I heard a speech from Loren Ridinger the other day where she spoke about our relationship to past self. I am the first person to admit that I am no expert on this topic because this is one thing I’m working through and probably one of my biggest struggles. Loren spoke of forgiveness and understanding for the past self.  I assumed a long time ago that I had reconciled my past.  I understood everything that happened logically and I was able to compartmentalize it for a time.  I thought that meant I dealt with it and that it was normal for little pangs of nostalgia or embarrassment to pop up.  I never considered it was something that needed to be forgiven.  I was never taught that we could or should forgive ourselves for anything.  My family, especially the women in my family are excellent at holding grudges and have long memories, which means we hold onto that feeling and it’s always nice and fresh no matter how long ago the event may have happened.  This includes grudges and guilt against ourselves as well—we are great at replaying the most awful events of our lives repeatedly until we are so down in it we can’t move.  We feel the emotion of it now as we did then. 

I didn’t realize how trapped I was under the past until I really started to see some light on the other side.  That light was an understanding that I was simply not healthy.  My thoughts weren’t healthy, my behaviors and my actions weren’t healthy.  My actions came from my thoughts and my thoughts included things like what a loser I was for showing up at a party early, how stupid I was for repeating patterns, that I wasn’t loved for me but my money, that I wasn’t taken seriously in the business world (true to the extent I haven’t been taken seriously in my industry in the business world—doesn’t mean I can’t be successful in an aligned field).  Loren spoke about how if we don’t reconcile and rectify these thoughts we will continue to keep ourselves down.  We need to forgive ourselves for who we were and what we did because we were operating under what we knew at the time.  That logic is something I’ve followed for a long time—for everyone else.  I completely understood that as far as my relationship with my mother—I knew full well how hard she worked and that her behavior was because she did what she had to do with what she knew.  Honestly, that was also an indicator that I needed to look at the behavior I took from her and break that pattern in my life—it was another little light for me.

This concept of forgiveness for myself still feels foreign to me.  I can’t help but feel that there were instances I should have known better.  There were moments I am 100% positive that if I had chosen differently the outcome would have been different. I guess we can say that about anything.  I struggled because there seemed to be a series of definitive events that I chose in my life and I felt obligated to stick with the results because that was my choice so I needed to be responsible.  But the difference is responsibility doesn’t mean replaying those moments over and over again.  Responsibility means adjusting toward what we really wanted.  Unless it comes to death, the decisions we make aren’t permanent in regards to keeping our position.  We are always able to move toward where we go.  It isn’t a chess game where we are check mated and have to wait for a new round—we are able to find a new path across the board.  Staying where we are doesn’t serve anything.  So it’s more important to learn how to adapt and adjust than it is to make the right decision the first time all the time.  That’s how we learn from the past.  That’s how we forgive the past.  We learn to dance with it.