It’s Time To Let Go Of Yesterday (A Meditation For Deep Release)
The past is gone, all that exists is this moment.
The past that you believe is currently holding you back is nothing but a memory.
It’s an image that lives in your mind and in your mind alone.
The past is not a painting in a museum. It is not a portrait that we can gaze at and identify each brushstroke and contour. It is a semblance of emotion, a series of recollection, most of which become increasingly more distorted over time.
Do you ever wonder why the things that seem to drum up your heartbeat and sink your stomach until you’re caving in on yourself are one dimensional ideas of what might have happened, or how someone may have seen it?
Out of your entire life, why is it that this one experience carries so much weight over all the others? Why is it that you’ve distilled a memory down to its most haunting form? Is this the full truth of your story? Or are there more dimensions that you have not yet explored?
I want you to feel into your body. Feel the tension and constriction in your bones. Feel the weight of what you have been carrying for all of these years. Feel your feet and your legs and your hips and your neck. Feel the contractions, how your cells are constructing your body as the first line of a defense in a battle that is long, long over.
As you feel this more and more deeply, I want you to tell yourself something over and over again.
The past is gone, all that exists is this moment.
The past is gone and when we try to resurrect pieces of it without its full context, we torture ourselves for no reason. There is no wisdom to be gained this way. There is no lesson to be learned. There is nothing that is added to our current lives nor future, there is only time that is taken away. The past is gone and when we try to let our most impulsive thoughts tell us what it was or what it meant, we rob ourselves of the experience that was our own life.
Because everything — every step, every chance, every person, every encounter, and even everything you think you did wrong — was building the person that you will one day become. And before you start thinking that good people can only be a collection of positive experiences, please remember that often, you must first realize what is wrong before you will know what is right. You must know what love isn’t to know what love is. You must be who you aren’t to discover who you are.
Instead of belittling the version of you that was holding themselves up in whatever way they knew how, thank them, because the vision of your future rests in their minds. The weight of your life rests on their shoulders. You are only here today because of what they did, and how they did it.
Could you imagine if they knew, that after all of that, their future selves would look back on them and sum them up by the smallest details that they couldn’t even control?
You owe yourself more than this.
You owe your life more than this.
It’s time to let go of the past, though of course, it’s already gone. There’s nothing that you have to release other than your idea that these old experiences are still with you now, because they aren’t. There’s nothing that you have to release other than the fact that your life is not just one thing.
When we carry the past into the present, it’s because the experience feels unfinished. But what we often don’t realize is that the only way to complete it is to take everything we wish we could have had then and to enact it completely right now. This is the only way.
The most damaging way to live is not to stay small so that the world is never given the opportunity to hurt us on occasion, but that we hurt ourselves every day insisting that we might not be able to start living now because something behind us once didn’t go as we planned.
Courage is to show up and live anyway.
Change is to show up and live anyway.
Truth is to show up and live anyway.
The memories will keep coming, for a while. They don’t leave because we tell them to. They slowly fade as we fill our minds with new things more captivating, more compelling, more worth our attention.
We do not let go from standing in the ruins, but by building our new cities.
