Would you rather dwell in your past world than flourish in your present world? Are the thoughts of your past more comfortable than the dreams of your future? Do you feel the emotion of fear at thoughts of your future goals? Are the emotions of security and comfort present when you dwell on thoughts of your past?
Most of us dwell in the past for way too long. In my opinion, there are only two advantages of our past lives. Only two. Anything else you think of can be grouped under these two categories:
- No. 1 is to give us sweet memories of all the happenings and events of our past birthdays, anniversaries, marriages, project breakthroughs, successes, memories of our travels, work achievements, healing from ailments, our children's milestones, and so on.
- No. 2 is to give us unlimited and continuous lessons and life-growth tools so that we are fully equipped for our future trials—failed businesses or projects, divorces, failed friendships, health problems, avoidable injuries, money issues like bad debt or bankruptcy, death of loved ones, and so on.
These two purposes of our past are very important to our lives. However, we must view them as advantages and treat them as such. Celebrating our sweet memories makes us happier and more peaceful people. It fills us with gratitude, and we look forward to making more sweet memories. This contributes immensely to the strength of our present and future spiritual lives. We can then look forward to the future with hope, joy, peace, and faith, as we long for more sweet memories to come.
This is the easy part of dealing with our pasts. The No. 1 advantage is pretty comfortable and soothing to us.
No. 2—not so much! The "negative" events in our pasts are more complex to deal with, and they bring us pain, not joy. However, it is your choice to view them as painful. It is OK to feel the
emotions of pain, sadness, and grief after such life events, but it is also your choice to quickly heal from them.
The only way healing can occur is if we extract the lessons from those past events and use them to make our future life events better. These "negative" events help us grow much faster than the
sweet events. They have more solid and concrete life lessons, and they were put in our lives to enhance another aspect of our futures.
We are not meant to dwell on them and have those events build a fortress around us and trap us from walking freely in to our awesome future lives.
They are purely lessons, and they are there to strengthen, empower, and build stamina for the future.
Examples
- A failed business teaches you how to plan better and be more strategic for future businesses. Same applies for any failed projects.
- A divorce teaches you how to be wiser in choosing a life partner in the future, and the role you have to play in making the union work. Same goes for failed friendships.
- Health problems teach us how to take better care of our physical and spiritual lives. Reminder: spiritual ill health may lead to physical ill health, which may led to spiritual ill health, and the cycle continues.
- A car accident that occurs from excessive speed teaches you how to drive within the speed limit in the future (hopefully, if you survived it!).
A death of a loved one teaches us to love our loved ones dearly every day.
Do you notice a trend here?
All these negative events are there to empower you to do much better in your future.
What does No. 1 “sweet emotions” do to us? They make us feel very good, but there is not much to learn from them.
We learn the most from our adverse life events.
After my divorce, I was empowered to grow spiritually and to manage my practice a lot better. It is still thriving today. I quickly also learned that I was enough for myself.
After my dad passed, I took the spiritual connection with him and transformed it into the making of my first book and my overall writing career.
These were two painful events. They were beyond my control. I allowed myself to feel the pain and grief, but only for a limited time. I then extracted the lessons from those two life events and
used them for my life growth.
My comfort zone did not lie in the pain of those events.
My comfort zone was only in the lessons those events taught me.
I did not feel comfortable at all with my divorce and with my dad's passing.
I only felt comfortable when I was faced with the reality of the notion that I was enough, and I still had the power God had placed in me to go higher in my life.
And with my dad's passing, I felt comfortable as I connected with him in spirit, and this brought me peace.
These events had occurred. I could not change them. None of us has the power to change the past. But we have immense power over the future—only if we have learned lessons from the past and can
apply those to the future.
So if your comfort zone lies in your past, you are not growing. Your life has become static.
All you are thriving on is the No. 1 option advantage of your past—the sweet memories.
This is not enough.
You learn a lot more, grow a lot faster, if you refuse to dwell in the pains and failures of the past, and you start to extract those growth tools and soar with them. Do not use the sweet
memories as an excuse to lie in the comfort zone of your past negative events.
We must be flourishing in our past sweet memories and flourishing in the lessons being extracted from our past negative events.
Our pasts must be win-win for us.
Make two tables in your journals today:
SWEET MEMORIES FROM MY PAST
LESSONS AND LIFE-GROWTH TOOLS FROM MY PAST
Keep adding to this list daily.
You are truly thriving and living a full life if you can freely write these down and skip happily into your future with them.