Good Morning! I talk often of letting go of what doesn’t serve you today and of looking in the mirror daily. I want to work on both a bit more today. Life is a journey… if it were a destination, it would be death because every living thing pursues this… so which do you want to live for? I recently wrote a series on past trauma, this post adds to that series.
Looking in the mirror daily. This means taking time each day to look within yourself. Yes, every day. You are different today than yesterday, right? Find time each day – whether it is before others in your home rise for the day, while you work in the garden, or while you walk your 30 minutes each day. No music. No talking – unless it is to yourself. No phone. Begin this process by asking yourself some simple but equally difficult questions. The trick here is the answering. You must be brutally honest. Do I like who I am today? What are my greatest faults? What do I want to change and why? Who do I most want to emulate and why? Obviously, these aren’t questions that you will likely quickly have answers for unless you are actively looking in the mirror.
These questions can cause a lot of stress, so start out easy with yourself. Choose the easy things to change and actively address them. Work on them gently, with love and patience. I don’t want you choosing all the things you want to change at once – that will cause more damage. We are working to heal you and that takes time.
When you finish with your self-reflection, you might want to write down your goals for yourself. Rank them in order of how you want to approach them. This is for you, and you alone. Always keep your journals for yourself so that you feel safe being honest in them. If you don’t want to keep a journal once you have filled it, ask yourself why. There should be no shame associated with improving who you are. Your past is your past – not your present and you should be thankful for realizing and changing the things you don’t like about yourself.
As you are looking in the mirror, do you find past hurts? Past pain that you can’t let go? Things you have kept locked away in a deep dark part of your soul? This guides us to the second part of this message, letting go of what doesn’t serve you.
Letting go of what doesn’t serve you. We have all done things for which we are ashamed. We have said things to people that have hurt them or ended relationships. We may have physically hurt someone or their family. Others have also hurt us. Were you bullied in school? Felt / feel like an outcast? Been physically assaulted? Emotionally traumatized? These things will come up when you begin looking in the mirror and it is vitally important that you address them. Again, not all at once and some may require special handling with your tribe, family, or a professional. The fact that they are coming to the surface, means you are ready to face them and work through them. You cannot be completely healthy with all this weighing you down.
As with your self-reflection, find something that you feel you can do – repair – fix, and work on that one thing to completion. You will feel lighter for it when it is completed. Letting go of what doesn’t serve you, changes your life. It may not repair an old hurt for someone else, but it will remove the shame and pain from yourself if you are doing it for the right reasons.
Some letting go isn’t past hurts or relationships, or fixing things with someone, it may be as easy as changing a daily habit. You are different today than you were yesterday. That habit might have helped you through a very difficult period of your life, but you are past that now, and no longer need that “help” any longer.
Some letting go is related to food. Many people have a love-hate relationship with food and use it to relax, destress, deal with relationships, etc. Make sure you are using your food to heal and nurture your body, not deal with a broken heart or stress at work.
Let me share a couple of short stories of my letting go. When I went back to school, this was part of our homework. While I have always been a self-reflective person, I was just surface-skimming and pushing back the hurts. I decided to take it a bit deeper and fix some things I needed to from my past.
The first was repairing a couple of old relationships with friends. I had wronged these people in my past world as a selfish teenager who was painfully shy and needy. The reconnection with several was quite positive. But with one, I had hurt her too deeply and she wanted to hear nothing of my apology. This is ok. She wasn’t ready to hear it. That isn’t on me, and it isn’t a negative thing on her either. We were in different places, and I hope that one day, she will find it in her heart to forgive the teenager I was. I am by far not the same person I was then, and I have accepted this.
The second was beginning the repair process with my father. This was a far deeper issue and much more difficult to do on my part. However, when I began looking at what happened when I was a child, I saw something different. Rather than seeing the man from a hurt child’s eyes, I looked at it from an adult’s perspective. I found that he was a miserably unhappy, damaged man who had no way of giving me what I needed from him. I was amazed at the difference in how I felt at that point. I pitied him rather than hated him. This one is an ongoing process because I have to accept that he is broken (easy enough) but I also have to allow him to be who he is and decide whether I want “that” in my life. I need to make sure that I allow only healthy relationships to surround me. And his broken state is one filled with gambling, alcohol, verbal abuse, and even physical abuse at times. Those things mean that I have to “let go” of my relationship with him until he decides he wants better for his life.
The journey is our life. Finding new paths. Learning new things. Having new adventures. And letting go of the things we thought we wanted, or what we needed for a time so that we can continue to grow. Letting go can be painful, but at the end of the day, it is so rewarding. Choices. Every day. New choices. It’s time to start a new adventure. Are you in?
Blessings – E