Many still need to free yourself from the past and live in the present. Living in the past can mean reliving either your previous victories or your past defeats. If you are living from and more focused on anything to do with your past, rather than your here-and-now, there will be obstacles from your past that will be in your way and that will be blocking here-and-now and future success, goal achievement, happiness, and peace of mind. Mind balance – living in the paradox of your here-and-now unfolding experience in a mindful way.
Living in the past, from past pain, or past happiness, will to one degree or another preclude your living more fully in the here-and-now and all of the possibility contained in your present-day life.
Living in or from the past, focusing more on your past, than your present, is self-limiting to various degrees and for too many people can become a self-imposed prison. Avoid letting your earlier years taint the future. It’s unnecessary to continue reliving painful experiences. Whatever happened in the past, can be worked through, worked out, and you can free yourself from your past. It is a choice. Am empowered choice that’s not always easy to make, but, that a choice that you can make on any given day of your life. If you haven’t yet clearly made that choice and taken action to get help and support with the changes that such a choice will lead you through, what are you waiting for?
The past, until you choose NOW can still largely feel responsible for who you are today. You have been making an unconscious choice to continue allowing your past or past hurts to define you? Do you have unresolved issues from the past? If so, the good news is you can resolve those issues, and you don’t need to depend upon anyone from your past, not even family, to resolve your issues. I help people everyday in this area (among others) of Personal Growth and Personal Development.
Our pasts taught us many things. Some very useful, in many cases, much not very useful or relevant to who we really are or what life we have created for ourselves in the present day here-and-now. You can free yourself from your past by focusing on the present and making the choice to not be defined by that past anymore. You are no longer who you were or thought to be by family or others in your past. You are not that wounded child anymore. You are not a helpless child anymore. Even if you were not understood or nurtured by your family in the past, that does not have to be a defining or even relevant reality in your here-and-now present day life and self.
For so many people, more than you might ever guess, the past was full of pain, low self-worth, low self-esteem and the narrative that many people still hold today that was really the narrative of their toxic dysfunctional families and often parents or a parent with mental health challenges and/or addictions. Parents that, as with many generations past never knew or did not acknowledge, and still really don’t, that getting Life Coaching or Counselling with someone like myself can truly help you to put difficult and painful aspects of your past out of your life. You can reclaim your own truth and let go of the invoked (often) negative thought loops and distorted sense of self that they left you with because they themselves were projecting their unresolved pasts and childhoods on to you instead of being there to emotionally and psychologically parent you as you so very much deserved.
3 Life-Changing Realizations To Help You Break free from Your Past:
Developing Self Awareness and Creating Personal Life Change
Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life – 19 Coaching Exercises – End Negative Thought Patterns
.J. Mahari’s Coaching Guide/Ebook/Workbook – Quest For Self Awareness & Creating Your Story of Success Audio
Personal Change and Coping
- Choose to Let Go: Work through unresolved feelings, fears, resentment, love/hate, abandonment (emotionally or physically), abuse, neglect, lack of attachment, lack of nurture and lack of emotional availability of a parent or your parents so that you do not continue to carry what was always their baggage (and still is) – not yours. You’ve taken on their baggage and been carrying it for years and have lost your self in the process. Decide to put their baggage down and to find out how wrong they were about you because they didn’t see or know you – the you they knew was an extension of themselves as they saw only their own projections through the lens of their own emotional/psychological unaddressed damage.
- Expect the Progress of Letting Go to be Uncomfortable: Change is frequently uncomfortable. It’s a part of human nature. Even climbing out of bed can be a chore some mornings. But, the more discomfort you’re willing to endure, the more quickly you can move your life forward. Advancing your life is one way of freeing yourself from the chains of the past. Learning to think about what happened in your past through a less distorted child-like lens will help you to quickly want to re-frame and re-process what has felt like unresolvable losses – grieve them and let them go.
- Focus on the Present Here-and-Now: By focusing on the here-and-now you will easily be reminded that you are no longer the child that you were. That you’ve grown and developed over the years. Focusing on the here-and now allows you to re-frame past opinions believed about yourself that were not ever accurate and were not your own. Not only are past opinions of others (like your parents) if you focus on them or hold onto them out-dated but they become obstacles to how you have grown and to new choices you can make to further outgrow your past and its pain and/or losses. When we were children we needed our parents and this leaves us just believing their criticisms and judgments of us until we realize that we weren’t being seen and that parent’s opinions in the past were largely based on how badly they felt about themselves. You were never what your mother or father may have tried to saddle you with negatively (or even in some cases over-positively). Learn to think about your own memories, experience, and truth, and from that point, with help and support, you can make the choices that support who you really know you have always been whether that’s what was mirrored to you or in the case of so many of us, not mirrored to you at all.
So many people with or without a diagnosed so-called “mental illness” are left with distorted thoughts and feelings about who they really are because they have taken on and not challenged or re-framed the projection of parents who despite (in most cases) meaning well ended up falling far short of being healthy enough to actually parent the authentic you. This means then, that in your past, you may have had to erect a lot of defense mechanisms to cope with the pain of the “love” (toxic love) that your was all your parent/parents might have had to give if they gave emotionally to you at all.
If you are focused on the past, trapped by elements of painful past experience from your family of origin that you are stuck and still blocked from living the life you were meant to live. A life that awaits you when you actively choose to break free from your past and to work it through to an understanding that will shift your focus to the present, to your here-and-now. It can be a difficult choice but it is such a rewarding choice and one that you deserve to make.
Choose to break free from your past today, if you haven’t already, or more fully free if you still have some unresolved blocks keeping your from being as fulfilled and happy as you deserve to be in the present, in each and every here-and-now moment of your precious life.
Letting go of past pain feels very uncomfortable for most. It can feel scary or terrifying for others. It has at its core, this choice to break free from your past, a willingness to accept the pain, loss, and grief, and a strong desire to more fully know yourself and then effectively and skillfully become more fully who you authentically are. You have always been worthy of this gift. Now, it is a gift that you can choose to give to yourself.
I have been though this myself in my early to mid 30’s and I broke free from my past. Each and every one of us has to do what that takes and understand and accept what that means in our own personal individual lives so that we can be the best people that we can be and not be held hostage to the lies, negative beliefs, abuse, differences, distorted narratives of parents or other relatives or people from our pasts and believe enough in ourselves.
You need to first shift to believing enough in yourself, right now, in this present moment, if you haven’t already, to begin that shift. It’s a shift with many moving parts. At the core of this shift is feeling the incredible self-esteem, self-worth, and self-respect that your past likely never acquainted you with. Dare to discover more about this wonderful vibrant and worthy you that you may not yet know fully or believe enough in yet. That authentic you, awaits you breaking free from your past and shifting into a present day focus and a here-and-now newly found understanding of who you really truly are.
Define yourself. Do not continue to let others from your past define themselves through you.
Today, and each and every day your, place your focus on the present moment and live in the here-and-now. Unlike the past, the present is the gift that you can give to yourself. A gift of continuing personal growth in increasing awareness and enlightenment that makes possible you’re finding Mind Balance outside The Box. Thinking and choosing consciously. passionately and individually who you are, what you stand for, what you want.
It is from this foundation of self, you can pursue your goals, dreams, and fulfill them so mindfully, meaningfully and absolutely authentically.
© A.J. Mahari, March 22, 2015 – All rights reserved.
