’s really needed is not more time, but intentional release? 

To guide us through this powerful topic is the wise and wonderful Hanna Kok. 

Hanna is a coach with over 30 years of experience in the body-mind-spirit connection. She’s a qualified Educational Kinesiologist, Allergy Practitioner, and Medical Intuitive, and she’s the creator of the iThrive web app — a beautiful tool that’s helped countless people experience real transformation in their mental, emotional, and physical health. 

She brings both heart and science to this conversation, and I know you’ll feel her calm, grounded wisdom as we explore how to release resentment, shed victimhood, and reclaim our energy 

Welcome in. I am so excited to get started today with our topic of the silent poison of unforgiveness. I'd like to start by having you tell our audience a little bit about yourself and you know what brought you into dealing with this topic? 

Speaker Hanna   

Well, let me start by thanking you, Darla, for this opportunity, and also thanking your audience for taking the time to listen to this podcast. I really am grateful for that and how I got into dealing with forgiveness and realizing the poison of the unforgiveness is because I had a major event in my life where I had to forgive. Nearly 30 years ago, my husband was murdered in an armed robbery, which was what was supposed to look like an armed robbery, but it was also a hit to take him out. And I was a mother. I had a 16 year old little, not a 16 year, sorry, 16 month old child, and I had to continue with my life after that. Thank goodness. I had learned about the importance of forgiveness before it happened, because I had learned that forgiving is something that we do for ourselves, not for the other person. And in my case, they knew who the perpetrators were, but they were never arrested. And I knew that if I did not forgive those people, I would end up being very bitter, and then my son would have lost two parents that night because I would have been consumed with, you know, my bitterness, as I said, I was very lucky with that. I also decided then to make this a situation that I was going to grow from, and I was going to get better from. And I'm actually busy writing a book on that topic, on bitter or better? It's our choice, because that is what I have experienced, and I could see in the family members around me who didn't know what I knew that after that, they struggled with health issues. Because when you hold onto that bitterness, it is something that consumes you. It takes a lot of your energy. And before you know it, a lot of your life force is spent on thinking about this difficult situation. And then you don't have the energy for the body to heal itself, and that is how we end up getting sick by holding onto grudges in a simplified form. So that is how I got into knowing the importance of forgiveness and wanting to teach people about how important it is and why we do it that we do it for ourselves and not for other people. 

Speaker Dar 

Wow. So indeed, unforgiveness is a silent poison, and you really have first hand experience. 

How do you even release, begin to release something that big? Could you share that with us? 

Speaker Hanna  

Absolutely so what happened was, in the months leading up, or actually the years leading up to that event, we were unhappy with our situation, not with each other, per se, but in the situation. We were living in a rural village in Lesotho, which is a landlocked country inside of South Africa. The area we lived in was so remote that we didn't have a telephone or TV. We did have a radio, but that was it. And our car park had a trading station where we sold everything from napkins to coffins and what you need in between. And the car park, well, so called car park was filled with horses and donkeys, and we did not like running the trading station. We wanted to do something about starting maybe a center for personal development and spiritual growth. And we were stuck, really stuck. We did not know how to get out of that situation. And then I. So after he died, we got a book that was written by a friend of mine, and she had posted it maybe two weeks before he died. She'd posted it to me, and so it arrived a few days after he passed, and in that book, she spoke about how we decide on a spiritual level, or on a soul level, three days before we die, that it's time to go. And I'm sure you've heard many times people speak about how, for some reason, when people die just a few days before, they started to get their house in order, and they started phoning people and saying goodbye, and so there's a lot of there are a lot of signs around to to acknowledge what she'd written in that book. Now, if my husband had decided three days before it was time to go, and I know he did, because he had written in his diary. I'm so stuck, it's time to move on. And he wrote that just a few days before then I'm thinking, Well, was it murder, or was it just something that had to happen? He had chosen to go so that helped me also to forgive. Another thing that helped me to forgive was that I was now free to leave. We couldn't leave that situation because it was a family business. The family had been running that business for over 100 years, and now I was free to go because it was too dangerous for me to stay there with a little boy. So those are just some of the things that helped me to forgive 

Speaker Dar 

Wow, and then you're doing this great work for other people so that they can release the poison of unforgiveness. So could you talk to our audience a little bit about, I guess, what we would call the basics of unforgiveness, and perhaps lead them through a short activity. 

Speaker Hannaa   

The basics of unforgiveness is that we feel that something has happened to us that is not fair, or somehow we feel a victim of a situation and now we are upset and we blame the other person for what happened. But the thing to ask ourselves is, what role did we play ourselves in that situation? So in our case, our stuckness brought that into our life. Another thing that also played a role was that my late husband and I, we had been talking about, we want to make a life instead of making a living. So with him passing the goal that came out of that situation was that I now was free to start to make a life for the both of us. Basically, even though he wasn't there on his behalf, I could now start doing this work. 

So one thing that helps to forgive is to look at the gold in the situation. Now, people are maybe dealing with rape or, you know, something other traumatic, but there's always gold to be found. 

One of the things that I find is that people treat us the way we treat ourselves.  So for example, in a case of a rape, what happened there is people have been really disrespectful of our of us, you know the victim, and then as the victim, we can ask ourselves, well, how respectful am I of me? How often have I I know this sounds a bit harsh, and I don't know how to say it in a gentle way, but have I raped myself or raped my own ideas. How often have I destroyed my own ideas, or How often have I been really disrespectful and rude to myself? Because we often, you know, the way we speak to ourselves, we wouldn't even speak to our worst enemies. If this situation happens, then we can also say, see it as like, Oh, it is time. It's really important that I start treating myself with respect. Because when I teach myself with the respect that I want from others, people start to treat us with way more respect than ever before. So that is a good example of how gold can be found in a difficult situation, like in my situation, I now had the opportunity to do what I really wanted to do and make a life for another person. Just the fact that we become aware of how important it is to treat ourselves with respect is the goal to be found. Because if we look at what we want to achieve in life, we have maybe some goals that we want to achieve, maybe, you know, do well at work or have a loving family, whatever that goal is now, that ability to treat ourselves with respect that We now have become aware of how important that is, that ability is going to help us and increase our chances from reaching our goals. So that is why, when you see the gold, it becomes easier to forgive. However, when you're stuck in an emotion, it's very difficult to make this thinking process because it requires higher brain functioning. And when we are unforgiving, we are in survival mode, and it's very hard to even consider wanting to forgive anybody. So the exercise that I want to share with your audience is how to shift that emotion so that you're not stuck in it, and what you do is you're going to take four fingers. You're going to take your index finger and your middle finger of each hand, of both hands, and you are going to put them on your forehead, above the eyebrows in the middle, above the middle of your eyebrows, halfway on your forehead. And you'll feel sort of a ridge there, and you put your fingers there. And what that does, it brings the attention to your prefrontal cortex that then what that does is it gives you access to your higher thinking again, because that is where your wisdom lies and your problem solving capabilities lie, and when you hold those points, and now you connect with your feeling, instead of running away from the feeling. You feel your anger, whatever the emotion is, let's start with anger, and you hold those points, and then you say to yourself, I give myself permission to feel my anger. And you just breathe while you focus on the physical sensation of your anger. So you might feel that a part of your body is tight. So you're not going to talk about the story of why you're angry, because that's going to fuel your anger. You're just going to focus on the physical sensation of your anger, maybe a tight chest, and you just breathe. Hold those points, they're called the positive points. And then you say, I give myself permission to feel that feeling. I forgive myself for being so angry, or I forgive myself for being unforgiving, whatever the feeling is that you're feeling in that moment, and you really connect with it, and guaranteed, after a while, you'll find that feeling subsides, and then maybe there's another feeling that comes up. Maybe now you feel extremely sad because you've lost something. Then you sit with that emotion, and you do that until you feel at peace. And once you feel at peace, you let that peace fill your whole body. And when you do this exercise, you already have released much of the poison that came. In with being unforgiving. And then you can start thinking, Okay, what happened? How? What can I learn from it? And a good way of doing it is say, how would I have liked to be treated by those people? I want them to have respect for me or talk nicely to me, and then you look for ways that you can apply your own advice to you, because most of the time, we treat other people very well, but we don't treat ourselves so well. 

So that is the process that I would like to share with your listeners. 

Speaker Dar   

Awesome. I followed through with that, and it was really interesting for me. The  feeling was almost stuck like in my chest and my heart space in there, and then it did release as as I held onto those meridian lines or acupressure points 

Speaker Hanna  we can, yeah, they are acupressure they are acupressure points. And in the Kinesiology they actually call them emotional stress release points,  That's exactly what they do. 

Speaker Dar 

Okay, so thank you for giving us that terminology. So what I'd like to hear next are some client examples. Of course, I want you to protect their confidentiality, but could you give us a few examples of the results of this work? 

Speaker Hanna 

Yes, before I go into the examples, I just want to explain why I'm talking about forgiveness. Yet I'm working often with women with hormonal imbalances. Oh, yes, you already spoke about meridians. Those are those energy pathways that run through our bodies, and acupuncturists stick needles in them. Now those meridians, the flow of those meridians, can be either inhibited or they can be increased with our thinking. When we have certain fear based thoughts, they will inhibit it, and when we have love based thoughts, they will encourage that flow. Unforgiveness is the emotion that affects our circulation, sex meridian, which affects our hormonal system. So a lot of women that struggle with periods or with menopause symptoms, but even bladder problems, or, you know, there are quite a few heavy bleeding towards the end of our reproductive cycle. Those can all be part of the same unforgiveness issue. So to give an example of one of my great success stories at and I'm allowed to give her username. Her name was Major, is major usta, and she's an army major. And she really used to struggle terribly with her periods. She had endometriosis, which probably caused most of her symptoms, she used to have heavy bleeding and severe pain, five to 10 days a month. She used to be a major from hell, with headaches. She had blood pressure problems. They had given her the Mirena IUD, but it hadn't really stopped the bleeding like it should have, so she was really struggling. Then within three months of coaching and using my I thrive app, she got rid of all those symptoms. The bleeding stopped because with a Mirena IUD is quite normal, that intra uterus device, the pain stopped completely, the heavy bleeding I mentioned that already stopped, but also the migraines had stopped. Her other medication was reduced in strength up to 90% and the gynecologist that had been working with her actually did an internal examination after I'd worked with her, and he said, I don't know what you've done, but it's looking really good for you. So. So that is one of the success stories. Is a really great success story. Another success story that I had was a lady, let's call her Ntabi Singh. She was bleeding terribly. She would bleed like three weeks out of a month. Now, she was a grandmother, and she didn't have the energy because of the oldest blood loss that she had. So I worked with her, and there was a lot of forgiveness work that we had to do, and the bleeding stopped, and she had all the energy back and she could enjoy her grandchildren. So those are just two of the stories. 

Speaker Dar 

Thank you. Thank you for sharing those. And you mentioned your “ I thrive app”, and you have a gift for our audience. So let's dig into that! 

Speaker Hanna  

So the app is, at this stage, a web app, so it runs off my website. So it has the advantage that it doesn't take any space on your phone. And the app, there are audio programs that you can play, and I purposefully say the word play and not listen, because you do not have to actively listen to these audio programs. You can just play them. I play them while I sleep, but you can play them softly while you go about your day, or you can play them audibly, if that's what you want and they are audios of an hour to an hour and a half at a time. And then the whole idea is that they loop so they repeat, and then they start to re-educate the body to be in harmony with its environment and to address specific topics. So when a person signs up for it, and they can sign up for totally free for 35 days, no credit card needed, they can just experience the results. And there are subjects like carefree periods, menopause and menopause, or menopause because men have a similar thing. They go through that time of their life. I've got them for overcome addiction. So they're like 12 plus programs that you can select from. And one of them is also to open this whole meridian system, and you'll find, well, that was my experience. I had so much energy when I started playing those for, you know, a few weeks. And people can just go to my name, Hannah Koch. And I know English speaking people, they cannot stop themselves from putting an H behind Hannah. So you can either do Hannah with an H at the end or without the H at the end. And my surname is K, O, K, and then you go to Hannah Kok.com and on the landing page, you can sign up for 35 days for free. And that will give you more than enough to go through a whole program, being it to overcome addictions, especially if you've you know, tend to be anxious, that is the program for you, or any of the other programs. And then you have enough time to complete a whole set. And then if you like them, of course, afterwards you can sign up for the paid version, but it's still super affordable. 

Speaker Dar   

Terrific, terrific. Thank you so much. And I think it's important that we stress again, that she said play so you don't need to think that you need to take a whole lot of time just jump in there and explore it, because this is a beautiful offer, and we want to thank you for that. Hannah, 

SpeakerHanna   

it's an absolute pleasure, and it only takes one or two minutes to put it on, so there's no reason why you cannot do it, and nobody knows what subjects you're listening to. So it's totally private, 

Speaker Dar  terrific. So this was just a wonderful informative session. I want to thank you so much for being with us. Hanna, I want to remind our audience that this information will be on the show notes page, so you'll be able to get the link that she's talking about from our notes. So Hanna, do you have anything else that you feel called to share with our audience before we wrap up here? 

Speaker Hanna  Absolutely, I do. 

What I want people to know is that we all. Want to be happy, and we tend to look outside of ourselves to create that happiness, and we tend to blame people outside of us for our unhappiness. If we want to turn that around, if we want to create happiness, it's so important that we realize it always starts inside of ourselves, and that's also with the app, it releases much of the poison that we have created with all the grudges that we've held on to, and it also makes it easier to start making changes from the inside out and create our happiness. 

Speaker Dar  

Yes, happiness is an inside job. Thank you so much. 

Speaker Hanna  

Exactly, Darla and thank you so much and the audience, thank you so much for listening. I really have enjoyed spending time with you all. Thank