“You can’t change the past no matter how hard you try or how much you want to, you just can’t go back and change what has been done.  But what you can do, is you can choose to move forward, make different decisions, more in tune more in line with the truth of who you are and also authentic to where you want to go.  You can create new from where you are right now,” Travis Holp.  I needed to hear this one.  Sometimes we need the reminder that there are things beyond our control, things we can’t change.  The only thing we have power of altering in the past is our view of it.  The only thing we can control is how we handle life moving forward.  The events of our past show us who we were and shape us into who we are.  Without them we wouldn’t be who we are.  We wouldn’t have our unique identity.  The past can be painful, yes, but even those parts are necessary.  Sometimes events happen simply to show us that we can handle things we didn’t think we could before and sometimes it’s to show us that what we thought would b0e devastating wasn’t so bad after all.  We endure what we have to in order to understand our strength and sometimes we have to remind ourselves of who we are so we don’t get buried under the weight of it.  As shitty as it sounds, sometimes our crappy stories are also to remind others of what they can survive as well.  We are here to help each other keep things in perspective.

I used to fight the ugly, fight the pain.  I feared both of those things—I didn’t want to feel those things. I didn’t think I could handle something if it went wrong. I didn’t trust my ability to problem solve so to speak.  I wanted everything to be planned to the T and to come off without a hitch simply for the sake of my sanity, so I would be safe, because I knew what was happening.  I needed to be in control, aware at all times of what happens.  With that level of hyper-vigilance, we turn on sensors in our body that aren’t designed to run all the time and we become sensitive to EVERYTHING.  I didn’t want pain so I was aware of everything that could possibly cause pain and my body/mind never learned how to shut off—and then it started interpreting everything as pain.  And in avoiding pain, I created more pain for myself because it all seemed designed to hurt me. I avoided the things that could have helped make me who I was supposed to be and I interpreted every slight as a targeted hurt against me.  But I guess by this logic, I would acknowledge that getting over avoidance was the lesson and trusting that all is right on time—exactly how and when it is supposed to happen.  Nothing will change the past.  The sooner we reconcile that, make peace with it, the easier it is to move forward.  I wanted to go back and fix things, I wanted to live forever to make sure I got it all right by having an endless supply of time to get it right—but I never learned to simply sit in the moment and find what I needed right now.

Truthfully this is about more than presence.  This is about the awakening to who we are and accepting the past is part of that.  Humans have the capacity and capability to bring their visions to reality and we don’t always get it right.  We fear missed opportunity and mistakes but sometimes the mistake is the opportunity.  That opportunity is the new. That is the chance to get it “right” again.  This time with a little more conviction and knowledge behind it.  Choose to take the path of creating new because we can’t undo what has been done.  Allow the experiences we’ve had teach us and shape us.  And be grateful to be where we are right now because it is exactly where we are meant to be.  I’d be lying if I said I practiced this all the time, that I believed it all the time.  I still struggle like a motherf’er with keeping my emotions/brain in check and the smallest things can set me off.  And I know that’s where I’m out of line because when everything sets you off, you aren’t seeing the reality of what’s going on—you’re too locked in your mind and other people aren’t there.  People don’t know how to respond if you don’t know how to handle yourself and we can’t live in fear that the truth, the mistakes, the times we have to do what we have to do will offend people when it has nothing to do with them.  We can’t expect them to handle us with kid gloves either.  The reality is this is a lesson in reconciling the past and accepting it, integrating it.  We can’t change it–so we can learn from it and adapt to where we are now.