THE EMBODIMENT OF PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
18 JANUARY 2022 (11 MIN READ)
About a week ago, standing in front of my mirror and dissecting every piece of my body, a sudden existential crisis smacked me in the face—that the past, present, and future are all occurring simultaneously. I could observe the past thought patterns of insecurity, calling myself ugly and fat, stemming from when I got bullied for my skin and weight as a kid. I could also feel myself in the present moment and how those thoughts from the past were affecting the way I currently felt. Lastly, I started to think about the person I was becoming and how close I was to my future goals, but the way I felt now was holding me back. After connecting these three dots, I realized that they are all occurring simultaneously to create your reality. My past traumas were affecting the way I felt in the present moment, which was making it harder for me to achieve the version of myself I wanted to become in the future. As I sat down in a state of shock and panic, I immediately thought, “How can I work with this? How can I use this newfound knowledge to become a better version of myself?” Well, this article is my attempt at answering those questions, both for myself and whoever decides to read the crazy ideas of a 23-year-old.
In short, my argument is that you cannot create a new future for yourself unless you start becoming present, because if you are not present, then you are just a reflection of your past. And once you find yourself in the present moment—away from past patterns—you can start creating a new future for yourself, as long as you have an intention for that future.
Although this sounds dandy in theory, getting to an internal place where you can actually do that is brutally difficult, especially without any guidance. For this reason, the rest of this article will lay out ways you can heal your past in order to become present, and how you can use intention in the present moment to create a new future.
LIFE AS A REFLECTION OF THE PAST
People often believe that by making a big life change, such as moving cities, that they can create a new version of themselves and alter the trajectory of their future. I once thought this way, but I realized that if you bring with you the past stories in your mind that you have always known, then your external environment will never really change you as a person. The stories have to shift for you to create any concrete change. And by “stories,” I mean the way you think about yourself, as well as other people. I used to constantly change romantic partners, external environments, fashion senses, etc., all in an effort to change my reality, but everything always felt the same. I never really understood why until I connected the dots I spoke about earlier. Because I never healed some of my traumas and insecurities, they affected the way I spoke to myself and thought about others in the present moment, leading me to always view life in the exact same way. Your thoughts color the world you see, and if those thoughts always stay the same, so will the version of the world you live in. This fact is why the commonly used phrase “change your mind, change your life” is so true.
Although many thought patterns have run rampant through my mind for many years, one mental loop has fucked me up the most over time: needing approval. Funnily enough, I had no clue it existed until I was about twenty-one. Until that age, every new friend or romantic partner I made stemmed from a place of needing their approval and love. Every word I said was coated with the intention of manipulating them so they could love me to the highest degree. This also meant that any time a friend or romantic partner felt distant or unloving, I would immediately get sent into a state of panic and self-blame. In short, I never felt like who I was deserved any love at all, forcing me to constantly play a role to receive validation. Thus, my thought pattern whenever I met a new person was, “How can I change myself for them to like me?” And until that mentality shifted, nothing changed in my reality—every new friend or girlfriend made me feel the exact same way. To combat this, I had to change my relationship with myself. I understood that I had to get to a point where I could meet people and think, “I hope I like them,” versus the other way around. Unfortunately, you can’t just think of a new reality and live it; you have to do the inner work first. For me, the majority of that work was inner child healing, focusing on the constant need for love from my mother and approval from my father, which transferred to needing love from romantic partners and constant approval from male friends. I had to break this pattern in order to live free.
After months of doing this intense work, I noticed my thought patterns shifting away from neediness. Even better, I stopped making any stories in my head whenever I met someone. I just put out my hand with no expectations and remained present, honoring who I really was throughout the interaction. Through this experience, I learned that unless you heal your past traumas, you will never truly be present. Because whatever is not healed from the past will dictate your future, resulting in a constant continuation of the past. So, if you truly want to create a new future, you have to heal your past trauma, which allows for you to become present and stay away from the past stories in your head. With this newfound presence, you can enter a new version of reality.
BE HERE NOW
My end goal in life is to be completely present a vast majority of the time, meaning that I barely think at all. Any thought I would have would be intentional, rather than invasive and emotionally charged. However, I do know that one can only get to this place if they have healed all the wounds from their past. This is the main reason why I’m so willing to tackle any emotional scar in my psyche, because I know complete personal freedom lies on the other side—in the form of genuine presence. Within the battle for presence are those sneaky things we call emotions, which can defeat us over and over again, but not for the reasons you may think. Each emotion in our body comes with a specific thought pattern that we have cultivated over time. Consider how differently you talk to yourself when you feel happy versus when you are catapulted into the pits of anger. In theory, each emotion should be treated like a wave washing over your body, refusing to give too much logical attention to one specific wave and remaining relatively tight in the mind throughout. You can both laugh and cry without having to make a story about the emotions in your mind. In other words, it is possible to feel without thinking. In fact, it’s what we started off doing when we were born, until suffering and trauma took over our bodies.
I believe that we feel first and think second, leading to most of our thoughts being colored by emotions. So, if we just learn to feel the emotions and stay in our bodies, then the thinking should start to dissipate. If only it was that simple. One must become familiar with the painful history of their negative emotions first, allowing them to release that pain and reset. Take the concept of a trigger—an intense emotional reaction stemming from exposure to an external stimulus reminiscent of a painful moment from the past. Once this trigger arises, then the historical thoughts that came with it will flood your psyche, leading you to become your past self in the present moment. A trigger I used to struggle with was feeling mentally useless, as in when my brain would stop functioning at a high capacity. Once this feeling arose, I would start panicking and thinking self-deprecating thoughts, such as calling myself stupid and lazy, over and over again. Until I investigated the history of this trigger, nothing changed. And the story goes like this: because I was bullied for my learning disabilities and put in special education classes as a kid, as well as my family members thinking I was dumb, I would constantly believe I was stupid and useless. Thankfully, years later, I realized that if I just worked harder than everyone else, I would outperform them, regardless of how smart I was. With this new strategy, in college, I started performing at an elite level academically and it felt so fucking good for my ego, making me never want to feel like that dumb kid again. Thus, I only felt worthy when I was the best academic performer in the room, but whenever I was tired or not performing at my best, the same exact feelings I felt as a kid would flood my body and mind. Unfortunately, this time the feelings and thoughts were even stronger because I held so much shame for them.
In summary, whenever that feeling of worthlessness and stupidity hit my body, I literally became that depressed kid again, thinking the exact same way he did. To heal this, I first had to release all the anger and negative energy I was holding in my body from that period of my life. I did this repeatedly, for a couple of months, until the trigger stopped feeling so emotionally charged. Next, once the bulk of the negative charge was removed, I started forcing myself to become present when the trigger arose. In order to flip the script, I knew I had to throw out the old one and write a completely new one—but how can you write a new script without a clean slate? You can’t. This is where being present comes in. You must empty your mind before you embark on a new journey, especially when it comes to healing a trauma. So, I would sit down and breathe for about five seconds on the inhale and ten on the exhale, forcing myself to remain as present as possible the whole time. Once I got to a place of complete presence, I opened my heart and sent love and gratitude to the feeling inside of me, as well as towards that little boy dealing with all that shame and pain. I would do this every day until the script had shifted to the version I wanted to live in.
In terms of your own trauma, you must identify the feelings that lead to the most negative thoughts. In other words, the feelings that take you most out of the present moment in a painful way. Next, you need to rewrite the mental script for those emotions to create a new reality. To do this, release the emotional pain from a trauma until the trigger loses a bulk of its charge. Once this is complete, force yourself to become present with the trigger through meditation, and send love and gratitude to the feeling, as well as the old version of yourself in deep pain. Repeat this over and over again until you notice the thoughts that come with the feeling vastly change in a way that you like. And of course, the end goal is having no thoughts arising with the feeling. Once you are at a place of presence with your negative feelings, and start a clean mental slate, the future that you want for yourself is more likely to occur.
INTENTION FOR THE FUTURE
Once you arrive at a place of presence with an emotion that usually gets the best of you, it’s then up to you to set an intention of what you want for the future. With being in the present moment, you have given yourself a clean slate to create a new future, so you might as well use it for what you want. For example, when my mental trigger—which was explained earlier—would come up, I would immediately go on my phone and doom scroll on social media, trying my best to numb the pain without using drugs. To alter this past script, I had to start putting my phone away when dealing with the trigger—and once I got to a place of presence, I would choose to do something more active, such as going for a walk or exercising.
Although slight changes in activity seem like a small deviation in your life, they actually create a compound effect that causes significant change, especially when they stem from a place of presence. Let’s go back to my example of scrolling through social media—it used to be my go-to activity to escape negative emotion, setting off a brain association between scrolling and feeling shitty. So, if I went to social media right after reaching an awesome place of presence with my trigger, my brain would just start manifesting negative emotion from the association it has built over time—transporting me back to the same old person I was before. New behavior can only stem from the unknown, meaning that your best chance at creating a new reality is to do something you normally would not do from a place of presence, away from the past stories you usually bring along with you. Therefore, you should pick an activity that is quite literally the opposite of what you normally would do when dealing with the negative emotion you are trying to heal. If you repeat this strategy with every negative emotion or trauma that comes up, then you will literally create a new reality for yourself—all stemming from making small decisions from a place of presence.
