Coffee With Hilary and Les from State of Mind Hypnosis and Training Centre
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Coffee With Hilary and Les from State of Mind Hypnosis and Training Centre
The Past is Myth: Transforming Your Past into a Book of Lessons
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Can the past really be nothing more than a subjective myth? We promise that by the end of this episode, you'll see time in a whole new light. Join us for a thought-provoking conversation as we liken the ever-changing weather to life's constant flux, underscoring the significance of staying present. By dissecting our attachment to past experiences and future anxieties, we emphasize that the present moment is the only one we truly possess. This mindset shift is pivotal for those looking to cultivate mindfulness and embrace the now.
Our journey continues as we explore how reinterpreting past mistakes can lead to remarkable personal growth. Learn how seeing the past as an unreliable and subjective narrative can free you emotionally and mentally. We present compelling real-life examples, like overcoming deep-seated fears through regression and inner child work. By rethinking past events with newfound understanding, you can transform your future behaviors and attitudes, making peace with past mistakes and breaking free from their hold.
Lastly, we discuss the liberating power of forgiveness—not just towards others but also oneself. Viewing the past as a book of lessons rather than a source of pain, we unveil practical methods to facilitate forgiveness, such as visualizing the offender as a hurt child. Self-forgiveness is crucial, and recognizing that our past actions were informed by the knowledge we had at that time can lift emotional burdens. To support you further, we introduce the transformative potential of hypnosis for personal growth, offering resources and a free consultation. Join us for this enlightening episode and transform your perspective on time, forgiveness, and personal growth.
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Welcome and thank you for joining us for Coffee with Hilary and Les. Brought to you by the State of Mind Hypnosis and Training Centre located in the heart of the Kawartha Lakes, this is our almost daily community podcast about the mind and how we all might change it in the most simple and helpful ways. Every day we sit staring at the lake and sipping our coffee, chatting about hypnosis and how to make those meaningful adjustments to our state of mind, adjustments to our state of mind, because nothing's more important than your state of mind.
Speaker 1:Okay, we're on the line.
Speaker 2:Summer day, windy, summer, sunny day. Weather moves really fast. Now it's like one minute it's calm and sunny and warm, and the next it's windy and rainy, and then the next it's overcast and dark, and then the next the sun's breaking through and it's just quiet and still constantly moving, constantly changing. The harder I try to prepare for it, the more it bothers me. Yeah, always anticipating the future, always wondering about the past, complaining about the rain on the weekend, when really in this moment, right now, it is just beautiful outside.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it really is.
Speaker 2:The smell's nice, the wind is gentle on my face, the sun is warm coming down. Yeah, it's really kind of nice. I don't know what it'll be in 20 minutes, but I do know that it's nice right now. How's that for a segue?
Speaker 1:That was great A segue. Can you guess what we're talking about? Not the weather, no.
Speaker 2:No, the weather is just a good vehicle to talk about things. Yeah, I want to talk about past, present and future. I want us to do three more podcasts on time. I find it to be the singular most important thing when working with clients is trying to get them centered back into the present moment.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The past and the future are like problems to people you don't. They deal with the past in terms of resentment or anger or, um, guilt, shame. The past is fixated on it's thought about a lot things that have happened. You know there's there's so much to life and you know there's so much to life and so much going on. And then everything goes on and it's done. It did it, it's happened, and yet we reach backwards and cling to it. Even the good times, right, the good old days, the glory days.
Speaker 2:Asuce springsteen says you know the, the things I used to be, the things I used to have accomplished. You know, I remember when I had black hair, you know, and I weighed 30 pounds less. And you know, people cling to to things that are so long ago, you know, like high school days or things like that, and it's just such a problem the way people embrace the past and drag it into their present, and it's such a predictor of the future. People use the past to be afraid of their future, to be sometimes just really committed to their future, which isn't necessarily bad. But you know, we all talk about.
Speaker 2:You know, harry Chapin, you know cats in the cradle when you coming home, dad I don't know when, but we'll get together. Then, when you coming home, dad I don't know when, but we'll get together then we're so busy creating the future and being focused on the future that we lose track of the present, and the present comes and goes and we spend our present moment doing things that are targeted towards a better future. We think we'll make our future better without taking into account, really, the way we're spending our time mm-hmm, I think too, we reach back for not.
Speaker 1:You don't often see people reach back to like dwell in a happy time. You know, we, we, often we reach back um to things that are are perceived as maybe negative or scary, or regretful, or, you know, we're always doing that stuff instead of thinking, oh, I think, I think I'll, I'll, I'll sit and think about that happy time. Right, we, happy time comes and and it and it seems to just blow past us, but if something bad happens, we end up dwelling in it sometimes, and I think that's you.
Speaker 2:You know, the main reason why clients come to see us is because that has gotten out of hand and when we have had, you know, those moments where we look back at the past with love and appreciation, we spend our present time trying to recreate it rather than create something new and exciting.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I just think that, more and more, the more I examine my own life and the more that I spend time with clients, this idea of past, present and future are so difficult. There's such an obsession about them and, yeah, I just would like to deconstruct them a little bit, to take them down to pieces and see what it is we're doing in our mind that's not helpful, that our perceptions of the past, our perceptions of the future. You know, there's the old saying, you know past is regret, future is fear. You know that incredible, elusive goal that we never seem to be able to achieve. And I guess to me the first thought is they're all myth. They're all myth To consider what the past is practically and its dimensions, I think is really valuable.
Speaker 2:So I I think let's talk about the past and the past as myth, as this thing that we create to try to teach ourselves. But we often lose the the moral of the story. But we often lose the moral of the story, which would simply be to be present, be here, be now, be in this moment, because this is the only moment you've got and this is the moment that you're acting in and if you're going to do or you're going to think, or you're going to say something. It's going to happen now and, yes, the things we might do now are going to put us in a direction for the future. But there's a whole lot more, you know, factors that determine the future than the ones that we control, and so to be obsessed and controlling that, I think, is um illusory at best yeah so past as myth.
Speaker 2:You know what are your thoughts thoughts.
Speaker 1:What are thoughts um? What are thoughts? Um?
Speaker 1:I think, in terms of seeing it as a myth, is is uh, it's a. It's a new concept to me just now that you know you're bringing up, and I think it's interesting because we all have events from our past that sometimes aren't even the way we remember them right so we can go back to them. I've had clients go back in hypnosis and go, oh, that actually didn't happen like that. It's not always exact, right, we're not playing out exact situations in hypnosis, but sometimes it's just a new concept that, oh, someone didn't actually mean that, or that didn't actually happen, or that wasn't actually mine, or all those things. So I think, in terms of myth, I mean, yeah, it's already happened, it's in the past, it's never gonna happen again. You, you know, probably in that way, in that exact way.
Speaker 1:So I think it's good to look at it almost like a, you know, a painting on the wall or a, or what would you say? Like something written in a book. It's, it's already happened, it's, it's, you know, um, it's not something to cling to, even though we do. Um, it's not something to cling to even though we do. Yeah, it is a little mythical because it can also, just as myths do, it tries to create the future, right, oh, there's a myth of, let's just make up something Like a myth of somebody coming across the sea and you know, oh, so we'll stick to that myth and we'll wait for the person to come across the sea, right, and we'll do everything in our power to not miss that or be aware of it or be scared of it maybe yeah, I think that the past is so limited and so deceiving and so filled with interpretation.
Speaker 2:I I mean, first of all, everything that happens happens from an individual perspective. Right, what you and I are experiencing right now is completely different because we're sitting at the same table, we're talking about the same topic, but we're interpreting everything our own way, from our own perspective. Our own way from our own perspective, I mean, in hypnotism. We regress people to the past all the time because a little kid's interpretation of events has got nothing to do with any third-person observable, objective view of the circumstance.
Speaker 2:Right, you know, you are completely at the disposal of your five senses and you know just to think about how the world looks when you're, when you're two and a half feet tall and you weigh maybe 30 pounds and you have absolutely no control over anything that's going on other than maybe your own, being able to walk around inside the house or see what's happening, and you're observing things from that perspective. That limited amount of knowledge, that limited amount of knowledge, that limited amount of life experience, that tendency to be in fear because everything is new, that perspective is just so untrustworthy and it's seldom even close to what anybody might call reality. It's why I say that there's no such thing as reality, there's only experience. We are stuck with our five senses, moving around a giant planet, exposing our mind to a multitude of things and stimuli, and what we collect from our five senses is what we call our past, and then we interpret it. And that's, I think, so important is it's always being interpreted, and it's almost always being interpreted out of fear. How does this affect me? What will happen to me? What should I be afraid of? How much fear should I give this? And then the meaning goes even further, because then it's meaning about us. Am I worthy, am I deserving, am I allowed, am I good, am I bad, am I being good or am I being bad? So the past becomes this misperceived set of experiences that we use mostly to judge ourselves or judge others or, more importantly, just build a body of fear and confusion, sometimes determination and anger and resentment.
Speaker 2:But the thing that we tend to remember, I mean that's the tool we use in hypnosis, right, we use emotion, right. I can't say let's go back to a time where this happened. But I can say really easily I'm going to count backwards from five and when I get to one you're going to be at the place where this emotion began, this feeling that you have began, and I'll count backwards and I'll hit one and they'll just be there and it'll be some event that they don't even actively remember, that they haven't thought about in a long time. You know that's just repression, that they haven't considered, that they weren't even aware was there, and then it pops forward and then we reinterpret that past from the perspective of an adult.
Speaker 2:That's often just. All it takes is just re-examine that event from the perspective, a new perspective, not any more accurate, really, but probably a perspective with a lot less fear, a perspective with a lot more confidence, a perspective that, you know, in many respects proves to the little one that's going through that that experience, that they survived it and they survived it quite well, right. And it changes everything in the mind that precipitated from that. It changes every event following it that created that same emotion. So, you know, it's that idea that the past itself is such a limited, unreliable idea.
Speaker 2:That's why I call it a myth I call it a myth and the unfortunate thing is it often serves as the foundation for our future beliefs. It found it forms the foundation for the way we approach similar events or, more importantly, similar, similar emotional events.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the past is a myth, and the best we have is our experience. And our experience is we talk about all the time and we teach this because we think it's just a really useful tool to understand it. You know what's his name? George Ball the statistician, said all models are wrong, some are useful. You know what's his name? George Ball, the statistician, said all models are wrong, some are useful. You know, we like to think this is a model that is useful. That's helpful.
Speaker 2:If we take what we call experience and we accept that there's no such thing as an abstracted, verifiable reality, but that what we call reality is sort of the aggregate of everybody's experience and we all share it together. We say these are all the experiences and therefore this is what happened. If what all we have is experience, then experience comes from events that happen, that we place a meaning on, and that meaning is often very personal. It's often about who I am, what I am, my worth, my abilities, my qualities as a being, and then that creates an emotion in us, and the spectrum of emotions is from highest elation to the lowest depression and feeling that we are either champions and incredible, or that we are unworthy and incapable and everything in between.
Speaker 2:And those are the emotions that we put on, and when those emotions come in contact with the body, we call them feelings, because that's where we feel it, and everybody feels emotions differently. It's just our own habits. We feel them in different places in our body, we feel them at different intensities in our body. We feel them at different intensities. We feel them sometimes as very, very little and sometimes as as incapacitating. But when we break them down into those pieces and then we look back and see the past as a myth, then we're really in a position to say, um, I can release the past yeah, yeah, I think too.
Speaker 1:It brings me to, um, somebody I was working with recently I mean, everybody, it seems, goes through this, but this was very apparent is someone I was working with had a fear of frogs and it was debilitating, right, couldn't go on trips, stuff like that, couldn't even be around our own house without freaking out.
Speaker 1:Anyway, through regression, we came to a time where her mom had just said a few words and she took it on right. So it's, it's really, um, like you said, it's about going back and reinterpreting it as an adult, adult, adult, um, and uh, uh, yeah, just looking at it differently, applying new knowledge to it, um, doing some inner child work, and I mean, it can be that that simple and, uh, you know, the client was like holy moly, I had no idea that that's where that came from. But you know, moving forward is going to be different for her. And I think if we looked at everything like that, if we're scared of something, if we're, if we're, you know, anxious about something, if we're angry about something, if we're fearful, or, you know, if we're hurt about something just taking a moment and not getting dragged into it, but looking at it and going okay, you know I wasn't born with this anxiety. Let's say, where did it come from?
Speaker 2:probably somebody else yeah, we're so subject to other people's interprets, interpretations of events, especially when we're little and we have such deep, complete trust in people. You know, most people have this deep, complete trust in their mother, in their parents, in somebody who's been empowered to care for them and has been doing that, taking care of them. And and when somebody keeps bringing you a meal and somebody keeps changing your clothes and tucking you in at night and telling you a story, um, you, you, just, they become the source of all understanding.
Speaker 2:They become the source of everything yeah and you know, like you point out, the most important thing you can do with the past right, the word mistake. I'm just sitting here thinking about the word mistake. I took that wrong. Right, I interpreted that incorrectly. Mistakes that we condemn ourselves for, you know, mistakes in the past. I still have moments where I'll think about some things I've done in the past Just dumb, dumb things and I just shiver how could I have done that? And then I remember because now I'm a hypnotist and I've been working on this now for a couple of decades the past is only valuable for the lessons that we take from it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right In many respects. Just forget it, just let it go Like there's nothing you can do about it.
Speaker 2:It's absolutely gone, cannot be changed, never can be changed. The only thing that can change is your interpretation of it. And if your interpretation of it is, oh, I made a mistake and there's a lesson to be learned from that, then the past might have a little bit of value. But as soon as you learn the lesson, it's like I've learned the lesson, I don't need that past anymore. It's not valuable to me.
Speaker 2:You know, I think that we put too much weight and severity on mistakes. I always use this reframe with my clients we never learn anything by doing something right. When we do things right, we don't really learn much because it's obvious, we already know, we already understand, we're already capable in that regard. So when we're doing things and they go well, we don't remember them right. Simple things in life, like what you wore four days ago for clothes it went well, you didn't dress, you didn't have your tags out, you didn't have your zipper down, you didn't wear clashing colors it must have worked out, and so you don't even remember what we remember. What comes to us are the things that we did, that we didn't get right, that we didn't get it the way we wanted, and that's how we learn, that's how we grow, that's how we develop. We learn much more from our mistakes than we'll ever learn from the things we do right. And so really, the best thing you can do for yourself is make as many mistakes as possible, because every mistake you make you learn more.
Speaker 2:Now I think I've done my share, but um I? It changes the way I look at it. It changes the way I look at myself. Right, when I look around the world and I acknowledge that there's there's no human being walking around that hasn't made mistakes, and every human being is learning from their mistakes and I'm just one of them. I'm just another human being learning from my mistakes Then the past is nothing but a book filled with lessons. And if I took the lesson and I'm using it now well, in my life, then the past is not valuable to me anymore. And so how do I get rid of the past? How do I not judge the past? Well, I forgive it. Forgiving is everything. How do you teach people to forgive?
Speaker 1:Well, first I ask them if they're willing, and usually they are. Once they've done the groundwork, which is looking at the past in a different way, it's easier to forgive. I also have them look at, let's say, the offender, right In hypnosis. We call where you know there's a term the offender, which is just the person in the situation that did you wrong kind of thing that you're now hopefully about to forgive. But we look at the offender and sometimes I go as far as having them imagine the offender as a child, right, Because the person offending in that moment is back when is a scared, angry, usually hurt child, right?
Speaker 1:So, seeing them for what they are and where they came from. We're not about, you know, letting them off the hook for whatever they did, but it's about looking at it differently. And in looking at the person differently, it can change in an instant how you feel about the person and make forgiveness a lot easier. And I always get them to forgive them in their own way, because everybody's different with their forgiveness. So, yeah, that's how I, that's how I do that.
Speaker 2:I always use the refrain forgiveness is freedom and I always tell them you're not forgiving them for them, for their benefit, and I really encourage them not to let them know, don't tell somebody you forgave them, I forgave them. That's just a great way to start a fight. I just want to let you know I forgave you In your noses.
Speaker 2:For that thing that you did. Yeah, it's not advisable to go around telling people I forgive you. That forgiveness is really never about the other person. In as much as you forgive the other person and tap into some form of universal love that says, you know, we all make mistakes, you made a mistake, that's a pleasant gift that they don't ever need to know you did. But in as much as forgiveness is really about you being done with the past right. Forgiveness is about saying I learned the lesson here. I've learned about trust. I've learned about love. I've learned about these kinds of situations. Here I am today. I survived. Here I am. I'm smarter. Now. I've learned. I've survived this situation. That happened that maybe you know.
Speaker 2:I see myself in some ways as having made a mistake and I see them as having made an enormous mistake and really hurt me. I've benefited from that situation and that I'm smarter. Now I'm capable. Now I can see that kind of situation coming. Now I'm able to avoid that kind situation coming. Now I'm able to avoid that kind of situation. Now I'm able to avoid that kind of person. Now I'm able to protect myself from anything that might hurt me like that, I'm strong.
Speaker 2:But what's not serving me anymore is thinking about it, thinking about what happened, letting emotions of anger and resentment dominate my emotional state, letting fear and hurt dominate my emotional state. That's not helping me. I know I'm smarter, I know I'm capable, I know this will never happen again and so I'm ready to let go of it. I want to just let go of it. I don't want it acting in my life, in my choices, in the way I live today. I don't want it being active, and that's the value of forgiveness. The value of forgiveness is that I'm free today. I'm free to make whatever choice I want, without referring to the past, without referring to my past mistakes, without referring to other people's past mistakes, without referring to the past that might have hurt me. I know I can take care of myself, I know that I'm capable and I want rid of this past. I don't want it being part of my life anymore, and that's the value of forgiveness. And nobody has to know. You don't go telling people, but what you do is you empower yourself that way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think also it. Then usually what you see in clients is there's a forgiveness of others and as we're moving forward to the present moment, there's sort of like a wall there. And next is always forgiveness of self, right, because usually at that point they're going well, wait a minute, I hurt others too when I was younger or along the lines, and so then there's a forgiveness of forgiving yourself. Right, that's important to to do, and that's part of the past as well, because there's a past you that's suffering over something that you did.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I remember. It's an old, old phrase that a hypnotist who was one of our teachers uses a lot, and thank you, cal, for this phrase. If I had known then what I know now Oldest phrase in the books If I had known then what I know now right, oldest phrase in the books If I had known then what I know now, would that have happened Right? Would I have made that choice? Would I have done that hurtful thing, that foolish thing, that selfish thing? If I'd known then what I know now, then what I know now. And I think that it's that phrase puts it in the past and reminds us that the past is gone and there's nothing we can do about it. We can be different today, we can make different choices today, but the past is just gone and the thing of it is is it is gone. I mean, it's nowhere to be found except in your memory. And your memory is this really horrible storyteller because it focuses only on usually sort of negative judgments against yourself.
Speaker 2:Right, memory is confabulation. It's this really well-established concept in memory studies. That we fill in the gaps is what we do. We have the little bits of the story that we actually experienced and then we fill in the gaps with confabulation, and the confabulation is seldom accurate, but always consistent with the meaning we've placed on it. If we've interpreted the event and put meaning on it, then how we confabulate, the parts that we don't remember are very consistent with that meaning and often just inaccurate, just incorrect, not even close to what really was going on. But it's just the way the memory works. So the memory, you know, if you read memory studies, memory is as much a creator of story as it is remembering facts. Yeah, yeah, the past it's gone. There's only two things to do with it.
Speaker 1:Learn from it and forgive it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and when you do those things, it's amazing how free you feel to make choices now, which is the only real moment. It's the only truly part of time that is under your control under your control.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's true, it's where we actually live. So where we're thinking about our past, we're living in our head. If we're thinking about our future, we're living in our head. When we're engaged in the present, we are a mind inside a body capable of saying, thinking or doing an infinite number of things, and what we say, think or do is then a choice. And so that's why I say life is not lived minute by minute, life is lived choice by choice. Unfortunately, we let the past and our habits control our choices, and we let our fears and concerns about the future control our choices, when our choice can only ever be exercised here and now. It's easy to say, it's hard to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We all struggle with it, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:But yeah, let that be your reframe today. The past is a myth, a myth that I tell myself.
Speaker 1:With mythical beasts. To yes, yes.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, that's the way sometimes it becomes these others who have become so much more than they ever were in our minds. Past is a myth. Hope that helps.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's helping me. It's making me think. I'm just off thinking now, so on that note, we'll see you later. We hope you enjoyed today's podcast and that maybe it helped even a little. If you have any questions, we would love you to send them along in an email to. We hope you enjoyed today's podcast and that maybe it helped even a little. If you have any questions, we would love you to send them along in an email to info at psalmhypnosiscom. Thank you for being part of the State of Mind community. For more information about hypnosis and the various online or in-person services we provide, please visit our website, wwwpsalmhypnosiscom. The link will be in the notes below. While you are there, why don't you book a free one-hour journey, meeting with Hilary or Les to learn more about what hypnosis is and how you might use it to make your life what you want it to be? Bye for now. Talk to you tomorrow.
