We create versions of ourselves to bear the weight of where we are.  Those versions work with what we know and create opinions and solutions and responses based on information they have.  They can do nothing different than operate within the framework of where they are.  As we heal, evolve, progress, and learn different ways to do things, that version expands.  After time, the way we handled things previously no longer works.  It doesn’t serve.  The people we created to get through and survive are not the people who can go forward.  We can love and honor them and we can even retain the skills, but those responses and reactions are not what is going to help us progress.  We tend to go back to those versions in the heat of the moment when a familiar situation arises because it is familiar.  With time, as we learn and recognize we need operate differently, we can make conscious choices to change the behavior.

Too many of us spend time lamenting repeating the same actions or even being angry when we fall into old habits.  I don’t deny how frustrating it is to fall into the same pattern, especially when trying to bring more awareness to our lives, but sometimes it’s more than habit.  The protective behaviors and patterns are so engrained in us that breaking the pattern sometimes means becoming a new version of ourselves all together.  That isn’t easy work.  It’s painful and raw and delicate.  It needs to be done with patience, love, and gratitude because those versions of ourselves have seen things and done things that brought us where we are now.  We need to appreciate what we have done to get ourselves where we are.  I’m not suggesting we hold every moment of our past in reverence because no one is happy with everything they’ve done and if we are too fond of it, we live in nostalgia.  But I AM suggesting that we need to spend a bit more time in gratitude for what we endured and the work the mind, body, and soul have done to carry us through.

Moving forward requires honoring and appreciating who we were.  The past isn’t something to completely dismiss, and honestly, even if we aren’t proud of it, it is nothing to be ashamed of.  We learned something from everything we’ve been through as long as we are willing to see it.  This IS where it gets tricky: while we have to honor and appreciate the past, we can’t take the past with us.  We have to be willing to let go of the responses and reactions we had in order to move forward successfully.  The reactions, and quite frankly the person we were before, will not be able to experience new reactions or feel differently because all we know is what that person knows until we learn to change our behavior.  The healed version moves forward, the survivor version must be left where they are.  Be grateful to that version and integrate those lessons, and with love, step through.  That is how we figure it out and how we progress.  New responses, new reactions, new feelings.  That is the new version of us.  Love and honor the past but respect the present enough to know when it’s time to move forward with new behavior.