How to Change the Past

<p>Past experiences shape who we are. We, humans, spend an incredible amount of time reliving our pasts and forming narratives that, consciously or unconsciously, can begin to dictate how we think of ourselves and how we show up in the world.</p><p>But the truth is, you likely have some stories about your past that aren't serving you – that are, instead, keeping you from owning who you are NOW and rocking the hell out of this one precious life.</p><p>Today, we’re going to talk about your past and how to change it.</p><p>For many of you, this may be the most important work you do in your life. Because far too often, we base our entire identities on our past experiences.<br />All those things we regret.</p><p>All those things we feel victimized by.</p><p>We spend a lot of time with those memories – those thoughts – of the past.<br />In turn, this influences how we experience the present moment – and how we create our future.</p><p>What is the past, anyway?</p><p>The “past” as we experience it now is a thought – a thought about what happened.</p><p>We feel like our thoughts about the past aren’t optional – that they are just recollections of facts. We don’t think we have a choice about how we think of the past.</p><p>This is why, when we spend all our time perseverating about the past, we keep living the same life over and over. We keep repeating the same patterns.</p><p>But actually, we get to remember our experiences however we want to.</p><p>Does this mean that all those traumatic events in our childhood didn’t happen? F*ck no. Of course, they did. Does this mean that all that work we did to heal and overcome them and move forward somehow becomes minimized by not giving them as much brainpower? Never.</p><p>But our interpretation of those facts – the STORY we tell about them – THAT’S optional. Ultimately, our thoughts create our results.</p><p>Using myself as an example, I could choose to tell myself the story of how hard my life was because I grew up poor and in a violent, gang-ridden neighborhood, with a mother