Changing The Past

Today I had a mind blown moment when I was doing my morning writing.

I’ve been wanting to write out the story of me for a while – just to see on paper the thoughts that are floating in my head about me and my life.

As I was writing, my brain was telling me I don’t feel like digging into this right now. It all just feels true. What’s the point?

But I kept writing, and came to a situation in my teenage years that has always felt heavy. I’ve done some work on it in the past, but it still feels like something went wrong. That I should’ve known better, I should’ve done better. That it should’ve gone a different way.

I asked myself questions like What if that’s exactly how it was supposed to go?

What if nothing’s gone wrong?

How can I have compassion for the me that made those decisions, rather than telling myself I should’ve know then what I know now?

Then came the kicker – I plugged one single thought into a model. The same thing that I do with my clients. We take one single thought and see the effect that one sentence has.

I broke down how that one thought made me feel, what I did because of how I was feeling, and what the effect of those actions were on me.

As I sat with it, I realized that it’s not the past that’s making me feel heavy now – it’s that sentence that’s in my brain now.

I realized that the effect that situation had on me now wasn’t the other person’s fault – I created that result myself.

Do you know how freeing it is to see that? How lightening it is to recognize that the past, the other person, doesn’t have that power over you or how you feel? That it IS in your control?

And because I was no longer beating myself up for what I should’ve done differently, a new thought came to my mind. I was able to see a direction that my life could’ve taken if things had gone differently; one that I’m so grateful it didn’t go.

Sit with that today – look at a situation in your life that you believe causes you pain. Write it out. Question it. Be open, be curious, be compassionate.

Everything really does go exactly the way that it’s supposed to.