It seems to me that often how we feel about what is happening in the present moment is not really about what is happening.  Our struggle to be in the moment is often a valiant one because so many of these moments are perfect re-enactments of other moments, painful or challenging ones.

This is why we get upset about a seemingly minor occurrence.  Our worldviews are upset.  They are being shaken by a trigger that brings a message about a past event; it is ready to heal.

Life’s desire to heal us laps at the shores of our consciousness constantly.  It does this by manifesting in our lives situations that replicate the ones that hurt us in the past.  A seemingly innocuous event might upset us more than we think it should.  Most of the time we try to brush these things off.  We ignore the events which bring up these feelings inside of us over and over again until we just can’t ignore them anymore.

You know you’re caught up in a reenactment of an important moment from your past because it hurts more than it should, makes you feel childish or foolish, and makes you want to forget about it but you can’t this time.

You may think you were too young to have been affected by what happened in childhood to bring about this reaction today but you weren’t.  Because you were so young what happened impacted your whole world at the time.  Because you were young and had limited life experience you drew an incomplete and erroneous conclusion about what happened.  You gave it meaning and the meaning you gave it said something about you.  You thought, “if I am being treated this way then I must be….”  But what happens around us is rarely about us, even (especially) in our childhoods.  And the conclusions we drew back then can impact us for the rest of our lives until we recognize them and correct them.

How do we do that?

I found an answer to that question when I was traveling with my daughter in Greece in 2010.  I wrote a book about it: The Happy Place.  It’s available in the Amazon stores in print and Kindle format.  No Kindle?  No problem!  Get a free Kindle Reading App here.

Photo credit: Randon Pederson