I keep forgetting what I know. What I’ve suspected for a very long time and have known for quite a while now. I can create my future to be the way I choose for it to be if I stop creating my future from my past! If I stop running ingrained, old programmes telling me that certain things are just not available to people like me. If I stop holding on to the belief that people from my family, town, my country even, don’t get to have certain experiences, and certainly it can’t be easy. And if I do get it, it must be hard, I must suffer for it and I must never feel as though I deserve it!
Happiness. A day without friction. Stability. A lessening of fear. I keep forgetting that it’s all in my head, and I can stop creating my today based on what I learned about how life works during my yesterdays. Often, when I ask the internal parts of me what age they think I am the answer is between 2-13 years old. Those lost parts didn’t get to grow up and are stuck, forever thinking some action I want to take is not safe. Stuck believing it’s not OK for me to want it because, for whatever reason, it wasn’t then.
The deeper understanding, I keep misplacing, is knowing that I have the power to heal those parts of me that are mired in the past playing the same old song, feeling the same old feelings, creating the same old personality. I can choose every night before I go to sleep and every morning when I wake up to be the change I want to see in my life. I can decide that I am allowed, it is available to me, and if it’s been done by one person it can be done by many, including me. Including you.
We can all run our version of Roger Bannister’s 4-minute mile. If you had asked me this time last year if I’d be writing articles for a magazine I’d have laughed but, I forgot for a bit that I couldn’t do it. I forgot that I’m neither allowed nor clever enough, that I’m not a writer! I remembered to forget that old song and found myself saying ‘sure, I’d like to do that’.
How did I forget? I chose my wellbeing and that which fills me up. I chose my happiness. Every night and every morning and throughout the day I chose me. You can too. Choose you, every single moment you remember, and the rest will follow. It must. You create it all. Just before you go to sleep at night ask yourself ‘what’s the first thing I want to feel when I wake up in the morning?’ Then say to yourself ‘when I wake up I want to feel loved, peaceful, energised’. Use your own words. Breathe that desire deep into your heart and slumber, knowing you remembered to choose you.
First published in Luminous Wisdom: SOPHIA August 2019