March 16, 2016
Alexia Isaak
Are you looking to your past, present or future?
Letting go of the past is challenging for almost everyone. Do you have regret and hurt lingering from your past and still affecting you today? Do you need to let go of your anger retained from long ago? I’ve gone through a process of letting go of many of those hurts and the past regrets, which frees me to live a more enriching and fulfilling present. In fact, holding onto your past can poison your present. It is important to release the past so you can live now.
Emotions the Keep You from Letting go of the Past
Anger is one thing to process. Regret is another because regret often comes as a result of your own bad decisions. I’ve made plenty of poor decisions in my life and spent adequate time beating myself up over them. I have been cruel and harsh to myself, which is not showing self-love and often led to more bad decisions. Common sense tells you that a gallon of ice cream won’t take back the hurtful words you said to someone you care about, but we tend to operate in that manner of thinking when dealing with the past. We can try to medicate it by filling our lives with distractions and outside things instead of facing it.
Creating Your Future
Rather than punishing yourself, a better course of action would be to take the time to accept the past and regret for what it is, learn from it and release it. being a victim in your story about the past only inhibits you from creating a clearing to create your future. Forgive yourself and carry the lesson on into today.
The truth is that the regret is in the past and there’s nothing you can do to change the event that caused the regret. It is not in your present moment in time. The consequences of your regret may be right now, but the regret itself is in the past. There is enough pain in life, and you can make a decision not to carry it into your future. It would be far more productive to focus your energy on making the best of right now rather than trying to recreate your past to change the outcome. Live for now rather than letting your past dictate your present moment because you can!