Are You Anchored In The Past?

“The butterfly does not look back at the caterpillar in shame, just as you should not look back at your past in shame. Your past was part of your own transformation.” — Anthony Gucciardi

Do you constantly blame yourself for what has happened in your past?

Are you carrying anger over what you have gone through?

Would you be willing to look at your past in a different way?

You see, you cannot change the past, it was what it was. However, you can change how you deal with it now. You can anchor yourself in your past and keep lamenting over it, OR you can reframe your thinking and allow it to transform you.

What is reframing? Reframing is changing your thinking about your past to recognize that what you went through may not have been what you wanted or the way that you wanted it, but on some level it was what you needed to get where you are meant to be.

Everyone has people in their past or their present who have hurt them whether intentionally or not. Reframing allows you to forgive yourself for the way things happened. So often you don’t want to forgive or be grateful for the lessons of the past because you think that that means that forgiveness makes all of it was OK and that everyone was right in doing what they did.

That is not really what reframing means. Reframing means that you are grateful for the lessons and for what they taught you. Reframing means that you stop blaming yourself for the events and stop making yourself wrong for requiring the lesson or taking part in the experience.

Josh Shipp said, “You either get bitter or you get better. It’s that simple. You either take what has been dealt to you and allow it to make you a better person, or you allow it to tear you down. The choice does not belong to fate, it belongs to you.”

Every experience you have ever had has shaped you into who you are now. Those experiences showed you how strong you are, how resilient you are. They showed you who had your back … and who didn’t. They often allowed you to clear things out of your life that just weren’t working.

Another quote (attributed to MANY people) is “Resentment and holding a grudge is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” The only person you are poisoning is you.

Releasing the anger and resentment over your past can truly move you forward and allow you to stop poisoning yourself. It can help you realize that you can have gratitude for the parts of those difficult experiences that moved you forward, for what came into your life as a result and have gratitude for the things that left your life as a result.

You can discover that letting go of the people and situations and upset over the past that are holding you back usually leads you to finding better things to replace them.

When you are authentically able to release your past, it leaves you with giant open space in your life to create your new future  – a future that isn’t built on the past, a future that is something new and different and supports YOU!

A different future you would love to live!

Join me Monday through Friday at 9:30 AM Eastern for my daily FB lives on creating your authentic life. It’s in the Purple Dawn Group on Facebook . Join me!