A couple of months ago, my laptop died.
When the new one arrived mere days later, I hurriedly unboxed it.
This happened right in the middle of the week, and while I wasn’t stressed, per se, I was rather impatient with the wait.
I quickly opened this brand new shiny laptop and mechanically started getting its settings to exactly what my old laptop had.
The new laptop was the recent 2022 Macbook Pro model; the old one was from 2017.
I remember not stopping to see what the new Macbook was even like - what were its features and what was awesome about it? Could it help me organize or do something better or differently? Did I even need all the extra apps I was downloading?
We do this in life sometimes - we get something new and we effort to have it look and feel like what has been familiar to us.
Maybe, we are happy with what is familiar, what we have known.
Maybe, we know exactly what we like and that is just the way we like it.
Maybe, we have no capacity or time to explore and figure things out, as we are eager to just move forward.
This is the energy of bringing the familiar into the present rather unconsciously, simply because it is what we know and how we think we are.
While it may not be a big deal with a laptop; it becomes a big deal in our relationships.
Living in Past Relationships
It is like dating several people over the span of many years, and while the people are different humans, they sort-of have a similar vibe. Energetically, we are attracting the same vibrational frequency of partners.
We may also experience this in our workplaces, where even though we change teams and jobs, we have the same type of characters showing up as our bosses, coworkers and team-mates. As such we wonder exasperated, why keep having similar frustrations that leave us feeling inadequate, unappreciated or overworked. The shiny feeling of a new job, new team, new company wears off very quickly.
With friends, family and in our intimate circles, this energy has the tendency to make us victims of our circumstance. We may be quick to blame others when things go sour and on the flip side, we attribute our happiness to what others are doing for or with us.
The past, or things that are familiar to us can be comforting and even give us certainty.
Knowing ourselves and our family, we may decide it is very important for us that our partner values family over perceived independence.
We may know and trust with certainty that our technical skills will be an asset to a particular project, even though we may not know the details or size of it.
We may know that we have a weird uncle who always brings up matters of politics in a gaslighting and argumentative way at family dinners.
This is information that the past has given us.
Some of it can be helpful to our present moment, but not all of it and not all the time.
Acting in the present, because the past is what is was, keeps us stuck and stagnant, rarely allowing us to relate truly and fully to our lives.
We relegate ourselves to dreams and imaginings that we believe we will not achieve.
The motion to bring more of the past forward, is a choice and so has the opportunity to be either empowering or disempowering. It can enliven the oldest relationship or deaden the newest one just as it is starting. It can stay as coal, or transform into a diamond.
Treasures & Prisons of the Past
For the most part, things that are familiar to us are so, because we have known them. They are, in linear time, part of our past.
I know how to use a MacBook because I’ve used one of many years.
I may know what friend will say when I tell her something, based on her past reactions to the topic; or, at least I think I do.
I can anticipate the hesitations my boss may have to this crazy new project I want to do, and I can give myself time to create responses and bring solutions.
Our past experiences and moments are a treasure trove.
It is wonderful to go digging for these treasures.
To do so intentionally, we have to be in a place of neutral mind and open heart, guided by the needs of the present moment.
Our treasure hunt in the past has to be inspired by our present moment.
If it is not, we risk vacating our mind and body in the present and going off on a long vacation to the past.
This was be the equivalent of driving your car on a country road you know to be fairly empty, based on yesterday’s experience. But today, there is traffic and since you have told yourself that this is an open country road and you will get to your destination fast, you do not adjust your speed, even though you can see with your eyes that it is a lot busier than yesterday. You hit the brakes hard and curse at the traffic, even though you’ve been seeing the buzzing road the entire way.
Knowing something, knowing ourself is amazing and a loving quest in the journey of life.
But believing that we, that others, and life experience, even the most rigid, is unchangeable is in many ways against Universal Law.
Maybe last year, we did not like a certain type of food.
Maybe for the last decade we told ourselves that we are hermits and don’t like social time because people are weird and their weirdness drains us.
Maybe we have so many imagined arguments with our mother, that we are certain she will react horribly to the thing we want to tell her.
This is us trapping ourselves, others and life vital flow in a glass casing.
We are this way, not from a place of Soul and Spirit, but from a place of preference and familiarity as determined by our personality self.
This is something that is a lot easier to see in other people than within.
Maybe we have complained about how stubborn our family members are. About how our coworkers never appreciate us. About how a restaurant or social activity is horrible, even if we haven’t been there in ages.
I have done this many times.
I find myself closed in these moments. I am closed to having a new experience in an old circumstance. My mind eagerly goes to the past, bringing up non-ideal or unpleasant stories that substantiate why I dislike something. It is like a binder full of excuses that I’ve been waiting to bring to the present moment. The tone of my voice is defensive rather than liberated.
It is like I am defined by my ‘No’, by what my personality self has dictated are my limits.
This is how I placed myself in a glass prison of my own making.
It isn’t always negative.
Something, the past has been a gift that we didn’t believe we could receive. And so, because we were seen, felt, admired, activated we loved the experience. When it ended, we held on to it.
And so the days pass, and we smile at former glory, our present moment becomes cumbersome and a distraction from our (past) happiness. We seek to recreate the moment, but it never truly satisfies. This is one of the surest ways to ensure a disempowered future of fleeting joy that speckles mundane existence.
A glass casing is interesting. Because when you look around you, you see everything and believe that you are not encased, because you can see through.
As such, it is hard to recognize when we put ourselves or others in these boxes.
This is the illusion of freedom.
But we are not free, are we?
We are restricted within the bounds of this glass that is determined by how much our personality allows our Essential Self to interact with the world around us. To begin with, these may feel like necessary boundaries. They may have felt safe to preserve our delicate sense of self.
But healthy boundaries that serve our highest Self, do not feel restricting. They feel safe and grounded and also allow us to unfurl into our True Infinite Self.
True freedom is not known by our natural physical senses as much as it is felt by the inner ones and by our Heart.
Freedom in relationships is being exactly who you are with ultimate acceptance of others being who they are.
This is joyful.
It is where true pleasure in relating to another human lies - whether we have known them our whole lives or we have just met them.
Preferences and agendas do not live here.
Neither does need, where we require another person to be a certain way or warp ourselves to fit.
Surrendering to love, I think, feels a little like this.
On our way there, things may be a bit bumpy.
UpCycling: The Way & the Work
The idea that something or someone is - as I have decreed - unpleasant, ‘not me’, or non-ideal, can actually be the place of growth is as bothersome as it is true.
I should clarify, that this may only be true for you, if you are actively engaged in the uncovering of your Heart, Soul and Spirit’s essence. This is the work that changes us from within.
If this is not part of your everyday journey, then perhaps the past for you, is just that, the past - the accumulation of moments that are behind you.
If you are change, changed, changing from within, then this work with the Past and Present is more activated.
You are more than your personality self, structure and preferences.
And because this work is part of your everyday existence, like breath, it also permeates around you, into your home, your car, your day, your life, your work, your relationships and your experiences.
The work is not hard, but it is work.
It is the work of consciously staying Present and visiting the Past with purpose. When we are pulled back by the current of our past, it is the work of drawing ourselves back to the present moment, like a fisherman reeling back his fishing line.
It starts with the practice of giving ourselves time at the beginning, middle and end of the day to settle into our body with Breath and Allowance.
It is the permission we give ourselves to, with a quiet mind, scan our day, and notice with utter lightness where we had emotional peaks and valleys; where our thoughts were in past haunts or future anxieties; where we were and were not in the present moment.
It is building the discipline of accepting ourselves, with deeper breath and the smile in our heart that bursts through into our face, regardless of our perceived successes and failures, and that of others.
From here, we can wander, without urgency, into our reactions and responses and how much of that we are determining, in advance of any possible interaction.
We do not know it, but we are on a path of Liberation.
You can judge yourself through this work. It will give you certain momentum with this work early on. However, it is with acceptance of Life and of Self exactly as they are now, that we and our realities can start to change.
The Past, all the we have known, and what is familiar is a part of that learning. Whether it holds pain or pleasure, the Past is to be honoured by visiting with intention, forgiveness, thankfulness as we mine our truth-treasures.
We are not here to reanimate zombies of experiences that lay behind us.
Guided by our Heart, which only knows the time of NOW, we set our treasure to its purpose. This is like taking an ancestral jewel that’s been in your family for generations and with the highest love, setting it in necklace of your own contemporary design and making.
This is us, mining the Past, transforming what lay there and bejewelling our Present moment with our own craft and creation.
Maybe we realize that we hated a particular food because it was forced on us by a mean aunt when we were 6. Now, we have re-lived that memory and while we had emotions of anger, we breath and choose to forgive said aunt. Perhaps, we can we can try that food again, for the first time with an open palette.
Maybe, we realize that we are no longer overwhelmed by social activities and the energies of others like we once were. We know that we are powered by our unlimited Soul-Source. So, perhaps we have to self-challenge the notions and beliefs around hermitude and social buttering beyond the personality preference. We try doors we had closed for a long time and find that we are nourished by both, at different times.
Maybe, we realize that we relate to our mother from our teenage angst even today. And because of that, battles from decades ago are still being fought today, unconsciously. If we were to disengage from this battle before conversing with her, in reality (rather than in our mind), for the first time, we allow both ourselves and her an opportunity of true relating. How she reacts is her sovereign choice and not something we can force. We have however, changed ourself and by that, both of us are now free from the would-be prison of glass.
In this way, what is old, done, past, lived is not forgotten or trashed.
It is up-cycled, and given the chance to serve us in a different way than what we have lived.
The pains and traumas of the past can re-pattern and reveal a gem, under the guidance of our Heart, our Soul and our loving Presence.
We enjoy our present moments being truly liberated - for what feels good is amazing, and what feels bad, can be transformed, which is also amazing.
And so good and bad lose their relevance.
All that is left is the Loving Now.
What a lovely thought .. to upcycle the past. Just the word choice itself is very appropriate because it is so inherently steeped in the present.