Meet Future You

I did a fantastic exercise this week where I visualized future me. As I’ve been writing about recently, I’m focusing more in my heart than my head right now, so this wasn’t one of those wish list type exercises where I think about who I’d like to be.

Instead it was more of a meditation to relax the mind, followed simply by trying to see what ideal future me looks like. It was refreshing to observe aspects that made absolute sense, though I doubt I’d have come up with them if I’d let my head take the lead.

Future me was relaxed, my skin looked soft and glowing, despite some fine lines that appeared to etch kindness and point to something inside that was very at one with life.  I felt love flowing to and from me, especially in my interactions with others. I could hear children’s laughter and life seemed lighter and more fun.

Trying to capture the feeling of that vision in words simply doesn’t do it justice, it was a moment of pure grace and it will stay with me for a long time. It’s my aim to imbue this feeling and breathe this ideal me into existence.

Had I have gone the other route and tried this exercise from my head, I’d likely have focused on what I was doing and achieving rather than who I was and how I felt. Yet I am acutely aware that anchoring myself in the feelings of that visualization couldn’t fail to attract all the things I would love to see in my future.

It conveyed great relationships, vibrant health and wellbeing, satisfaction with life. No worries or stresses, though that didn’t mean an absence of challenge, I was just able to trust in the moment that everything was unfolding exactly as it needed to.

It’s as I described the three main states of being in Building a Healthy Self Concept, this future ideal self had managed to integrate, through awareness and active healing work, the parts of myself that had fragmented through my early life.

It is fair to say that I am not there yet, I’m more in the second category I described in Building a Healthy Self Concept. While I am aware of my thoughts and feelings much of the time, I am still working through the patterns and their origins as I outlined in Do You Need to Cherish Yourself?

But the third state, which still seems to be the default path for the vast majority of people, is one that occurs in an unconscious mind; unaware of the effects of one’s thoughts and feelings. A friend of mine commented on a photo of a family member they knew. It was a photo of her earlier in life, and they were particularly struck by how attractive she had been compared to the lines of bitterness that now etch her face.

Who we are on the inside shows on the outside whether we like it or not. But awakening to your thoughts and feelings, and the role they have in what happens in your life, means the default is reset constantly.

I once heard a spiritual teacher talking about bygone days of mystics predicting our future. There was a time when a valid psychic reading would have been extremely accurate. However, with each passing moment, our life presents infinite possibilities to change and so the future possibilities can also change.

As more and more of us take charge of what we are thinking and how we are feeling, future forecasts like this are less reliable.

It helps me to think of an ideal future version of myself as one who is unencumbered by circumstances and experiences. Rather than trying to be something different, I am simply trying to lighten the load and heal those experiences in my life that created splits within me (between what I would have authentically liked to have said or done versus what others wanted from me).

I can’t change those experiences that have happened, but I can change my perspective of them.  Rather than have them dictate the values and beliefs I subconsciously hold and thus the way I feel about everything in my life, I can look at those fragments as stepping stones towards greater clarity and understanding and – most juicy of all – growth.

The truth was, my parents did the best they could with what they knew in the moment, as did my teachers. Yet, as a grown adult, I would often feel defensive and angry if things were not going well for me in life. Then I started to reclaim my own life, to become aware of my thoughts and feelings and take ownership of living my life authentically.

There were glorious moments of testing the waters, of living my truth, and the walls not crumbling down. Through each step, my parents may not always have understood or approved of my actions, but I no longer felt the need to be validated by that approval and our relationship became adult to adult.

When my mum died, I felt blessed for all that she had taught me. But things could have turned out differently, like so many parent-child relationships, she could have passed away before I had got my big girl undies on and grown up. As grownups, we have the opportunity to make our own choices, and that includes rediscovering what we think about and feel about things.

Visualising future ideal me gave me the gift of hindsight in the present. By embracing who I felt my less encumbered self to be, things already feel a little lighter and brighter.

Given that you were drawn to this article, and particularly if you are still reading, it would suggest you have already diverged from your default path. So are you ready to meet your future self?

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