Does Resolving BS from the Past In the Present Help Your Future?
To be here now, in the present, and work towards the future, sometimes resolving your past is a must.
Everyone has a past.
Checkered, sordid, amazing, awful – all the above. Nobody who lives today is without a past (save newborns).
Lots of people dwell on the past. Many have a deep desire to return to it. Or rather, to return to a past that never truly existed, save in their unique memory of it. That’s where nostalgia comes in. You remember times that were – save that they never were how you desire to remember them.
What’s more, times that were good for some in the past were terrible for others. Ask anyone from any marginalized group about if the past was somehow better, and I’m fairly certain they’ll tell you all the ways that it most definitely wasn’t.
The biggest problem with the past is that it has passed. It’s done. You can’t go back, return to it, or relive it in any way. Additionally, you can’t undo it, redo it, or otherwise do it over.
Many outright don’t accept this.
It is, however, the truth. The past is behind you, come and gone, and can’t be reclaimed. All you can do with the past is learn from it to move forward.
And to do that, you need to be here, now.
The only truly real time that exists is the now. This moment, right now, is the most real portion of time there is and ever will be.
The past and future connect to the now in different ways. That can be helpful when creating and/or setting goals for yourself for the future.
Sometimes the past impacts the present and subsequently the future – and must be addressed.
The trouble with recognizing and acknowledging feelings from the past
The past can be extremely messy. What’s more, it is seldom – if ever – perfectly remembered.
For example – you might recall a past experience that was deeply upsetting. It may even have caused you trauma. While you remember various elements of that – some, possibly with too much clarity – the emotions of that time will not be remembered.
That it was upsetting, you can recall. How you reacted, you might also recall. But the actual feelings of that time? No, you can’t recall them.
Why? Because how and what you feel can only be known in the now. Only in the present are they truly clear.
How and what you felt, in the past, leaves an impression behind. You can see and even get a sense of the feeling they impressed on you. But you can’t know how or what they felt like – because that was then, and this is now.
Don’t believe me? Try to think back to a past incident you remember well. While examining the memory, get past your head and see if you can get to the feeling, exactly how and what it was, then.
You’ll find an impression. But the exact what and how of the feeling are in the past and can’t be recalled.
That doesn’t mean, however, that you shouldn’t look at bullshit of and from your past in the present to find and/or create goals for the future.
The bullshit of the past is strong with this one
When my parents divorced, I was 5 years old. As a highly sensitive child, that hurt a lot. Rather than deal with the hurt, I intellectualized matters – and shunted my feelings away, like a Vulcan from Star Trek. For nearly 3 decades, I could barely feel genuine feelings – save in extreme situations and circumstances.
Once I started to reconnect to my feelings – and being able in the here and now to feel the what and how of them – my life changed considerably. I stopped trying to be someone I wasn’t, started to find and be my more authentic self, and like/love who I am. That led me to open up to mindfulness and all that can be.
Being more present, and actively mindful, here and now, has been enlightening in numerous ways. Overall, I’m more content, living with more intention, and seeking to find and/or create a life of my choosing.
However, I’ve discovered that some of the bullshit from my past is impacting me, still. Unresolved issues stemming from things that have happened over the years that left an emotional impression on me.
That impression is one of shame, guilt, resentment, anger, and worthlessness all rolled together. At least, that was my first impression.
A deeper analysis showed me that it was mostly shame, resentment, and worthlessness reaching up like zombie hands from a grave to drag me into the dirt.
The intellectual analysis leads to a new problem. You can’t resolve in your head a matter of the heart. So I need to sit with the feeling impressions left behind by the past emotions and feel them out now to work on resolving them.
Then, now, and the future
As my therapist suggested – I need to treat that past feeling impression like a garden. I can only uproot the weeds after they pop up. But they must be allowed to pop up to be removed.
Lots of big-brained scientists, writers, and other smart people have told us that time and reality are just illusions. As Einstein said,
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
In other words – reality is how you perceive it for you – and you alone. It’s colored by your experiences, biases, education, environment, and many other factors.
Time is just as much an illusion as reality. In the words of author Douglas Adams,
“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
The past, the present, and the future are all intertwined. They are, in the words of The Doctor from Doctor Who, a “big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff.”
Let’s unpack that. The only time that is true and wholly real is right now. This moment is the only moment that can be entirely real.
Why? Because the past is colored by your experiences, biases, education, environment, and many other factors. The future is unwritten and will be impacted by random happenstance, circumstances, and tons of factors over which you have zero control.
Right here, right now, however, you are. In the now, you can know who, what, where, how, and why you are. This moment of time is the most real time, the only time you can do jack shit to control. Now. The present.
The future is made up of decisions you make in the present combined with lessons learned from the past. And that’s achieved via mindfulness.
Mindfulness and active conscious awareness
You, me, and everyone are comprised of three minds – unconscious, subconscious, and conscious.
The unconscious mind handles the works of you. It’s how you breathe, circulate blood, digest food, and so on. It’s always there, always on in the background like the OS of a smartphone.
The subconscious mind is where your values, beliefs, and habits live. This is like an app on a smartphone you must remember that you even have to be accessed (or maybe it’s more like an in-app extra you can only get when you pay for it).
The conscious mind is your mindset/headspace/psyche self, in the present. Think of it as the actual phone function of your smartphone when you talk or text with someone.
The unconscious is never accessed, save when you breathe deeply or exercise to impact cardio health. The subconscious is only accessed through the conscious mind. And that is done via mindfulness.
Mindfulness is active conscious awareness. It comes by exploring your thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions.
To act in the now in a way to impact a future goal, you start via mindfulness. You use your thoughts, feelings, and intentions to set action in motion.
The past factors in when you first explore elements of your subconscious mind to see what you learned from them, and if you must make changes to your beliefs, values, and/or habits.
But to do anything that will impact your future and find and/or create goals, you must work here and now via mindful conscious awareness. That may or may not involve recognizing lessons from the past.
And sometimes you must resolve your bullshit from the past, first.
Be here now to address the past for the future
When you’re consciously aware, you can see beliefs, values, habits, and all else embedded in your subconscious. That includes all of your past.
Some are buried in such a way that you can’t access them without extreme work. That’s not always a bad thing – you might have memories involving specifics of trauma you simply do not need to recall. For me, that would be getting hit by a car crossing a street, for example. No recollection – and I’m very, very happy to leave that buried and forgotten.
But the impression of shame, resentment, and worthlessness that I’ve uncovered needs to be explored. I’ve intellectualized that and analyzed it in my head. Now, I need to sit with it and feel it out.
I also must accept that the what and how of the feelings that left these impressions cannot be recalled. But that tells me what I do have to work with now.
Resolving the BS from my past is the equivalent of uprooting a weed. Doing that now will free me of some useless beliefs and values from my past that no longer serve me.
Thus freed, here and now I can take wholly new roads to find and/or create goals for the future.
Convoluted? Yes. But that’s life, my friends. And while that can be annoying and infuriating, there is another way to look at this. It can be enlightening and full to overflowing of potential and possibilities.
That’s how I prefer to approach these matters. And that’s why I’m bothering to resolve bullshit from my past, in the present, to better my future self.
Do you work in the now to learn from the past and plan set goals for the future?
This is the five hundred and ninety-sixth exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – using mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.
I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.
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