People sometimes frown on the idea of “going back to the past” to heal themselves.
Some of the usual comments I hear are:
“I want to let the past go.”
“I don’t like rehashing the past.”
“That’s just a story my mind tells.”
“But I’ve already done it many times.”
All this may be true and valid. But I invite you to ask yourself:
Have you really healed the past or did you just try to plaster a new story on top of it?
You see, it is true that the past is just a story we tell ourselves, but a story is not just a two-dimensional picture that we can just change by changing the reality.
If any aspect of your past is unhealed, you’d tend to repeat the story in your head. Overtime, you invest more and more power to the story until it becomes three-dimensional, filled with lots of your energy. It contains a piece of your consciousness, or from a shamanic perspective, a piece of your soul.
That is why it’s not enough to work on healing the past cognitively – it must involve your emotional and spiritual bodies, to extract your energy out of it and take your spirit back.
Changing the Template of Creation
An event that happened in your past which caused a negative reaction in you has locked in the story in your psyche: A story of injustice, being betrayed, abandoned, rejected, neglected, starved of love or lacking resources to escape from a bad place.
Often, the story becomes a template for future creations. As long as you have invested a piece of yourself in the story, it has the power to create similar stories in the future.
On the positive side, this means that when you retrieve your energy, power, consciousness or soul from that story, you end the cycle of recreating similar stories. It can make a difference between being stuck for years and being liberated from a familiar, unwanted pattern.
#1 Release the Emotions
Sometimes, we need to go back to the past and allow ourselves to feel the pain and hurts. Feeling painful emotions is one of the ways we learn valuable lessons – about life, about being human – and to open our hearts to love.
If those lessons weren’t learnt, on a soul level we may recreate a similar event to enable us to complete the learning.
Thus, you may not be aware of carrying certain emotions which you failed to express fully at the time. Subsequently, you may recreate another opportunity to access those emotions. One way to avoid recreating or remaining stuck in painful situations is to access your emotions now.
Allow yourself to be vulnerable and feel them fully. It is okay to judge and blame at this stage because it enables you to connect with your true feelings.
You may find it useful to verbalize or write out your thoughts and feelings; whatever tools you use, ensure that you let out your feelings until you run out of steam, and you naturally transition to a bigger-picture perspective of the event.
#2 Find the Abundance
Most likely, your reference of the past you are revisiting for the purpose of healing is limited. You probably perceive yourself then as small and powerless, in a world that is harsh and lacking in love, joy and abundance. This is due to your attention being drawn to the aspects that were painful. But when you expand your perspective and look around in that scenario, you could probably find more positive aspects – especially after you have released the emotions.
With fresh eyes, see if you can spot anything in the event that is positive which you didn’t notice before.
Perhaps where you had felt deprived of love, you realised that being deprived of love from one person does not mean there wasn’t any love around. Know that there was love, and appreciate those other sources of love. Where you had felt deprived of abundance, notice that there was abundance, and appreciate those sources of abundance.
This will shift the energy of your past and your relationship to the event.
#3 Stand in Your Power
Lastly, change the state you were in. If you had responded in fear, anger or desperation, imagine how it would feel if you responded with calmness, delight or excitement. Instead of allowing the situation to take your power away, imagine you had managed to stand in your power.
Imagine how the situation might have evolved. Let the new story unfold until you feel satisfied, reconciled, with no unfinished business.
At this stage, the part of you that was stuck in the past will no longer be needing to remain there to fight your battle, but sailing happily through the ether back to you. ~
