How to Heal the Past so You Can Live Your Best Present

Image by Jared Muller from Pixabay

I thought I’d share some healing work I did recently using a process designed help me change how I feel about my past experiences. I’m not going to say that if someone suffered a terrible atrocity they could just do this and everything would be better, this is an example of a more chronic negative belief I have harboured.

The scenario was this: I was recently in a lot of pain as – unbeknown to me – I was in a long drawn out process that eventually led to the passing of a kidney stone.

Not receiving any compassion from those close to me when I shared I was in pain, I just repeated my life pattern of stoicism, pushing away that familiar dull ache that has a voice I have never dared listen to. Instead it unconsciously joined the manure pile of resentments.  

Once I had become aware of this (which is another story in itself, but the short version is I got upset about then being called emotionally withdrawn), I began to wonder why it was I was attracting a lack of compassion and kindness in my life.

More often than not, this trail leads back to childhood where early patterns begin before conscious awareness or memory even kicks in. One of the voices in my head about this issue pointed out that, even my mum (who I would describe as being often tense and controlling as a parent when I was younger) showed compassion when I got sick.

Then I realised, as often happens if unhealthy patterns remain unaddressed, it is a red flag when an even more unkind version of what I’d experienced as a child was showing up. That indicated to me I had a hurt part of me that was thriving like a cockroach on that manure pile of my unaddressed detrimental life experiences.

I decided I needed to take a good look in the shadows to figure out what was going on. I also noticed that, when I finally had some time and space in which to do this, I did my best to avoid getting started for quite some time.

My mind rationalised this by saying I was clearing the decks so I wouldn’t get distracted but, to be honest, it was probably trying to protect me. My mind usually thinks its job is to steer me away from anything that feels unsafe; which amounts to anything that might disrupt the safe patterns/stories that my head has been telling me for years.

Finally getting down to it, with a good hour or two of uninterrupted time still ahead of me, I began the process by getting comfortable and becoming aware of my body, and just identifying any aches and pains. 

I started with the recent memory of the kidney stone to trigger myself into the right emotional state, remembering how it had felt in my body to have the pain I was feeling unacknowledged. Everyone in the room was going about their business, not listening to me; it brought to mind a picture of me banging on the other side of a glass wall yelling for attention but no one gave it.  

Once I’d really sat with that feeling for a while, I let myself look at the video screen in my mind as I asked it to reveal the first time I had felt this way. As I’ve said, this is not about recalling conscious memories, it’s allowing your mind to create a vision of something it perceived through feelings.

I then found myself looking at a yellow sleeve on a chubby arm waving around beside me. It seemed I was a baby in a crib feeling little point in crying out. I could hear the sound of a vacuum cleaner in the background, and the odd clanking sound that indicated my mum was in the house somewhere.

This correlates with something mum told me when my own kids were babies, about her putting on the vacuum when I wouldn’t stop crying to create white noise. Rather than soothed, what I was feeling was suppressed; I had already learned not to bother crying in this memory. I knew, therefore, I had to gently persist and go back further to the point this pattern began.

I went back too far, or perhaps my mind was still trying to get in on the act to help me avoid the real source of pain, as I found myself experiencing my mum as a baby. Although I knew this is undoubtedly an ancestral pattern and part of our collective consciousness, it was not where I needed to land in order to heal, I needed to find the source of my own physical experience of this pain.

I then found myself crying and crying as a tiny baby lying on my back in the crib again with my hands and feet tensed up towards the ceiling. The sound I was making was high pitched, repetitive and full of anguish, my throat was raw and I felt disoriented and confused. As I was experiencing this in the first-person perspective, I stayed with it for a while and assured myself that the way I was feeling was totally valid.

Once I had settled into that awareness fully, I sort of splintered my awareness and stepped into my adult self’s perspective. The first thing I did was pick up baby me, wearing a little cream coloured onesie. She felt so tiny, like a newborn, I’d forgotten babies could be so small and light in weight.

I leaned her against my shoulder, her little bum wrapped in a nappy fitted entirely in one of my palms, while my other palm rubbed her small back that was all sweaty and hot. Comforting her until she slowly calmed, I could smell that lovely baby smell on top of her head and acknowledged to her all the while how scared she must have felt and how totally normal it was to feel like that given the circumstances.

Once baby-me was calm, I asked her what she wanted. She wanted her dad as his energy felt good, but he was at work and mum’s energy felt tense and overwhelmed. Asking what she would like to happen, I suggested that we explain the trauma this behaviour was causing, and show them a video of me in the future, crippled in pain with a burgeoning kidney stone and unable to attract soothing from those who love me.

I then asked that both my parents be wrapped in the arms of love to heal their own wounds so they could give baby-me the kindness and compassion I needed.

Afterwards I sought my inner sanctum, a place in the forest surrounded by photons of light with dappled sunlight coming down through the leaves, where I can sink into my higher self for support. From this safe haven I asked that any fractured parts of baby-me return. These are essentially the aspects of me that I had suppressed, denied or disowned each time my distress had been ignored.

These I visualised as other carbon-copy babies, and as the older baby I had first experienced. In fact, at that point I saw a lady walking towards me, as if out of the mist. She was young and looked dressed in the 1940’s fashion, wearing a small velvet half hat with a veil and feather and short woollen trench-type coat pulled in at the waist and heading towards me with the many versions of baby-me.

I recognised her as my gran, as she would have looked in that era, and she was bringing back all those parts of me that had turned and fled back to their source, our source. My gran was a gentle woman who personified kindness, so it was a very fitting image.

As all these fractured parts of me returned and melded with tiny baby-me, we watched as the previous scene of the screaming, unattended baby floated away on a bubble that then popped.

From there I found we were in a warm sandy cove, surrounded by narrow horseshoe-shaped grassy cliffs, with a waterfall making its way from a height into a pool at the bottom. We all splashed and played in the water and I experienced great joy as baby-me lying on her back in the warm waters of that pool, gurgling and splashing in abandon.

I left the scene holding that feeling within me as I seemed to watch a montage of further scenes of me progressing through life, revisiting points in my history from this altered state of memory of joy and kindness and then returned to the present day feeling a good deal lighter than when I had begun.

There are other specific memories that I hold, related to this, which I will do shorter visualisations on too. Am I rewriting history? Yes, I’m rewriting my emotional history. Does it change what actually happened in the past? No, but it changes the way I feel inside.

I now know that someone does care enough about me to show kindness and compassion when I’m struggling in life, and that someone is me. Inside I have a real sense of the compassion I felt towards that tiny baby as I held her when she was crying and a real sense of the joy she felt when basking in that care.

Free of past hurts that I hadn’t even been particularly aware of, yet had defined my approach to certain situations, I can now fully embrace the present and future without being constantly dragged back into a state of stoicism.

There are many resources and practices out there that facilitate this change in the emotional signature of events within us; this particular one is Teal Swan’s Completion Process. But I have come across this type of technique (where the adult self revisits the child self) in many practices, and recommend finding one that fits for you.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Why Resenting Your Parents is Healthy, How to Keep Your Eyes on the Prize, Heal Your Past Hurts To Help You Fulfill Your Potential and Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.