Recently, one of my clients said to me, “I thought it was over. I thought I’d handled it, that I was done with my past.” So, we slowed down together and looked at what was actually happening.
These are some of the things we talked about so that she could understand the absolute perfection of why ‘the past’ came up like it did—in the ‘now’.
What is the past?
The past lives within us—as memory, as emotion, both consciously and subconsciously.
We hold the past as regular narrative memory when we recall a wonderful experience of some kind. We experience the past subconsciously when we feel emotions such as terror, shame, and rage that seem out of proportion in the context of our present experience.
It’s the conditioned-mind-past that we generally refer to when we try to escape our past.
We all have experienced wonderful memories of our past. We all have re-experienced the pain of our past. Humans get wounded. We create a sense of being separate from our true Self. Many of us experience some form of emotional disconnection or abandonment…
The experience of not being seen, connected to, loved on the soul-level as children—this in and of itself causes the first inklings of the false self to emerge. To judge ‘the past’ as bad and something to ‘get over’ is a very shallow concept of what it is and how to be with it.
Why is it so popular to think we should ‘get over it’?
A current self-help trend towards the ‘past’ is that we must leave it behind. Many times, our past is referred to as ‘our story’. The consensus is that we aren’t evolved if we look at our past or get triggered by it. Thus, we have zillions of articles on 10 ways to be happy now; 30 practices to let go of fear forever. And so on.
The ego turns everything into a story—even our healing.
“I’m beyond my past now” simply becomes the next identity to hold onto.
The past is not our enemy. Neither is our story.
Have you heard the Buddhist saying: No mud, no lotus. The mud symbolizes our suffering. The lotus is the symbol of expanded awareness. We suffer when we get stuck in the past. We are stuck when we identify as it, when we feel our limited, little self as the real us. This is the mud. Yet, without suffering, without this false identity, we cannot experience the larger truth that this little self is not who we really are. The lotus begins to bloom with our greater awareness.
We don’t ever reach a point where the past is gone forever. But we can reach a point where our relationship to it shifts.
This shift in relationship is what constitutes a breakthrough.
The ‘past’ my client referred to was an experience she had at an earlier age. The purpose of remembering this was that a pattern still operating in her life originated then. She knew it was a limiting pattern, which had repeatedly kept her from loving herself on a deeper level. So, we welcomed this past experience into the present moment (because it was there anyway!) We explored it quite deeply and created healing and transformation of consciousness by doing this. She expanded into her lotus self that day.
The present moment is where our life occurs.
If you can point to some place other than the present moment for where your life occurs, let me know.
Sometimes the past shows up in the present moment. Being ‘in the moment’ so to speak, does not mean you never have to ‘deal with’ the past. The past arises. So, we embrace it. Explore anything that needs exploration. And shift to an expanded awareness, which includes a greater truth than what we were able to realize in the past.
With this greater awareness, what we called ‘the past’ (a particular fear, memory, shame, or stuck place) tends to dissipate. It softens. It loosens its grip. It no longer defines us in the same way.
Then life happens. We grow. And just when we are on the threshold of a new evolution of our consciousness, sure enough, some of the ‘past’ will arise again! Do you welcome it? Or do you resist it? Generally, we resist and then realize that doesn’t work very well.
So, when something from the past arises again…
perhaps nothing has gone wrong.
Perhaps something within you is ready to be met
in a deeper, more loving way.
CLICK HERE to schedule a free chat with Nancy if you want to explore this more.
