WHERE WE TALK ABOUT PAST REGRETS
Are you there?
Yes, we are here.
Today, I’d like to talk about regret, specifically regrets about the past.
Regret. A persistent source of unease and anxiety for many human persons. Regret and its progeny – disappointment, remorse, self-recrimination, low self-esteem, guilt, guilt and more guilt
Yes, it can be very challenging dealing with past regrets. If you’re not sufficiently grounded and centered, looking back can trigger a great deal of pain and confusion.
Is there a particular reason you would like to talk about regret today?
Well, it actually started with a friend of mine who recently turned 70 years old. He stopped working full time a few years ago and has been more or less enjoying his retirement up to this point, but now that he has turned 70, he has begun to look back at his life and finds himself filled more and more with regret – about the things he did, but wishes he hadn’t, about things he wished he had done, but didn’t, about the roads taken and the roads NOT taken. I’ve tried to encourage him to shift his focus to the more positive aspects of his life, but he seems determined to wallow in past regrets.
Unfortunately, regret is one the ego’s favorite pastimes. If given the freedom, the ego will shift your focus and attention to each and every moment in your life where you missed a great opportunity, failed to live up to your potential, hurt someone unnecessarily, made decisions that hindered rather than helped. What makes it even more difficult to confront and process the low-frequency emotions that arise during such hyper-critical reminiscing is that, in some cases, these emotions – regret, blame, guilt, recrimination – can lie deeply buried in the sub-conscious mind of the human psyche, repressed and unprocessed for many years, becoming so embedded in one’s energy field that they are unlikely to dislodge themselves without a powerful, provoking event. This is one reason why your friend is having such a difficult time shifting his attention away from those events from his past that he judges so harshly. Until this period in his life, he has been mostly unaware of the emotions of regret that have lurked beneath his conscious awareness. Turning 70, however, triggered an impulse to look back upon his life and pass judgement upon those experiences he now deems detrimental to his own happiness. “If only this. If only that. If only…”
I know the feeling. My friend’s preoccupation with his past regrets reminds of what I went through after I retired three years ago. At that time, I was not at all sure that I had done the right thing by retiring. I started looking back on all sorts of decisions I’d made along the way, things I hadn’t thought about in years, and I found myself doing exactly what my friend is doing now – judging myself for what I considered my mistakes, my missed opportunities, my failings. I tried to remind myself that I wouldn’t have gotten to where I am in life, which in my opinion is a pretty good place, without going through all the experiences I created for myself over the course of my life. One thing leading to another, like an unbroken chain, each event, each experience, affecting and, in a sense, helping to create the next experience and the next and so on and so forth.
Indeed. You would not be the person that you are today without having gone through a life that exposed you to the incredible diversity of experience available to you on the physical plane – the good and the bad, the highs and the lows, the light and the dark – all of which came into your life just as you intended.
And yet, it can be almost impossible when you fill your mind with thoughts of regret to convince yourself that your life has any real value. Reminding yourself that you’ve actually created all of the events you’ve experienced in your life can sometimes makes things worse. Not only do you feel regret, but on top of that you also feel intense guilt for what you believe are all of the horrible choices you made along the way. The question is: how can we shift our attention away from all of the negative thinking about the past and refocus on raising our vibration to a “happier” place, a place grounded more in the present?
The very best place to start is with forgiveness. Self-forgiveness. Finding your way to a place of compassion and understanding for yourself when it comes to the decisions that you have made and the choices that you have acted upon over the course of your life. This is a step that you must resolve to take on your own. No one can do it for you. Others may show you forgiveness for those moments of conflict or hurt that have passed between you, but true healing can only take place when you absolve yourself completely of all that you consider your “mistakes.” It may help to remind yourself when you are tempted to wallow in past regrets that this type of behavior is actually a natural part of the journey and that most individuals, at one point or another in their lives, experience something very similar. This is why it is important for you to affirm for yourself that you have done nothing wrong. You have simply lived your life as best you can and there is no reason whatsoever for self-criticism, for self-doubt, for self-recrimination, if only for the simple reason that such rebukes solve nothing, change nothing. They only embed the old emotional energies further still, and that is not a choice that serves anyone.
What else can we do?
Couple your self-forgiveness with self-appreciation. Along with forgiveness, we believe that the feeling of appreciation – of all that you are, of all that you have, of all that you strive to be – is perhaps the best antidote for regret, for it is the feeling of appreciation that can most quickly bring you into alignment with Source energy. If you must look to the past, look then with a positive eye, a loving eye, for everyone, no matter how badly they believe they have mismanaged the events of their past, everyone has experiences that stand apart as being particularly pleasurable or joyful or successful or loving. These are the moments from your past upon which we would encourage you to place your attention, for by focusing on the vibration of love still held within these precious moments, you automatically invite that frequency, the frequency of Source energy, the frequency of your own loving heart, into your field, making it that much easier for you to create similarly joyful experiences in the present.
I agree with you when it comes to the benefits of practicing appreciation. At the same time, it’s not always easy for us humans to find that place of appreciation within ourselves, not nearly as easy as it is for us to wallow in regret, in part because most of us didn’t see a lot of it – appreciation – while we were growing up, either between adults or from adults to children. In other words, we don’t have a lot of experience with expressing appreciation because it’s rarely been modeled for us and as a result, we’ve had very little practice with it.
We understand the challenges that this entails, especially for those who believe that there is little to appreciate as one grows older and nears the “end” of life. Indeed, there seems to be an almost universal compulsion on the part of human persons to perform a life-review at some point during their journey, to place a value on this experience or that experience and then total everything up to find out how high or low their score is and, most especially, how their score compares to others. But while looking back on one’s life can sometimes be quite stressful, if one can maintain some detachment and remain present and grounded in the process, it can also provide great benefit, in that it encourages the release of possibly a lifetime’s worth of self-doubt and heartache that no longer serves, and that, as hard as it may be to experience, is actually a good thing. This is why appreciation is so important in this type of situation, for it allows the individual to focus less on the unease they may be feeling over past regrets and more on the positive aspects of their life, both past and present.
As you have said, it’s really up to each of us to take responsibility for the feelings that arise when we explore our past history. No one can do it for us.
Indeed.
Are there some more practical things we can do when we’re dealing with regrets about the past?
We can recommend a form of meditation that might be of use. Begin by taking a few moments out of the course of your day, preferably in the morning, to simply sit and breathe, as you would do in any regular meditation practice, and then once your mind has quieted and your body has relaxed, start by choosing one event from your past that summons up for you a feeling of regret or a sense of guilt. The purpose of this particular exercise would be for you, or anyone else for that matter, to gain some distance, some emotional detachment, from this past event. See yourself at an actual physical distance from this provoking experience as if you are watching it unfold on a movie screen. Then simply let it go and allow it to move on. You may find yourself slightly triggered at first, but with practice, you will find that you can find and maintain an EMOTIONAL detachment from this past experience, in your meditative state as well as in your daily waking life.
Anything else?
There are a number of variations on this meditation that you might try. For example, there is no rule that says you may not alter the event that you are reminiscing about with your own creative mind, molding it until it approaches a vision that brings you more satisfaction than regret. You may also choose an event from this same time period in your life that DOES bring you joy or comfort or peace or love and use your imagination to pivot away from the event that brings you discomfort to the one that makes you feel good. As you do this, support yourself with the idea that you are in charge of your own life and that you can choose to feel however you wish to feel, regardless of the circumstances of your life events. Above all, love and appreciate yourself, forgive yourself for all that you have created that has caused you discomfort – past and present – and encourage yourself to look always for the positive aspects in your life.
I think we will stop there for today. You’ve given us all some very good advice.
It has been our pleasure. Until next time then.
Thank you all.
NEW POSTS APPEAR ON A REGULAR BASIS
SHARE THIS POST: