DIY for Your Soul Podcast - Look at the Past, Don't Stare

Developing a life in which we feel whole requires us to look back at our past to get an accurate picture of why we are where we are. It requires that we look at the whole of our lives – the good and the bad.

But for many of us, delving into the hard parts is scary. But we cannot ignore parts of the whole when the goal is to become whole. We cannot deny those things that caused us pain by avoiding or ignoring them. We need to find a way to keep the pain we will certainly encounter from overcoming us. And we can accomplish this by looking at the past, but not staring at it.

In this podcast, we learn that to successfully navigate the past we need constantly remind ourselves that although we are the sum total of our past, we aren’t stuck with it. The past may have brought us were we are, but it doesn’t have to dictate where we go. And we must remember that the point of looking back is to understand how it’s affected us.

And we find that when we take on the task of addressing those parts of us that aren’t so pretty, it’s helpful to have a tool that can talk us off the ledge when we forget that past is the past and mentally begin to relive and recreate those negative things about ourselves. That tool is, Look at the Past, Don’t Stare.