THE DECEPTION OF THE PAST

What are you currently held back by?

 

I can guarantee it’s a story of your own making.

 

But when did you make it a reality lens for you?

 

In the past?

Right.

 

All stories have a root in the past.

Whether that’s personal and direct past experience or ancestral and cultural myth.

 

We are all myth makers and we gather the threads of our stories from our past.

 

Even future imaginings are rooted in symbology and metaphor taken from past cultural memes.

 

Yet as my friend Tanah Whitemore from Sacred Ground and I were taught last week…..the past no longer exists.

 

Unless we bring it to life again and again through the stories we tell and bring alive through our actions.

 

Most of us are used to carrying around our personal and cultural past like a ball and chain behind us. We use it to determine the futures we create.

 

Whether that’s moving away from a past that we dislike.

Or moving towards one that recreates the nostalgia of ‘better days gone by’.

 

Either way, the past informs our future.

Yet we relive it in small and big ways each and every day.

 

Every time we tell a story about someone or something that happened we are bringing that past back into the present moment. We are re-energising its molecules and bringing them back into form.

 

Yes we can learn from previous experiences and events.

We can gather the hard won wisdom of our ancestors and honour them for gifting it to us.

 

But we are here to live and create in the present moment.

 

Now how many times have you heard that or an iteration of that?

Hundreds I can imagine.

 

But the reality remains that the point of power to create lies in the present moment only.

 

To harness that power we need to clear away the deception of the past.

That deception that the past has any power or bearing on the present.

The lie that we are present products of a past that we have lived through.

 

We have the ultimate power of choice and can create ourselves and our stories anew with every breath we take. Think of amazing beings like Victor Frankl who not only survived but thrived in a concentration camp (Man’s Search For Meaning if you haven’t read it). If he can choose a new reality in every moment of horror and hardship so can we.

 

So when we allow the past to be what it is – the fertile soil that our present moment choices create and grow from – we set ourselves free to be the powerful creator beings that we are.

 

The soil is not the seed.

It nurtures it but it does not govern the flower that will eventually bloom.

 

When we live in the present moment of choice, we harness the ultimate power of freedom to be found in this moment.

And this.

And this.

 

We make stories of a future that empower us rather than weigh us down with past circumstances.

 

We become truly free.

 

Ready?

I am.