Put That Heavy Stuff Down

 

 

 

“The past should be a learning experience not an everlasting punishment. What’s done is done.” – Unknown

 

We mall have some kind of heavy ‘stuff’ in our past.  We have all had friends betray us.  We lost our first ‘what-we-thought-was-our greatest-first-love-I-can’t-live-without-him’. We all wished for more than our parents gave us, in some area of life.  We all had disappointments and were disappointing.  We all have those secret hurts and places and spaces of worlds of hurt.  We have all been lied to and cheated on.  We have all hated something about ourselves or something we have done.  We have forgiven and been forgiven but have not forgotten.  We have all had need to forgive ourselves.  It is life, after all.  And life has its balance of joys and sorrows and we have resisted and made poor decisions, and tried to gain our balance time and time again.  At what point do we stop beating ourselves up?

We choose to let go or cling tight to old hurts.  We choose to have the perceptions we have about past tribulations.  We choose to be enabled or to be empowered.  We choose to live in the Past or live in the Present.  We choose to dredge up old wounds and keep feeding them with resentments that no longer matter to anyone else but us.  We choose to be resentful.

We choose to show ourselves empathy, or not.  We choose to listen to our own negative self-talk.  We choose to be impatient with others and self.  We choose to nurse dead memories as if they were precious, when they are far from it.  We choose to keep a past perception of incidents rather than look at them from an adult’s pov.  We choose our old hurt life rather than live new and changing life.  We miss our Present by codding our victimhood. 

At some point, we need some Grace.  Once we love ourself enough to let some of that old stuff g, we are moving into Grace.  We cannot move into our purpose as long as we live in the past and, again, drag that old hurt, pain, defeat, along with us into our Present.  Our past (and our memories of such) are not accurate because we add into that Past, our knew knowledge and presence, so that we are layering a forged remembrance.    

For those of us who have known abuse of any kind, we have to realise that clinging to our past is becoming our own abuser.  That is powerful knowing:  We become our own abuser(s).  At what point do we stop beating ourselves up?  Oh, let the Past be just that, sisterfriends.  We are worth so much more.

©Carol Desjarlais 10.10.20

 ****painting done from the Taster lesson "She Lost Herself" with Toni Burt