Hi guys! Welcome to Episode 489 of the wildly successful lifestyle podcast! Good to be with you! Are you getting better and better at noticing your thoughts? Noticing how they control everything you do? I hope so! That’s one of the goals of this podcast is for us all to realize that we hold the key to happiness right inside our mind. The opportunity for happiness is available to us all, we just have to allow it.
Ok, have you ever hurt yourself doing something and thought “I’ll never do that again and 20 years later, you’ve kept your promise?
We have some really good friends that we travel with quite a bit. They were in Ireland a few years ago and were taking a tour of an old castle which had a lot of steep sort of uneven steps. Our friend was walking with her husband when all of a sudden she stepped wrong and down she went. She fell really hard which ended up with her in an Ireland hospital with a broken collarbone. Not how you want a trip to go. But recently we were traveling with them in the islands and we were hiking on one of the islands and there was a part of the hike that was a little steep with uneven rocks and she sort of panicked and turned around before any of us knew it. By the time her husband realized she was not with us and called her, she was down at the bottom with our other friends. The reminder of the fall in Ireland a few years prior stopped her from experiencing a hike that normally would have been easy for her and understandably so, it was pretty traumatic to break your collarbone in another country and it’s not something you easily forget. I’m saying this because we do this all the time without realizing it. Past hurts often stop us or hold us back because we don’t want to experience that pain again.
I was in Mexico with my sister in law 25 years ago when we rented mopeds. Little did I know that my moped did not have a working idle so that when we stopped for oncoming traffic and I took my foot off the brake, the moped took off hitting a curb that was about a foot tall sending me over the moped and I landed on my backside. I was fortunate to not have to go to the hospital thanks to the wife of the Senior frogs owner who happened to be driving by and saw two young blonde Americans in an accident on the side of the road in busy traffic in Mexico. She knew what would happen next if the police and ambulance had their way and so she negotiated hard for us to not be taken to the emergency room. I was able to fly home a few days later, going to the Dr in America instead. That was 25 years ago and to this day, I haven’t been on a moped again.
I tell you these stories because they are visual but also because we don’t just do this with physical pain. We do it with mental pain too. We hold ourselves back by hanging onto and continuing to drag forward the hurts we have experienced in the past. So being rejected as a teenager could keep us from ever wanting to experience rejection again which could hold us back from career advancements, personal relationships, intimate relationships, the list goes on and on. You aren’t the only one if that hits home, so many of us have to overcome rejection. A friend of mine recently told me that his oldest son from a previous relationship was struggling in school in the inner city and so he moved to be with him and his current wife, so he could go to a better school, his teacher in the new school actually looked at my friend and said, Ive seen kids that come from that school and you’re wasting your time, he isn’t going to be able to catch up, to which I said wow, I would have been furious if someone said that about my son, he said no not at all. That was her belief, it was not mine. I did not take on that belief at all. He kept working with his son who is now a sophomore in college. What damage would that teacher have done to that child if she had said that to him instead of to his dad who did not allow it to affect him? His not taking that on inspired me so much.
As I have gotten older I realize that when you aren’t controlled by past hurts and past mistakes and other peoples opinions, it makes you so much more powerful. Letting go of past hurt is the actual power move, not hanging onto it. So often we cling to our past hurts as protection so that it doesn’t happen again. But when your mind is constantly occupied with thoughts of the past, everything in your present life is seen through the filter of that past hurt. How many times did I pass up a fun opportunity because no way was I getting on a moped? How many mountain top views will my friend miss because no way was she ever climbing uneven steps again?
Most of us have baggage we carry around and don’t even realize it. I remember a story I read about hanging onto mental baggage. It referenced how we were all given a symbolic back pack when we were young and we really didn’t know what it was for but then we noticed everyone had one and the adults back packs were heavy and really full because they kept adding more rocks to them, every once in a while they would put one down and leave it but a lot of times they put it down and then would pick it back up just over and over again and as you watched you learned and you did the same. As you can probably guess, we aren’t talking about actual rocks. The rocks are symbols. They are bits of residual resentment, hatred, anger, guilt, and shame from injuries or injustices or mistakes you won’t or haven’t tried to let go of. The backpack is your mind; the weight of the load burdens not just your back but every thing you do. It holds you back from reaching out to make new friends because that pack of girls rejected you in 6th grade. It holds you back from asking for that promotion because rejection is not something you ever want to feel again. It keeps you from really falling in love again because your heart got so broken at 23.
That story of the backpack and the rocks made a big impact on me because Im so visual. I can just see and feel how heavy the burden is when we continuously drag around and add to the backpack we’ve carried from childhood on. We just never let go of some of our past hurts and some we let go for a while but then something reminds us and we drag them back up, reliving that same pain over and over. The crazy thing is our nervous system doesn’t know the difference between the actual episode and the remembering of the episode. So every time you dwell on past hurts it’s like you are reliving them again and again.
I pride myself on not being able to hold a grudge or stay mad at someone. I actually used to wish I could stay mad. I realize now the value of letting go because as I get older, it does seem like it gets a little harder to let go of some of that past stuff or maybe it’s just that I never really set it down and so it’s gotten heavier over time. So just like the pain from the accident I had in Mexico keeps me from riding a moped again, the pain of rejection may keep someone from asking for a promotion or a date or opening up to any real relationship. We’ve all been hurt by other people and we’ve all hurt other people. So in order to lighten the load of our backpack we have to forgive and also be forgiven, sometimes we have to remember that just because someone says something hurtful, it doesn’t mean we have to believe it or take it on at all. I read a quote this week that said “An insult is either sustained or destroyed, not by the disposition of those who insult, but by the disposition of those who hear it”.
That’s my challenge to you this week is to consider what past hurts you are carrying around and how it’s holding you back. We all have past hurts, It’s the carrying them around that makes life harder. You could be living in paradise but your mind can’t see past the anger and hurt of the past. How would it feel to let that go? Share this with 3 people who help lighten your load. I love you guys, I’ll talk to you in a few days!
