Imagine you are an actor and your starring role in a movie ended with a horrible car crash that left you with both physical and emotional scars. Now imagine watching that scene over and over again, year after year. Repeatedly, you see your head hit the steering wheel. It’s hypnotic, dizzying and morbidly exciting. You’ve become a pseudo-addict to the make-believe pain. What’s really trippy is that it’s hard for you to believe it wasn’t and isn’t real. That the crash didn’t really happen. You touch your forehead disbelieving there isn’t a scar.
Now imagine that you’ve ruminated on an event from your childhood or a scene from your recent past so many times it’s become embedded in your subconscious brain. That is what happens when we replay things enough times. Once in our subconscious brain, we are tricked into believing the experience can still hurt us. It’s not really the event, but the containment of it, and the replaying of it that is re-traumatizing you. In other words, you are hurting yourself by keeping it contained inside of you. No one is doing this to you. That is because the past cannot still hurt you.
Carrying the weight of the past and all it’s pain and shame is, in part, what is behind the suffering many are experiencing. This suffering is the result of a growing sense of lack – lack of resources, security, safety, love, joy, peace, abundance. This ever growing list is what is behind the discord and dissatisfaction in millions of people’s lives. It is what is changing the face of our communities. It has become the basis for a global identity crisis.
When you left your first family and started a life of your own is when you chose who you would become. If you decided to replay certain events or words that someone said about you or to you, keeping them contained inside of you, using them as excuses for how you feel or how your life has turned out, then only you are to blame. Think of these stories or false narratives as creating a clog or tumor that becomes stuck at the base of your skull. That tumor is blocking the flow of energy from your heart and soul – who has knowing of who you are – to your mind. Once the flow is blocked, you will not be able to ‘see’ yourself or tap into your God-given power, beauty and strength – your Christ-given identity. When your true identity gets mixed up with the events from the past and the false narratives is when people feel discord and anxiety. Think of what is happening inside of you as a war. The real you and these programs are vying for the seat of your soul. You’re very own sovereignty. The hurtful narratives are trying to convince you that you are damaged, that there is no hope for you. That you are who you are because of how you were raised, who raised you or what you experienced or didn’t. All of these are lies you are telling yourself. They are the reason millions of people are suffering and turning to someone or something to rescue them. They aren’t taking personal responsibility for the containment of these these harmful thought programs and the retelling of them.
Are you tired of carrying around the weight of your past? Ready to stop blaming and get on with your life? Ready to gift yourself by detaching from the parts of your past and words spoken to you in anger that you’ve used to wrongly define you? Many people have been misunderstood, neglected and not ‘seen.’ It’s a big club. Maybe you don’t think it’s possible to remove your guilt given the long list of mistakes and misfortunes, let alone lost years. What if I told you it is indeed possible to exculpate your guilt and restore your joy. With true repentance, restoration is possible. This is where Divine intervention comes into play. What we cannot do, God can. No matter what was done to you or what you did to yourself or others, no sin, pain and shame is too big for God to wash away. This is exactly why God came to earth in the physical form. To be our personal Savior. To forgive us. If He can forgive you, then you must forgive yourself. What price are you willing to pay to live mired in self-pity and self-loathing behavior?
After forgiveness comes compassion. Show yourself some compassion by understanding that what you suffered from was an identity crisis. Secondly, understanding your parents or whoever harmed you, who they are and what they went through — their conditioning, suffering and loss — is seminal to you being set free. That is because much of who our parents are and who their parents were — their identity — gets passed down to the next generation along with the emotional imprints, just like they did to you. Holding onto all of this is also something you perhaps learned by watching others. Maybe you didn’t know that all of this was not yours to hold on to. Compassion and generosity are the keystones to you ‘seeing’ yourself and others in a debt-free way.
Next, putting the past in the correct context by seeing experiences as ‘events’ is also seminal to you being set free and creating real change. That is because these events do not define you. They are not the truth of who you are. They are not your identity. They are simply experiences.
“Success is how high you bounce after you hit bottom.” George Patton
