Everyone has an opinion about how YOU should live your life. NONE OF THEM KNOWS SQUAT!
Ned Lips – Author
Your demons, your fears, your history, they are all yours. Only you can let them go. They’re in your past. They cannot be undone, but they need not move forward with you into your future. Leave them behind.
To watch this on YouTube, go to http://bit.ly/NedLipsAuthorYouTubeChannel There you can also enjoy my interview with the amazing Karen Hoffman, founder and leader of Gateway to Dreams. Or listen wherever you listen to your podcasts. Search Ned Lips to find me.
Go to confession, talk to a special friend, hire a therapist, corner an unsuspecting person at a bar who doesn’t know you and will have no impact on your life, and bare your soul. Get it out. Cry, rale, rant, scream, pound on someone’s chest, but vent. That term is used because you are releasing all of the junk in your life like a vent allows the bad stuff to leave your house.
Whatever ritual or process works for you, you must free yourself of your past and strengthen yourself against those who mean well but do not understand and from those who mean you harm. Your future to joy depends on it.
I’m sure you’ve all secured your version of Reset. So, turn to page 216 to 17. This takes place a bit after last week’s excerpt, after Sarah has revealed to Tom everything about her past.
The rain picked up, and Tom spoke, his words resonating deep within her, as though mixed with Asha and her mother somehow. “Let this rain wash all of that hatred, fear and guilt away. Let it wash away everything from that past life except you and your girls and how they are right now. Feel it wash you clean and new and free in a new world.” She felt Asha smile. It was like a Sandhyopasana ritual that her guru had taught her, a sort of Hindu baptism for purification. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth, drinking the rain. She let the rain wash over her, down her body and off onto the ground as she controlled her breath and silently recited the Gayatri. She felt the evil darkness flow out of her, mixing with the rain, sinking into the ground. She settled into a low meditative state and let the rain carry away her sins, failures, mistakes and terrors from her previous life. She could feel the water take the Storm’s dark side from her soul, pulling it into the earth below.
From Reset pages 216 to 17
It is only when she decides to completely release her past, letting it flow symbolically with the water into the ground and out of her, that she is able to free herself from it, and from the dark-side of the Storm spirit that has invaded her soul. Hopefully that hasn’t happened to you, but when we battle our pasts, stuffing them deep inside ourselves, it is the same as being invaded by an evil spirit.
Sometimes when your past is revealed, you find out how much of it has been a lie, something you made up to reconcile things that you couldn’t understand. In this scene in First Steps, page 199, Sarah comes to grips with the realities of her past with Robert.
The tears flowed again, and she couldn’t do anything to stop them. “We were never normal, Mal,” she croaked out. “I couldn’t make . . . a good family.” Mallory guided Sarah’s head to her shoulder, and Sarah sobbed.
“Cry it out, honey. Just cry it all out.” The psychiatrist sat in silence, waiting for Sarah to pull herself together.
Sarah lifted her head off Mallory’s shoulder, wiped her eyes with her right hand, cleared her throat and said, for both to hear, “Damn, I really am a head case. Good thing I’m her patient now.” The doctor cracked a smile, and Mallory giggled softly.
“Mal, I don’t think I ever really loved him. I never did. I loved you guys. I loved Mother and Herb and you and all your crazy, wonderful family. I was in love with you, not him. Maybe he knew that. Maybe I drove him away. Maybe I drove him to drink. It’s all my fault. Oh my god, Mallory, what have I done?”
The psychiatrist broke in, “Sarah, Sarah, none of this is your fault.”
First Steps page 199
It’s hard to believe a past that has never been yours. You’ve never followed your path, so it all makes no sense, seems to have somehow been wrong. So, we cover it up, make up lies to allow us to deal with it. It is only when we reach down deep inside and drag all of the illusions up, clarify them and begin to see more clearly that we can start to realize that we deserve better. We deserve joy. We deserve to follow our passions. We deserve to find our superpowers and exploit them. We deserve success!
Out past does NOT dictate our future.
My Life
Everyone knew what was best for me. Counselors, friends, parents, grandparents, employers, etc. They all meant well. They all applied the conventional rules of life. What are you at least reasonably good at? How can you make some money doing something like that? Never, what do you love to do?
Over the years I knew that none of it made sense for me. I searched, changed jobs, pissed off or freaked out wives, screwed up businesses and have generally been an abject failure, except as a father. Why? Because I could not find joy where I’d been told, assured that it could be found.
I wrote my first unpublished book in the 1980s and it was so much fun. I have reams of handwritten stories and poems from college. My girlfriends seemed to like them. I didn’t share them with many people, but I never stopped writing. I’m not sure what I should have been, but I realized in 2016 what I wanted in my heart of hearts to be. A novelist.
