Where does the past live?

March 27, 2025 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

In our mind, only.

The first time I heard that forgiveness is “giving up the hope that the past could have been any different,” it resonated with me deeply. Something just made sense about that.

Oprah Winfrey expands on this by saying in the book What Happened to You?, “Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been any different, but we cannot move forward if we’re still holding onto the pain of that past and wishing it was something else.”

How often do we replay painful moments in our minds, wishing they had gone differently? We hold onto the past as if clinging to it will somehow change it. But the past isn’t something that exists outside of us—it only lives in our minds, in the thoughts we continue to revisit, in the stories we tell ourselves about the past.

It’s not the past itself that creates our pain. It’s the way we THINK about it.

Every time we recall a painful memory, we relive it in the present. Our body might tense up. Our emotions associated with that story rise. The hurt resurfaces as if it’s happening all over again. But it isn’t. The only thing happening is that we’re thinking about what happened. And those thoughts and the painful story are creating our suffering.

This isn’t about denying what happened. It’s about recognizing that right now, in this moment, we have a choice. We can keep carrying the weight of an unchangeable past and the story we have about it, or we can release it. We can stop arguing with what was and begin giving ourselves the care, love, and peace we want now. This is an option that’s available to us.

Forgiveness isn’t about excusing what happened. It’s about freeing ourselves from the pain of our stories about the past.

Your turn:
What painful story have you been holding onto? How does thinking about it make you feel? What if you chose to loosen your grip—just a little? What might open up for you if you allowed yourself to move forward or tell the story of the past in a different way?

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Work with me: Want to see how self-care is transformative and can help you create the results you want in your life? I can show you how. I offer first-time seekers a complimentary 45-minute exploratory session. Sign up here.

What’s on your mind? It can be powerful to learn from each other and our common struggles when it comes to our practice of self-care–or just being a human being. If you have something you’re struggling with and would like some perspective, share it here. Your issue may be chosen and addressed in the next post–it’ll be totally anonymous.

How your stories hurt you

August 15, 2024 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Change them instead.

Do you know that facts don’t hurt?

The circumstances of our lives have no effect on us until they encounter our mind – meaning, until we interpret them – and we attach meaning to them. We aren’t sad about someone dying until our mind registers the fact. The person’s death, which may have happened days ago, has no effect on us at all. It could be that at the same moment they died, we were laughing at a joke because our mind wasn’t aware of what just happened.

In this situation, we can separate out the facts from the thoughts. It’s less accurate to say, “I was devastated when they died.” It’s more accurate to say, “I was devastated by what I thought about their death.” And yes, these semantics matter.

When we realize that our mind causes our feelings, we can be much more in control of our emotional lives. It doesn’t mean that we won’t choose to be sad when someone dies – we most likely will be. But it does mean we can decide not to be mad when something much less significant happens in our lives.

We manage our emotional lives with our thinking.

If we say, “Work stresses me out,” it’s our thoughts about work that stress us out. Although we might not be able to change our job at this very moment, we can certainly change the way we think about your job. And that will change everything.

We create our lives mostly with our minds. We often believe our stories so deeply that we think they’re facts when they’re not. This is fine – so long as the story isn’t painful or causing problems in our lives. But many of our stories are painful, even debilitating. Our stories can hurt us.

Here’s an example of a story from someone who’s furious with her sister-in-law:

“My sister-in-law doesn’t respect or love me. She wants me to be fat because she makes certain foods for dinner when she knows I’m working to lose weight. It’s like I don’t even want to be around her because of the awful things she does. Just this weekend, we went to her home for a visit, and she was so backhanded, so conniving by making spaghetti for dinner. I know my husband (this is his sister) doesn’t even care. He doesn’t back me up when I feel this way, and he refuses when I suggest we should confront her and stop visiting her. I think I’m going to have to give him an ultimatum. It’s either her or me. He’s a grown man, and he needs to make this decision.”

In the end, these are some of the facts:

• She has a sister-in-law.

• She went to her home last weekend.

• The sister-in-law made spaghetti.

• Everything else was a story. A painful, stressful story.

This person’s sister-in-law made spaghetti, which she interpreted as conniving and

an attempt to sabotage her weight loss. Could the spaghetti perhaps have meant something else to her sister-in-law? Were there any other ways to interpret the facts that might feel better to her?

She could acknowledge that maybe her sister-in-law made spaghetti because her brother loves spaghetti, she’s Italian, and it’s one of her specialties. So either her original story or the latter one could be true. Which story served her better? Which story served the relationship better?

Even more, she can consider how it felt to leave the facts alone and not insert a meaning or a story about those facts. “My sister-in-law made spaghetti.” Without a story, this fact doesn’t hurt.

Facts never do hurt. Whenever we realize we’re creating a painful story, we can separate out the facts. Then we get to create our pain or our peace (or happiness) by how we choose to interpret the facts.

Your Turn: What stories have you been making up about situations, people, things, events? How do these stories leave you feeling? What are the facts? How do the facts leave you feeling? What happens if you tell the story of how this is happening FOR you instead of TO you?

I talk more about this topic of facts vs. stories in my most recent podcast episode for Get Out of Your Own Way. Listen to Episode 10: “Your Stories Are Getting in Your Way” here: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube

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The story you’re telling yourself

April 21, 2022May 1, 2022 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Making sh*t up?

Do you know that facts don’t hurt?

The circumstances of our lives have no effect on us until they encounter our mind and we attach meaning to them. We aren’t sad about someone dying until our minds register the fact. The person’s death, which may have happened days ago, has no effect on us at all. It could be that at the same moment they died, we were laughing at a joke because our minds weren’t aware of what just happened.

When we realize that our minds cause our feelings, we can be much more in control of our emotional lives. It doesn’t mean that we won’t choose to be sad when someone dies; we most likely will. But it does mean we can decide not to be mad when something much less significant happens in our lives.

We manage our emotional lives with our thinking.

If we say, “Work stresses me out,” it’s our thoughts about work that stress us out. Although we might not be able to change our job at this very moment, we most certainly can change the way we think about your job. That will change everything.

We create our lives mostly with our minds. We often believe our stories so deeply that we think they’re facts when they’re not. This is fine—so long as the story isn’t painful or causing problems in our lives. But many of our stories are painful, even debilitating.

Here’s an example from someone who is furious with her sister-in-law:

My sister-in-law doesn’t respect or love me. She wants me to be fat because she makes certain foods for dinner when she knows I’m working to lose weight. It’s like I don’t even want to be around her because of the awful things she does. Just this weekend, we went to her home for a visit, and she was so backhanded, so conniving by making spaghetti for dinner. I know my husband (this is his sister) doesn’t even care. He doesn’t back me up when I feel this way, and he refuses when I suggest we should confront her and stop visiting her. I think I’m going to have to give him an ultimatum. It’s either her or me. He’s a grown man, and he needs to make this decision.

In the end, these are the facts:

• She has a sister-in-law.

• She went to her home last weekend.

• The sister-in-law made spaghetti.

• Everything else was a story. A painful, stressful story.

This person’s sister-in-law had made spaghetti, which she interpreted as conniving and an attempt to sabotage her weight loss. Could the spaghetti perhaps have meant something else to her sister-in-law? Were there any other ways to interpret the facts that might feel better?

Facts never do hurt. Whenever we realize we’re creating a painful story, separate out the facts. Then we get to create our pain or our peace (or happiness) by how we choose to interpret the facts.

Your Turn: What stories have you been making up about situations, people, things, events? How do these stories leave you feeling? What are the facts? How do the facts leave you feeling?

Subscribe if you want to receive this content directly in your inbox.

Work with me: Want to create a more meaningful life in which you start committing to yourself and get to show up the way you want? I can show you how. I offer first-time seekers a complimentary 60-minute exploratory session. Sign up here.