The days pass ne’er to return. And depending on how much emotion and energy we experience in them, we may feel grief as each day ends. It could be grief from happiness we wish would continue forever. Or grief that comes from guilt, embarrassment, or anger that compounds into resentment. Regardless, it’s a longing for what was and a sense of loss for what’s gone.

No matter how good or bad the days seem, it’s easy to hold onto them and develop an attachment. We can’t change anything about yesterday, and we can’t relive it except from what we conjure in our minds and bodies.

Our longing for the past stems from our resistance to accept the impermanance of life.

Nothing lasts forever, not even the good stuff.

But we cling to what we’ve seen, said, and done in an attempt to feel safe and guarded from life’s temporal nature. The past is a known, and knowns make us feel safe. The future is unknown and therefore uncertain, spurring anxiety and worry.

Practicing letting go of the past helps us detach from what we cannot change. It frees us of yesterday so we can live in the present.

But letting go doesn’t mean we move forward unchanged. Each day impacts us and provides numerous opportunities for growth and joy. There’s plenty we can carry onward in a healthy way without tethering ourselves to a time that no longer exists.

What can we leave in the past?

Embarrassment. That icky feeling that we did something other people laughed at or frowned upon. All humans make mistakes, and we’re responsible for our behavior. We can’t control how people react, but we can control what we do next.

Guilt. Prolonged guilt compounds into remorse and spreads throughout our minds and bodies. Unchecked, it can negatively affect our health, relationships, and self-worth. Guilt is a helpful teacher, but we can keep the lessons without punishing ourselves permanently.

Anger. A nasty comment, an unexpected blow, a cheat or steal or betrayal — all viable reasons to feel angry. But for how long? When we internalize anger, we harm ourselves. The others have probably already moved on. Yet we stew in anger, which becomes long-term resentment and alters every aspect of our lives.

What can we take from the past and carry into the future?

Lessons learned. Most life lessons sting like heck. And if we choose to learn from them, we’ll be all the better. Let’s grow with each lesson and share them with others to give everyone a chance to evolve.

Joy. Moments of joy may end. But if we let them, such moments can infuse us with joy such that we become joy itself. Let’s welcome the positive energy we experience into our bones and blood and become part of our beings.

Beauty. Life is an artform. How we see our environment depends on the lenses we choose to look through. If we pick up a new lens, we’ll no doubt experience a completely different scene. Let’s carry our discoveries into the new day and enjoy the beauty of life.

How to let go of yesterday

There’s no complex formula or ten-step plan for letting go of the past. It’s simple, yet challenging.

The way to let go is to release your mental and physical grasp. Your mind has wrapped itself around the past and is clinging to it so tightly, protecting it the more you rely on it for safety. You probably feel it all the way through your neck and back. It’s no longer just a thought but a whole body experience that stiffens you, aches you, and blocks feelings of happiness and enjoyment.

You must practice releasing such energy from your mind and body. When thoughts of the past flutter in, just sit back and watch them flutter out. When your shoulders tense up all the way to your ears, unclench your jaw and surrender your muscles to gravity, letting them gently fall back into place.

Set aside time to practice. Get in tune with your thoughts and your body. Spend five minutes in the morning before the day begins to focus on your thoughts, feeling the rush of yesterday’s happenings come in and sitting back letting them rush out the other end. Watch the movie in your mind reel through without engaging in any of it. Just let it all pass. No need to stop it, just let it run its course.

Spend another five minutes slowly rotating your head about your neck. Roll your shoulders gently forward and backward. Sit or stand up straight, aligning your spine and breathing deeply through your nose. Give your body a good dose of oxygen and let it permeate your organs and limbs.

Later in the day, when you feel the past creeping up on you (or barging in unannounced), take just a minute or two to sit back and watch the movie rush in and out of your mind. Roll your head and shoulders and align your posture. Breathe deeply a few times and visualize the air reaching your every cell.

Before you go to sleep, spend a final five minutes reconciling the day and clearing your mind for rest. Release tension, relax your face, neck, and shoulders, and slow the breath.

That’s how you let go of yesterday. You literally let go of its energy. It might not be something tangible you can hold in your hand, but it’s an energy that sustains in your being until you release it.

So, practice loosening your grip. Practice relaxing your mind and body and letting the energy of the past go.

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Sometimes, our lives are abundant – filled with love, happiness, and fortune. Other times, they’re not. Most of the time, we teeter-totter in between. Wanting life to be better or different doesn’t mean we’re not grateful for where we are right now.

Wherever our lives are at in a moment, it’s important to recognize what we have. Make a list, even. Let’s jot down all the stuff that composes our lives, starting with our basic needs – food, clothing, and shelter – and moving through all the small and grand aspects of the daily grind.

But “what we have” is not just material stuff. It’s also our relationships, experiences, and understanding. It’s all the stepping stones that paved our journey thus far and all the opportunities that lay ahead.

It’s easy to forget how many people and experiences have shaped our lives. And it’s not just the victories or catastrophes – the extremes or grand gestures – that got us where we are today. Life is mostly an amalgamation of subtleties. Daily habits. Patterns of thinking and behaving. Frequent exposure to environments and people.

And if our lives don’t look the way we’d like them to, it’s easy to blame the extremes and subtleties, and the environments and people, for our dissatisfaction. Instead of nurturing the warm fuzzies about everything we have, we fuel resentment that boils inside us and spews out of our eyes, hands, and mouths, spreading like wildfire into our environment and affecting others’ lives.

At that point, it’s easy to curl up in a ball and claim victimhood, declaring that the world is cruel and everything bad happens to us. We’re helpless and hopeless, and it’s not our fault.

It’s unlikely that we’ll feel grateful when we’re at the bottom of a well lamenting over life’s wrongdoings.

But we build such wells of despair with the stones that are thrown at us. We are the architects of our lives and responsible for recognizing that such stones have other uses. Instead of building walls to shut out the world or wells to indulge in bottomless pits of misery, we can use the same stones to lay paths. Paths of our own making. Arranged with the debris of life’s happenings.

All life’s events are stepping stones that can serve as checkpoints for reflection. And gratitude is a reflection that is both empowering and humbling. Gratitude reminds us that we always have all we need to be happy. It also reminds us of our interdependence with each other and life.

Let’s pause on this stepping stone and be grateful for where we are – whether we’re struggling or striving or somewhere in between. Let’s use gratitude as a torch that lights up the dark places so that we can venture into the unknown future with love and curiosity. And let’s be thankful for the opportunity to align our lives with what’s most important to us.

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Read: The Be Well Place January 2023 issue

Download the issue and revisit it when you’re feeling stuck. And please share with someone you think could use a little lift.

I hope it’s helpful.

Be well,
Rachael

The post Issue: January 2023 appeared first on The Be Well Place.

But despite people’s intentions when they tell us to lighten up or loosen up, there’s a lot of wisdom in those sayings.

Whenever we feel anger, frustration, resentment, embarrassment, guilt, shame, or (insert your favorite emotion here), we tend to grasp at it. We don’t just recognize our emotional response. We don’t just feel the feelings and let them go. No, we grab them and hold them tightly for safety like stuffed teddy bears that arm us against the dark and scary night.

We tend to cling to our feelings and let them run rampant throughout our system, hijacking our otherwise rational thoughts and otherwise functional organs.

Then, we wonder why we have headaches, digestion issues, stiff necks, and aching backs. We wonder why we can’t sleep, can’t focus, and can’t find the motivation to do what brings us joy.

Maybe we do need to lighten up. Maybe we need to loosen our grip on those feelings and just allow ourselves to feel them without making them who we are.

We feel anger. We don’t have to be anger. But the tighter we grasp at anger, the more we identify with it, and the more it consumes our being.

Same with sadness, embarrassment, guilt, and shame.

We latch onto such feelings until we can no longer separate them from ourselves. And then we get so disoriented that it becomes so easy to blame everything external for our unfortunate emotional state. Our feelings quickly become everyone else’s responsibility since they’re the ones who initiated them.

Right? Nah…

We know we’re responsible for our own feelings. We know that we’re the only ones who can truly control our thoughts and emotions — which can get pretty heavy and overwhelming. So, sometimes it’s easier to give up than do the hard work to process them in a helpful way.

But eventually, our inaction catches up with us and we find ourselves buried within a heap of emotions, unable to breathe let alone reach out an arm to hoist ourselves up. It’s like leaving dirty dishes in the sink for a week and having to set aside an hour to clean up the mess, instead of just washing things quickly after we dirty them. Letting a small task go unattended leads to a big pile that we later need to put in a great deal of effort to correct.

Managing feelings is like doing the dishes. If we process them bit by bit, they’re less likely to become a mound that’s more difficult to dismantle.

Though some things like dishes require a good grip to prevent slippage, our feelings do not. We do not need to hold onto feelings for fear of losing or breaking them. If we let go of a dish, it may shatter, and then we’re without a plate. If we let go of a feeling, it disintegrates, and then we’re without its suffering.

So, let’s drop our emotional dishes and let them shatter into pieces. Let’s loosen up our grip so that our feelings can unravel and free themselves from our grasp. Or to summarize what Aldous Huxley wrote in his novel, Island: let’s lighten up, my darlings.

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Do you know the song? It’s one of those catchy childhood rhymes that sticks in your head and has an unexpected morbid ending. (We’ll discuss the dark and morbid stories embedded in nursery rhymes another time.)

“There was an old man named Michael Finnegan.
He grew fat and then grew thin again.
Then he died and had to begin again.
Poor old Michael Finnegan. Begin again.”

And then you keep singing the song over and over and over and over until one of your parent’s heads’ explodes. I did that a lot to my parents when I was a kid.

These days, I focus less on the annoying repetition and more on the fact that good ol’ Michael Finnegan had to begin again every time the song ended. It’s inspiring, really. The man was reborn with each iteration despite each parental cringe. (He was also a swing dieter, apparently.)

We, too, can begin again in each and every single moment of our lives. But we don’t have to wait until the end of a song or the end of a year. We don’t have to wait until the sun comes up tomorrow. We can begin again right now. And now. And again.

Each moment is another opportunity to realign our thoughts, feelings, decisions, words, and actions with our values. And it’s another opportunity to evaluate our values to make sure they’re actually important to us.

Consider this moment right now. What thoughts are you thinking? What feelings do you have? What decisions, words, and actions are you about to deliver? Do they align with your values? And are your values really that important to you? If not, then this is the moment to “begin again.”

Be well,
Rachael

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But that angry response where we focus on blaming someone or something for causing the situation and how we feel isn’t helpful. And it certainly doesn’t *poof* the situation away or erase anything. Blaming doesn’t help us travel back in time to prevent something from happening.

Instead, blaming keeps the negative aspects of that situation alive and present. And it often impedes our ability to handle the aftermath.

Some simple examples:

• Someone spills coffee on the carpet.
• Someone breaks a plate or bowl while clearing the table.
• A tree branch breaks off and crushes your almost-ready vegetable garden.
• A driver cuts you off and prevents you from beating the red light.
• The weather folks got it wrong and spoiled your picnic plans.

It’s so easy to get mad at someone for staining your rug or shattering your serving ware. It’s easy to curse the tree for destroying your harvest and costing you money. It’s so very easy to villainize the disdainful driver who delayed your commute. And there’s certainly no chance of sunshine for those unfortunate weather demons…I mean folks…weather folks.

Even if you go through the motions of scrubbing the fabric, sweeping the tile, clearing the branch, making up for lost time, and postponing your plans, if you still harbor the anger, frustration, anxiety, or disappointment, you haven’t truly resolved the situation. And it’ll screw up the rest of your day…or longer.

You might even develop a habit of blaming such that your baseline emotional state gradually gets angrier or more resentful.

Then when bigger things happen – when someone breaks a window instead of a dish, or when a distracted driver rear-ends you instead of cutting you off – how do you expect to respond? You’ll likely be even more angry, frustrated, anxious, or disappointed and carry those emotions deeper and longer so that they start impacting every aspect of your life.

Blame mentality is a slippery slope.

You might think it’s okay to assign temporary blame as part of your emotional processing, especially if you keep it to yourself and don’t act upon it. But you still develop the habit of blaming as a kneejerk reaction to something unpleasant. And as a result, you’re less prepared to handle bigger events that require a lot more mental and emotional stamina.

If you want to become mentally and emotionally stronger, you need to practice shifting away from blame mentally and towards personal responsibility.

Oh, man…I can already hear some of you protesting, “But what if it wasn’t my fault?! Why do I have to be responsible?!”

Well, it boils down to focusing on what you can and can’t control.

You can’t control what just happened. It’s in the past, and you can’t change it or erase it.

You also can’t control how other people respond to the situation. Maybe the driver will zip out of their car apologetically and readily exchange insurance information. Or maybe they’ll speed off and hope you can’t read their license plate. You just don’t know how they’ll respond, and you can’t do much about how they behave.

But what can you control in any situation?

Your response. Your reaction. The way you think and feel and how you behave.

You can control how you communicate with other people. You can decide to kick the fallen tree branch and rip out all your precious plants in angst. You can choose to let the weather rule the rest of your day and dictate your happiness.

You can control what you think, feel, decide, and do.

See, taking personal responsibility isn’t about taking the blame. It’s about taking back control over what you can control, which is you.

The side effects of practicing personal responsibility instead of blame include:

• Increased confidence in your perception and capabilities
• Less reliance on external circumstances for emotional satisfaction
• Less stress and anxiety, both in situ and prolonged
• Increased mental, emotional, and physical resilience to change

If only all those medication advertisements promised the same…

But there’s no oral supplement that can do the mental work for you. Even if you feel you need to take prescription medication to ease your anxiety and curb your emotional response, pills can’t make decisions for you. There’s still work you need to do.

And you don’t wait to start the work until the big things happen. No, no, no. There’s no need to throw yourself into the wolves and get eaten alive.

Instead, start with the small stuff. Start with the tiny inconveniences that irritate you throughout the day. Start with the coffee spill or the television volume or the empty toilet paper roll or the unmade bed or the sink full of dishes.

Think about the little things that push your buttons. And when you feel those buttons activate, pause. Think about what just happened and how you feel about it. Think about what you wish would have happened instead and who or what you’d like to hold responsible.

Start becoming more aware of how you respond to those little things. Practice pausing after each occurrence and doing a quick self-check.

After a while, when you’re used to pausing your reaction, practice choosing another reaction. Start by interrupting and challenging your kneejerk response to dismantle its legitimacy. For example, if you’re usually inclined to feel angry, begin asking yourself, “Is this really worth getting angry over? Is this worth ruining my day?” Then, consider an alternative response that’s more helpful to you in the long run.

If another person is involved, consider whether a verbal response is needed. If so, consider the tone and words you think would be most helpful to resolve the situation. And accept that you can’t control how the other person reacts.

Please be patient with yourself as you practice. You’ll probably mess up a bit, forget to pause, or say the wrong thing. It’s going to take time to build your awareness skills, and it might take even more time to change your response style.

But, as you gradually substitute personal responsibility for blame mentality, you’ll feel lighter. Daily inconveniences won’t shatter your spirit, and you’ll be better equipped to handle the bigger, more emotionally charged events.

And that’s what you want, right? You want more emotional stamina so that you can face life’s challenges without crumbling. Right?

You want to feel happy most days, have meaningful relationships, and live a good life. Right?

If so, then it’s up to you to make it happen.

Personal responsibility.

You got this.

The post You always lose the blame game, so practice personal responsibility instead appeared first on The Be Well Place.

But how far back should you think? Are memories from way-back-when still relevant? Are hurtful memories helpful? Or is it all just self-destructive?

Use caution when digging through the past for answers to present problems. Oftentimes, we already know the answers without seeking them out, we’re just looking for validation.

Instead, trust yourself. Trust you who are right now. Trust that the culmination of your past has helped shape you into a wiser, more capable person in the present.

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Sometimes, you may not be the best version of yourself. But that doesn’t mean you need to overhaul your personality and everything that makes you you.

Instead, you should leverage who you are. All the good and bad. To be the best version you can be.

You’ll make mistakes. You’ll let the bad side show at times. But you’ll always have the choice to learn and grow. And the bad times are actually grand teachers that reveal everything you need to know to be better.

So, please. Don’t change. Don’t ever change. Just keep on learning and growing and being a better version of you each and every day.

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Abstinence doesn’t have to be dramatic, though. It doesn’t have to be a grand giving-up of something and swearing it off for the rest of our lives. In fact, that method often leads to us abandoning our intentions and indulging with a vengeance.

Instead, we can practice abstinence in small ways throughout our normal day. We can recognize when we’re about to reach for one more or open our mouths to speak, and we can stop. We can simply stop our thoughts and actions right there in that tiny moment.

Overtime, as we continue to practice tiny acts of abstinence, we develop the habit of consciously refraining. And we don’t see it as a sacrifice or total life overhaul. Contrarily, we see it as a peaceful way to practice the power of choice.

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We can hold on to the familiar for a little while, especially if it aligns with our life path. But at some point, we’ll have to let it go and embrace the new. Even if it’s rooted in joy and love.

See, if we cling too long to anything, we stagnate. We stop changing. We stop growing. We stop living.

We don’t need to rush through life or keep busy just for the sake of doing. But when it’s time to let go, we need to let go so that we can continually welcome life into our lives.

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