Focusing on how things used to be makes it hard to move on.   I was a nostalgia junkie (I even made a post about it last year I believe) getting caught in how I wanted things to be and searching for the good old days. Focus on what is right now and what’s to come.  Nostalgia  keeps us attached to an idea of something, more often than not a feeling we are trying to recreate, so it isn’t always an accurate gauge of what happened or even what we are really looking for.  For example, after a lot of digging, I realized that I wasn’t necessarily looking for the experience, I was looking for the feeling of safety.  It dawned on me that if the goal is to move on and create new experiences, looking back at how things were will not carry us forward.  It’s important to remember that we are attached to our interpretation of an idea based on how we felt, and that we aren’t even the same people we were.  We have to become present to what is and what’s to come.  We have to be alright with letting go in order to embrace what is and what’s to come.  That isn’t to say eliminate the memory, but it is to say keep it in perspective.

It’s key to understand the importance of feelings and not get caught in them.  Feelings are guideposts that indicate what direction we need to go in.  We are meant to lean in to what feels right for us and not confuse the emotion with the experience.  That can be hard to do because we often equate the experience as generating the emotion.  That emotion came from within and it resonated because that is something meant for us on our path.  When we catch ourselves in the loop of longing for a particular experience, it’s more helpful to stop and ask what feeling we are trying to recreate.  There were times nostalgia hit me out of nowhere.  A particular smell, or the way the light hit at a certain time of day would send me back to the time I felt something good.  It took a long time to understand that that “good” feeling was really about safety.  It was rarely about fun or joy or doing things, it was about feeling secure and like I was doing the right thing—constant reassurance I was good.

Learning to generate that feeling from within and discerning the actual emotion we are looking for changes the game.  We are no longer reliant on finding that time again or on rehashing the emotion.  Studies have shown that remembering an emotion creates the same chemical experience in our minds—so we are essentially putting our minds through the experience, we are physically experiencing that moment again.  The short version is if we constantly repeat an experience in our minds, we are repeating it in our bodies because we are replaying the emotion of it which our minds can’t distinguish from past or present.  So before thinking things were greater at another time in our lives, start asking the question of what made us feel that way?  Not the experience, but what ABOUT the experience made us feel that way.  Is it that we want to do it again or that we want to feel that way again?  Understanding what we are actually looking for is key.  Once we unlock that, we can either reconcile it or we can determine if that is for the highest good.  THAT’S the guidepost we need.  Focus on how we want to feel and let the rest fall into place.