Hello Beauty 🙂
Today let's slow down a little, and talk about how to allow yourself to mourn the loss of what was, in a way that is healthy and productive for you.
In this life, you are essentially always going to be in a state of transition in some form or other. Internally you are always growing and evolving. Shifting. Life will ALWAYS always be pulling you to new and different experiences.
This is the crux of life after all - expansion, growth and evolution.
We are not meant to 'arrive' anywhere.
Ever.
What this means is, you are going to have to get used to the idea of transition, of letting go of what was, in order to move onto what is to be now.
Homeostasis To Change-Land
In your life, there will be periods of time where you hit a homeostasis and learn from that experience for a while on a general note. Within that homeostatic state, small changes and transitions will be taking place, but generally you are have a continuity in your experience. In those times, generally you are integrating, and internally shifting things around while enjoying (or not enjoying at all, whatever the case may be) the seemingly static nature of your environment.
You are in the situation you are in, because it is fostering growth and expansion for you.
Then; things shift.
Things change.
You lose a job. You move. Your children move away. You lose a loved one. You get a new, better job. You get married. You have a baby. You go back to school. You graduate. You shift your level of consciousness to a place where you can't ever see life in the same way ever again.
Your outer world reflects the inner changes that have taken place, OR your outer world reflects a change of circumstance that is there to foster growth in you.
Either way, you lose what you once had.
Sound familiar?
How Do You Be Ok When The Shifts Feel Not Ok?
There are a few pervasive mindsets in our culture that prevent full integration of our past, so that we can embrace the shifting nature of our present. In this and the next articles, I want to offer you some things to mull over, that will enable you to complete with your past, to mourn the loss of what was, and to joyfully step into the ever evolving now with more and more presence, so that you can truly get out of life all that life is here to offer you.
You can shift yourself to a state where you become comfortable with change. With flux. With being uncomfortable - as odd as that may sound. You can arrive in a state where you are no longer resisting reality and its shifting nature. It is not complicated to do, it is simply something you must commit to and practice.
Which of course you can do, right?
Let's look together at how you can healthfully mourn your past, so that the loss of what was, can enrich your experience of what is now.
Step One: Know That Resistance To Change Is Just Your Lizard Talking: The very first thing to understand, is that it is only fear that gets you attached to a particular set of circumstances, and then resists moving forward.
It is not your true essence that resists change.
Only the reptilian part of your brain that believes that life can go wrong - that it must cling to what is familiar in order to be safe and secure - even if what is familiar is terrible.
When you are living closer and closer to the understanding that everything unfolds exactly as it is meant to, that we as a society are meant to be in a continual state of outer transition and transformation, life gets dramatically more comfortable. Before that time, when fear is running the show, change will still be happening, the river of life keeps flowing, but you will be clinging to the shore desperately trying to remain where you are. Which is painful, simply put.
So in the beginning phases of transition, when fear and doubt and distrust are running the roost, learn to comfort your lizard. The little reptilian part of your brain that gets activated when you are scared. The part of your brain that floods you with worry and regret.
When you are fearing what is to come, comfort that lizard.
When you are full of doubt and distrust, comfort the lizard.
When you are wanting to go back to a more pleasant time, comfort the lizard.
When you are wondering how things could have gone differently, comfort the lizard.
When you are missing circumstances that were horrible while you were in them, and feeling like a crazy person for wanting to go back to something that was painful or uncomfortable, again know that this is just your reptilian brain wanting to go back to comfortable, predictable, familiar territory.
You can use the techniques outlined in this video to start loving your lizard brain into a sense of safety and peace, so that you can be in the present moment without so much resistance and fear.
Remember - it is just the fear that wants what is familiar and longs to go back to what was. Even if what was was amazing, there is still a greater part of you that is more than willing to let that past go, so that you can move onto the adventure of the present. The part of you that wants expansion above all else. So appease the lizard, so you can connect with the expansion part of you - and thus get curious and excited about the unknowns of this new territory.
Step Two: Release The Idea Of 'Arriving': This idea of arriving some place and settling there for the rest of your life is an illusion - and one that makes life much harder than it has to be.
Once you get used to the idea of motion being the name of the game, grieving the loss of what was is possible.
Before you grasp this concept, you will struggle to actually do the processing work that is necessary, because you will be living in a fantasy that says change should not be happening.
When you are in that kind of resistance, life cannot teach you what you need to learn. You will be in resistance to what is - especially if what is is not what you would consider pleasant - because you will constantly be trying to get out of this experience, so you can land in the one where you can 'settle,'
On the flip side, when you have a fantasy about arriving some place, and you do end up getting somewhere in your life that you really love and enjoy - you may get overly attached to the circumstances you find yourself in. You may get overly attached to the concept of having arrived, of having permanence, of having something great you now wish to maintain and sustain. You may feel like your feeling good is then DEPENDANT on this circumstantial reality. That if 'this' were to go away, you would HAVE to be miserable.
Then, when life inevitably shifts, you are sad. Surprised. Angered. Depressed. Clamouring to get back to what was.
Thus, needing to arrive at a stagnant place causes pain. It stops you from being able to properly integrate your past, and it prevents you from reaping the benefits of your now.
Letting yourself mourn the idea that there is no arriving is essential. You will always be learning, growing, shifting and changing. There is no where to 'get.' Start to consider that the only true pain in life is that of stagnation, not of something you enjoyed going away.
Step Three: Allow Yourself To Identify Where You Are Incomplete With What Was: There are two ways to know if you are dealing with incompletions in your life.
1. You will be missing a past time and wishing you could go back and re-live it.
2. You will be resentful towards a time and space in your life, and continually feeling terrible in your now because of what happened then.
When you are missing what was, what used to be - even if at the time you were experiencing what was, you felt was terrible - you are at a place of having not integrated what that experience had for you. Of course it is easy to miss the happy times, and that seems to make logical sense - but know even in this if you are not able to simply look back on that experience and be grateful that it happened, but rather are in a state of longing to go back to it - then you are in a state of incompletion.
To long to go bak to a time that was unpleasant may seem really strange when it is happening, but once you understand the mechanisms of it, it will make more sense.
You may find yourself craving a time and space that felt constricting and contracted when you were living it out, but now that it is gone you miss all the good things that you were not appreciating at the time, because you were so busy trying to move on. Maybe there was abuse or you felt that you were trapped, maybe you were sick or lonely or feeling that the needs you had were not being met, but when changes happens you find yourself missing what was.
The reason you miss it, is because your soul is calling you back to fully integrate all the positive experiences, all the lessons and all the growth that hard experience offered you, that you were not willing to accept at the time because you were so caught up on fighting with your reality.
At the same time, if you look back on your past and regret it, hate it, wish it had not happened, if it still stirs up really painful negative emotions in you to think of your past, you are incomplete with the experience. If you hold resentments towards yourself, towards situations or towards others, this is another sign of incompleteness. If there is any portion of your being that cannot be OK with what has transpired in your life up to now, to the point that it does not cause you pain to think about and remember, there is some completing work that needs to be done.
The missing or the regretting/resenting are both happening to draw you into a state where you will do your completion work. This is the reason for these repetitive thought/feeling states. There is a part of you that is still stuck in the past, reliving the experience over and over, because the lesson contained within it has not been fully owned by the greater part of you yet.
Now that you are aware that the fear of change is just your lizard trying to keep you safe, and once you have wrapped your mind around the idea that change is constant, you can start to complete with your past. You can start to allow this new life to be fun and exciting, by allowing yourself to integrate what you have been through up to this point.
In step three, just recognize these emotions, these longings, these memories as being there to draw you to complete. Rather than resisting these emotions, rather than fighting with them or wallowing in them, see them as messengers that are here to help carry you to the next point on your evolutionary journey.
Practice seeing these emotions and simply not reacting to them. Do not try to fix or change or get rid of them. Just watch them. See if you can be with them a while.
You will use these emotions, memories and longings in step four, to help you fully complete with and integrate what you have been through - rather than allowing yourself to stew in resentment or live in a fantasy world of returning to past times. All either of those things will do is stagnate your growth, causing fermentation in your internal world. Stagnation due to missing or resenting always leads to fermentation and shadow being born of what your reality was.
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Next week we will resume our talk, and cover the final two steps. For now, allow yourself to integrate and experiment with all that was shared here and see how it feels for you.
<3
