Letting go of the past

Last week I talked about decluttering the mind and creating more clarity in our lives and there are a few ways to do this that I mentioned. One of the main things that clutters our minds is the past. Our minds naturally move between the past and the future and the problem with both of those is that we cannot do anything concrete about either of them. The past is over and cannot be rewritten and the future is unknown. We tend to dream about what we want our futures to look like and some of us take action to make that happen which gives us the feeling of control and creating our own destiny but we cannot redo the past and this causes us a lot of pain. No one is immune to pain which is derived from looking at the past and feeling unhappy that we are not able to change the parts of it that did not go the way we wanted it.

But the past can only hurt us if we let it. Sometimes we like to wallow in the unhappiness of the past while we reminisce about the wrongs that were done to us, the loss that we suffered and sometimes we go into a lot of detail about these things, reigniting the pain that we felt and bringing it into our lives now. Once we have focused on the pain again then we have given our power to that hurt and in effect we have now brought that painful past into our present and made that more painful too. The past, unless you are looking at it from the right perspective or with someone who can help you to heal it, can have a profound effect on your present which is why it is always best not to give the past any of our power. The past can’t be changed by forgetting it but we do have the power to help ourselves in a few ways and if you are struggling to do so, you might want to try them.

1. I know that I have been guilty of wrestling with my past, as if it were something that I could overpower and overcome. I used to spend hours trying to wrangle it, seeing points at which I could have done or said something different. I just couldn’t seem to accept that it was done, that was I did was what I have done and that even had I done something different, I might still not have got what I wanted. It is imperative not to do this because accepting our past is the first step to letting it go. We can’t go back, so we need to focus on the now. But there is one thing that we can do and it is important to do it and that is, while accepting the past as it happened, accept the feelings that you have about your past. Don’t punish yourself for feeling that way. You are a human being, be kind to yourself, do not judge yourself.

2. A large component of what I describe in point one is story telling. I love stories, as we all do, and sometimes we rehash the past because we are trying to make sense of the world, of our world. This is how we formulate our belief system, by telling ourself stories and drawing conclusions about ourselves. Sadly we are predisposed to look at the negative and so we draw conclusions about ourselves from our past that are not very useful and largely untrue. I felt very unlovable and I replayed stories in my head of scenarios where I was left or unwanted and super charged my feelings of ‘unlovable-ness’. I really began to believe that I was unlovable. I believed it, it became my truth. It takes time to make sense of the past sometimes and sometimes we have to confess that we can’t make sense of it, so it is best to just…

3. Let go. Letting go is the most important thing to do with your past for the precise reason that there is absolutely nothing that you can do about it. Making the decision to let it go is a big step to taking your power back from the past which is only going to make your present more difficult.

4. Part of the letting go process is forgiving. Forgiving ourselves is by far the most important thing to do because we are at the heart of everything that we do but forgiving others in our past destroys the power that that person, at that time, had over you. This way, the person as they were then (they may be very different now) can have no power over you. Once you forgive, you have let go of any resentment which is negative energy that eats away at us. By forgiving we are helping ourselves to find the peace and happiness we seek, we are not letting them off the hook, we are letting ourselves off the hook. We are human, and everyone else is human too.

5. In order to achieve the above, get support. There are lots of people who can help you to release the past and forgive in a very effective and lasting way. Finding someone to talk to about these things, even just for a very short period, can really help you. In an ideal world we would have friends that would be able to do this but sometimes the things that we hurt about from our past are sources of shame and so a person away from our personal sphere is usually better.

We are all learning and whatever it is that you have experienced in your past, the hope is that you have learned from it. I know that I had to go round and round certain lessons to learn them, I was pretty stubborn at times!

No matter what is going on in our lives, the most important thing is to be kind to ourselves. Make time for taking care of you, whatever that means but the basics are always important -eat well and healthily, sleep well, stay physically active, stay creative and take things slowly. Focus on being kind to yourself in the now and in the past and things will shift.

Remember, you are not alone!

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