WHAT IF???

Good day and I hope you are having a great day. I am visiting family in South of France for the holidays  whom I have not seen for over a decade.  As we are reminiscing about the past, I thought about something that inspired this post. Many times when family and friends get together,  talk eventually comes to “what if we had done…” kind of talk.  As Albert Einstein said “Time is an illusion, albeit a persistent one”.  I personally have a great deal of difficulty staying in the present.  I am more conscious of it after reading the book by Eckhart Tolle called The Power of Now, but this concept is still a difficult one to practice.

I keep on thinking if I don’t use my past as a learning experience, I may repeat my mistakes as I have done before.  This is all well and good, however when I start thinking and getting sucked into the “what if…” type of thinking it does no one any good.  When we start to reminisce about what could have been there is a good way and a bad way to go about doing it.  Let us analyze each way now.

The good way is the way Dr. Joe Vitale, and even Anthony Robbins explain “reframing” your past.  That is the constructive going back visualization of rethinking your mistakes and being constructive about the past.  That is a form of eliminating regret, and learning from mistakes. In this form of visualization you are changing the feelings of regret, sadness, envy, etc. into positive thoughts of accomplishment. The bad way of doing this is to actually bring up the past and re-live the mistakes and feel bad and worried about the events that originally produced the same negative feelings.  Often times during these sessions I get just as, or even more upset than the original situation.  My blood pressure goes up, my heart rate increases, and a general feeling regret comes over. 

As we have discussed, from the stand point of The Law of Attraction, these feelings have  a very high vibration, which means they will attract very quickly,  situations that will give me the opportunity to feel bad.  That is not what I want.  Using the past to learn, is a good thing.  It should be a short use of the “time”, not a place to wallow in ones pity. Yet that is what happens most of the time.  Once we start to go down that road, it is very easy to have others join us, because people love to talk about all the bad things that have happened to them.  Very rarely do people talk about the good things, and I think it is the social aversion to being over confident or to “brag” about one’s past. 

What we have to realize however, is that by going back to the negative feelings of the past, we are not doing anyone any good and in fact we are setting ourselves up for more failures.  We don’t have to brag, but confidence in the good things that have happened, and vocalization of these feelings with GRATITUDE  is a great way to attract more of it to our situation.  That is the purpose of visualization of the past.  We should use it to our advantage.  The mistake has happened and we have come through it one way or another.  What is the point of being upset over the so called “spilled milk”?

I hope this makes sense to you and you will heed my warning about reminiscing about your mistakes.   Don’t beat yourself up over things that have been done.  There is nothing to come of it.  Concentrate on the positive and more positivity will come your way.  I look forwards to your comments on my Facebook page and your Tweets on my Twitterfeed.  Till next week, to your success and happy holidays.