Not was, not will be, but who am I right now? That has been the resounding question in my heart and soul now for several months. And not surprisingly that question keeps coming to me via different messengers.
I have saved on my desktop a quote I read recently from Tony Robbins:
You are now at a crossroads. This is your opportunity to make the most important decision you will ever make. Forget your past. Who are you now? Who have you decided you really are now? Don’t think about who you have been. Who are you now? Who have you decided to become? Make this decision consciously. Make it carefully. Make it powerfully.
When I read this a few months ago, I knew the message was aimed exactly at me and where I am in life. It cut through all the fog and fear and challenged me to step up to the plate and embrace the changes that are calling me.
But words on paper, no matter how compelling, are just that — words on paper! Applying to real life is the challenge. In real life, we have relationships, obligations (real and imagined), physical and financial limitations, and on and on and on….. so many things to stop us from breaking out of old patterns and molds that no longer serve us. Actually “serve us” is too nice; these molds and patterns can begin to strangle us if we hold on to them too long.
Not that letting go of them is a simple choice. Often we are so entangled in these molds and patterns that we feel imprisoned by them.
And then there’s the real question of — is it really possible, even recommended, to “completely forget your past”?
Enter Christina Sell’s recent blog post on change, possibility and purpose. She talks about her own period of growth and change and quotes something from her spiritual teacher, Lee Lozowick:
“What can we create from nothing, without a filament of the past?”
There it is again, the same message! But Christina then goes on to explain what she believes he meant by this:
I do not think my teacher meant that we should forget everything that we know, pretend the past doesn’t exist or anything such thing along those lines. I think he offered us that question as a teaching, much like a Zen master offers his students a koan. I think he wanted us to sit with this question, to chew on it, to contemplate its meaning and its implications. I think he meant this question as an invitation to us individually and communally to move beyond our habitual mind and conventional notions of who we are and how we do things. I think he was pointing us to the doorway of true creativity where we could consciously craft our lives from Pure Possibility rather than from the patterns and habits that were forged in the past.
Thank you Christina for such a beautiful and clear explanation! Now the work becomes unbinding ourselves from the filaments of the past, so that we can create / recreate our lives based on the present — who we are today after all our experiences, challenges, and growth — rather than from filaments of the past. In other words, continuing to do what we did yesterday after we have outgrown those patterns only creates more of the same; it doesn’t allow us to create anything new and that aligns with who we are now.
Instead we just keeping engraving our old patterns deeper and deeper into our psyche and behavior.
To start over and create anew “without a filament of the past” is not a call to discount the past but rather to rise above it. Challenging? Absolutely, gut wrenching challenging! But what choice do we really have?
Deep change or slow death!
We either change deep within and let go of what no longer serves us or we die a slow and painful death.
Choice seems pretty clear.
May we each have the courage and the compassion to thoughtfully embrace the present, and to create lives that enable us to live fully “without a filament of the past.”
Leave a Comment