My future self; the one I am becoming; requires a re-viewing and re-weaving of my past. This re-creation of my past versions re-create the person I am in the present. This current re-creation is for the sole purpose of living in the present in a way that prepares me for who the future version of me needs to become … in order to re-create the past version … in order to live more fully as the person I am now … in order to prepare me for the person I am becoming.

This is an infinite cycle. In order to leave this life for my next incarnation, I must tie up the threads to complete the shroud so it is ready for me to take me to the other side and prepare me for the next lifetime.

There is a lot of talk about re mothering parts of your self. I didn’t have a good mother figure in my mother so I use my paternal grandmother, Diana, to fill that function and I use my own mothering of my son to remodel what I received. In doing so I change the vantage point and feel nourished by using this future reframe to rewrite my narrative. The same happens as I guide youngsters to build healthy relationships. It’s not going to change the abuse but it is going to create the spaces that allow the traumatised parts of myself to heal my future self (which informs the past I can see … is it making sense yet?). I am in my present being mothered by the future self who has me in her sites just as I have my past self in my present sites. The focused crosshairs are also threads of the sniper fire that assassinates the versions that must die.

And it all happens in the chakra of unconditional love: the higher Heart Chakra. As the lower chakras evolve and grow up through the density of physical matter and the light of our higher power comes down to transmute it, the meeting point of the infinity symbol is the beating of the heart, where life emerges from the seeds planted. 

Pushing away the things you don’t like about your past means also pushing away the things you like. They are woven together. Packing everything in the past where some people say it belongs is counterintuitive. Whatever you don’t process or integrate rules your life. The past travels with us. Either you keep looking over your shoulder as you run from it or you stumble and fall trying to chase it, or you hide under a rock so it doesn’t find you, or you stake it and carry it like a banner or white flag. Or you can look at it, befriend it, integrate it, and allow it to live within you as that part of you that reminds you of what you have experienced. It has to be identified and grieved and then projected as a healed version back into the future. 

Letting go isn’t forgetting. You can’t forget a memory. You can have a lobotomy or develop Alzheimer’s Disease. You can cauterise a bleed but not an emotional pain. You can work in a way that gives you full sight of the memory and with wisdom, clear vision and honesty, you can work in a way that allows you access to the story without all the emotional content that takes you into the trauma. Letting go of the bad memories requires letting go of the good ones too. Equanimity is about seeing both bad and good as equals; both as parts of the same tapestry that makes you who you are. Letting be is like keeping the memory and not getting tied up in it. Remember without the charge, the triggers, the amygdala hijack. Remember with the wonder, the intrigue, the anticipation. I once remembered with trauma … after Gavin, all my shadow content bubbled out of me like little demons. I felt possessed as I recalled the lies, the heartbreak, the manipulation. I wanted him to care but in hindsight I’m lucky he didn’t. Because I could allow it all to spill out of me and I could rage against the ghosting and I could purge my darkness … and all of it went nowhere; all of it fell on the emptiness of being abandoned and then ghosted. It’s a grim reality that ultimately saved us both. I thought I was going mad not getting closure for being thrown away like one of his discarded books he got to read, integrate and then toss in the recycling. It wasn’t so much that he had turfed me after taking all he could from me; it was that it triggered my lack of belief in myself … a feeling that people want only the illusion of me and that once they get to know the real person behind their idea of who I am, they find me inappropriate and too much and decide to choose something easier and less real. Life is full of irony. There are few people I have been really real with … like really real. I am now authentically myself always and yet I only show parts of myself at any given time. This makes it easier to be really real but in smaller more manageable doses. Not for myself but more for the people I am engaging with.

Like the quintessential philosophical dilemma:
How do you eat an elephant?
One bite at a time.