In my last Heart notes, I talked about how everything that happens in life, even when it appears otherwise, contains wisdom and love.
Some Heart Notes readers loved this idea. Others balked at it.
I get it. For most of the first thirty years of my life I was under the impression that Life was a minefield designed to trip me up. But despite my dim view, a series of a-ha’s gathered steam and on my thirtieth birthday my entire understanding about how life works shifted.
So today, I want to talk about one of the ways you can draw on the inherent goodness woven into the flow of life…
Quit trying to learn from the past.
Let me jump in here because that I’m not saying; “Go ahead. Ride roughshod. Repeat all the terrible mistakes of your life, the careless relationships and creative messes.”
What I’m inviting you to explore is that when you try to figure out what you’re supposed to learn from past hurts or failures. You end up repeating the past, not transforming it.
Now, in full disclosure; I used to encourage clients to pick over past events with questions such as; “When did you realize things were going wrong?” “Knowing what you know now, what could you do differently in the future?”
But the problem with this approach is that mental analysis is a function of everyday (ego) thinking. And this level of mind is invested in keeping you in the zone of what’s familiar. Not what’s possible.
Einstein put it like this…
“Problems can’t be solved with the same mindset that created them”.
When you try to figure out how to improve life by learning from the past, it’s like playing scrabble with only 17 letters of the alphabet.
You can create a few words. But not many.
Intellectual analysis appears to conjure up new solutions. But on closer examination you’ll find that they are a re-hash of past ideas.
So how can you see life from an entirely new perspective?
Acceptance, not analysis, creates fresh thinking
Accept the past. Allow what went well, and what didn’t, to exist side by side. Equally.
But don’t confuse acceptance with apathy.
You exist within a vast and beautiful mystery.
You cannot possibility know how your actions serve the whole, including when you make so called mistakes.
Acceptance is not saying “Oh everything happens for a reason” and brushing off what’s happened.
Acceptance is the willingness to allow cracks in the beliefs you hold about yourself and life.
Acceptance opens your small mind to infinite divine mind. And fresh thinking, and insights filter and flood through the cracks.
Then you live from inspiration, not a rehash of the past.
Then you play the game of life not only with a full alphabet. But by reading the book of Life itself.
Thank you for sitting at the kitchen table with Heart Notes today. I hope that you are fed by what you read here.
