Can You Heal The Past By Calming The Mind?
Healing from your past may seem difficult, but you can heal. Many say time heals all wounds. That’s not entirely true. Time doesn’t heal us. We heal ourselves if we choose to. We can take all of our pain and transform it into something beautiful to share with the world and in turn, can help heals us. We are put on this earth to help each other, though many choose not to help anyone but themselves, that’s not me.
I chose to speak up about the crazy chaotic journey that has gotten me here at this moment sharing this with you. You see, I’ve been there where you are right now, wondering how in the hell will I ever be able to move past every setback that has presented itself in my life.
From early childhood trauma to one of the scariest days of my life, when being held at gunpoint, being told to tell my two-year-old son “Goodbye son, momma will see you again one day.” But, I’m here happy and healthy, moving through life as if nothing terrible has ever happened to me. I was able to do this because I found my calm within the chaos.
I have empowered myself to look past all of that, to know and understand, what has happened to me can’t control me if I don’t allow it to. What happened doesn’t define me as a person. Yes, it’s made me into the person I have become thus far in life, but I didn’t have to remain that person.
I was angry because someone tried to take away something I would never get back and that was MY LIFE, MY ENTIRE EXISTENCE. This made me even more distrusting than I already had been due to childhood trauma. (that’s many stories for later) I distanced myself further from people who I loved because honestly unless they had been through what I had, they weren’t going to understand me at all anymore. (Or so I thought.) I became detached from feeling anything emotionally.
Unfortunately, I also had many sleepless nights from allowing my thoughts to consume my mind with reenactments of the past. I was diagnosed in my early twenties with PTSD. I couldn’t function as a valuable person in society because I was irritable with way too much anxiety, making it hard to pay attention and focus on simple tasks. I didn’t push myself outside of my comfort zone to heal because I didn’t understand how our minds work.
Instead, I abused the hell out of Benzodiazepine medications in my early twenties. For years I tried to mask the unsettling feeling of helplessness. I no longer wanted to think, I didn’t want to be stuck in my head not being able to slow the chaos that kept replaying over in my mind.
So, I continued my mind fog for fifteen years. Til I was compelled to face every chaotic thought that held me back from my true potential.
I was forced to stop cold turkey with those medications when I moved from my hometown. I had to figure out how to cope without any medications due to the opioid crisis plaguing our nation. Doctors now have their hands tied when it comes to prescribing certain medications.
If I hadn’t been forced to stop I wouldn’t have found the light at the end of the tunnel, I’d still be stuck spinning out in turmoil in my mind continuously on repeat.
Did you know 80 percent of our thoughts are negative, and 95 percent repetitive? Our addiction to suffering is at some level driven by a desire to feel better. But regardless, the result is that it makes us feel worse and causes us to suffer more than we actually need to. I prolonged my suffering by staying in the past.
So, how did I heal my past you might ask? It wasn’t all fun and games. It took learning about myself and how my mind made the illusion I was living in chaos. I had to recognize what living in the past does to us psychologically and understand how it takes away from our future.
Fast-forward 17 years, where a very impressive woman named Liz Franchini came along. She was in her sixties and seemed to have it all together mentally and spiritually. She would sit and talk me through some of my emotional overwhelming anxiety during tests I was taking for my GED.
Liz convinced me it was all in my head, That I needed to learn to slow my thoughts and shift them around into better more productive thoughts with the help of meditation, and ya know what?? It worked.
Now, I’m not saying I figured this out on the first try because that didn’t happen. I had to take the time to examine what I was feeling. This took me being consistent with my mental health.
It worked so well I started to research many different ideas on how to slow the mind and how it works. I wanted to know how to shift other thoughts that had been causing me long term anxiety and stress. At this point, anything was worth a try and had nothing to lose. So, I started in-depth research on meditation. It’s been suggested it can help with sleep, pain, high blood pressure, depression, and so much more. It has also been implied meditation can change the mind along with the body physically and help promote healthy habits within one’s overall health.
I personally use guided meditations by Jason Stephenson. He has taught me to transform my fear and anxiety into being driven by a passion to find my purpose for life.
With meditation there is mindfulness, I’m sure you have heard of it but what does it mean and how can it help? Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us. It means paying attention to the thoughts, emotions, and words we speak.
If you just throw in “whatever” you often end up putting in negativity, pain, fear, anger, etc. So it is really important to pay attention to what we are telling ourselves, what we are feeding our brain (the emotional pathways/habits we are creating IN our brain … 95% of our emotions arise automatically from those habits we have created)
I know, I know meditation and mindfulness sound absurd, I mean how can sitting quietly with your eyes closed help anyone? How can I stop my mind from rambling in the silence? How can I use this to heal my past? All of these are great questions and here is the quick answer. It just does.
If you’re anything like me and tired of the same old mindset of the past. Then, you are willing to try anything to get your mind straight to calm the chaos within, to live a productive life.
Gratitude is something else we all need to learn more about and how to practice it daily because it minimizes the use of words expressing negative emotions and shifts inner attention away from negative emotions such as resentment and envy, minimizing the possibility of rumination, which is an inclination of depression.
Over time, feeling grateful boosts happiness and fosters both physical and psychological health, even among those struggling with mental health problems.
Focus on the things you are grateful for. It can be something as simple as a smile given by a stranger or the colors of the sky nothing is off-limits when it comes to gratefulness. The air in your lungs is something you should be grateful for. Getting to wake up to have the opportunity to change is another. Like I said nothing is off-limits when it comes to being grateful.
Gratitude doesn’t have to be only for the “big” things in life. The habit of being grateful starts with appreciating every good thing in life and recognizing that there is nothing too small for you to be thankful for.
Throughout history and around the world, religious leaders and philosophers have embraced the virtue of gratitude. Some have described gratitude as “social glue” that strengthens relationships—between friends, family, and romantic partners and serves as the backbone of society.
With a simple intervention aimed at emptying the mind of the constant bombardment of disturbing thoughts can achieve major benefits for the mind, body, and soul. We all strive for the same goal in life,
and that is to have a calm peaceful life and heal what has broken us but we can’t reach that goal if we do not use the tools we are given to calm the chaos within. We never heal our past completely, we just learn different ways to cope, to me it was worth learning about.
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This book helped me put things into a better perspective.
