You Don’t Need to Reclaim Your Past to Heal Your Past
You can only learn from the past but can’t return to it.
Do you have trauma from your past? Have you experienced pain, suffering, sadness, and the like?
If you’re human, then you probably have had some or all of the above experiences. Some of them you probably don’t ever desire to recall or return to again. But some you might desire to redo or undo, and others you might desire to return to – with what you know now as opposed to what you knew then.
The trouble with the past is that it has passed. It has come and gone and can’t be returned to, reclaimed, redone, or otherwise revisited.
You might think that to move forward in your life, it’s important to reconcile with your past. To some degree, that’s true. But you can’t reconcile with your past by reclaiming it.
Reconciling vs reclaiming
The past had a major hand in making you who you are in the present. Experiences, environments, education, family, friends, associates, everything you’ve done and everywhere you’ve been played a part in making you who you are, now.
That includes all the highs and lows and everything in between.
You’re not the only one who has elements from their past that they’re not proud of. You made mistakes, messed things up, chose poorly, and did things big or small that you have at least a modicum of regret about now.
Reconciling this is different from reclaiming it.
You can reconcile your past by recognizing and acknowledging it. Good or bad, this is far better than avoiding and ignoring your past. You cannot reconcile what you don’t both recognize and acknowledge.
This can be painful. Many episodes from your past are undesirable at best, horrific at worst. But here’s the key to recognizing and acknowledging your past – it’s done. It’s gone. The past has passed by and can only harm you if you let it.
You might find that harsh – but it’s simply true. The past is not the present. Here and now, it can’t hurt you.
You can reconcile the past in that you can release it, learn from it, and move through the present with greater wisdom. What you can’t do is reclaim your past.
There is no going back. The past can’t be rewritten, redone, or otherwise changed. Despite lots of efforts on many levels of society personal and impersonal that aim to do just that.
You might believe that reclaiming your past is how you move forward. But trying to reclaim your past is impossible – because it’s gone.
You can’t reclaim your past to heal your past
You might think you need to reclaim your past to heal your past and move forward. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Why? Because your past can’t be reclaimed. Simple as that. It has come and gone. There’s no returning to it, reworking it, or otherwise reclaiming it. And that’s because it’s now just thought, feeling, and memory.
This becomes problematic because your thoughts, feelings, and memories of the past are imperfect. They’re biased, colored by nostalgia and trauma, and are most likely better or worse than the past truly was. That’s not to say that the bad wasn’t horrific and traumatic – just that your past is never perfectly remembered.
Hence, reclaiming your past is impossible. This is why you can’t reclaim your past to heal your past.
How do you heal your past? The truth is – you can’t. You can only heal from the past. And that’s done via mindfulness here and now.
Mindfulness to heal from the past
Mindfulness is active conscious awareness. It’s being wholly present, here and now.
The difference between active mindfulness and passive mindfulness is focus. You can be both actively and passively consciously aware. For example – driving. You’re actively aware of the road in front of you, the wheel in your hands, and your foot on the gas or brake pedals. Meanwhile, you’re passively aware of the cars around you, weather conditions, traffic lights, passengers in the car with you, and the like.
Active mindfulness employs intentions and actions. These allow you to make choices and decisions for who, what, where, how, and why you are. That opens you to delve into your subconscious self.
Your subconscious is where your beliefs, values, habits, and memories live. Ergo – this is where your past still exists.
Because your past exists in your subconscious, it’s not in any way, shape, or form tangible. It simply exists, floating in the background as memory, thought, and emotion.
By being actively consciously aware – and practicing mindfulness as such – you can address, explore, examine, recognize, and acknowledge your past. But know this – that trauma might still sting, but it only holds power over you when you allow it to.
That might seem rude, but it’s still true. And you shouldn’t disregard PTSD and other trauma. That’s not what this is about. This is about using your head, heart, and soul to work some healing on yourself.
You have more power than you realize
It can feel as if your past defines you now – and will continue to do so into the future. You might believe that you will always have your past like a cloud hovering over you. This is especially true of trauma, PTSD, abuse, and the like.
This is a brutal statement, but nonetheless true: so long as you believe that, you’re right. Your past will haunt you for as long as you allow it to.
You have the power to change that.
It might be painful and unpleasant. It requires you to recognize and acknowledge your past. You can’t ignore, disregard, blow off, or otherwise forget your past. Neither can you blindly, willfully forget, forgive, and pretend it never was. That won’t reconcile a thing.
Letting your past define your present and/or your future is a choice you make. And you have the power to do with that what you will. But knowing you don’t need to reclaim your past to heal your past can free you to make different choices and decisions here and now.
That can open you to a lot of potential and possibilities for improvement of your life on many levels.
That’s a whole lot of power that you’re worthy and deserving of.
Recognizing that you don’t need to reclaim your past to heal from it isn’t hard
It’s all about working with mindfulness of your thoughts, feelings, and intentions to direct your actions.
When you recognize and acknowledge that your past has come and gone, and only has power over you as you allow it to, you can see how it can be reconciled – but doesn’t need to be reclaimed. Knowing that everyone has past bad experiences, and things they’d also like to take care of, you can see you’re not alone and that overcoming and reconciling the past is doable.
This empowers you – and in turn, your empowerment can empower others around you.
Taking an approach to positivity and negativity – from the vast cylinder that exists between them – shifts life in a way to open more dialogue. With a broader dialogue, you can explore and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you here and now.
Choosing thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions for yourself employs an approach and attitude of positivity for realizing amazing potential and possibilities for your life.
The better aware you are of yourself in the now, the more you can do to choose and decide how your life experiences will be. When that empowers you, it can spread to those around you to their empowerment.
Don’t you think that’s a worthwhile endeavor to explore and share?
Thank you for coming along on this journey.
This is the four hundred-and-ninety-sixth entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog, and spread the positivity.
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