NOW

“When we move forward, wie die.
When we move backwards, wie die.
So let’s move forward and die.”
African Proverb

For me it has been very challenging to experience intimacy and vulnerability while feeling parts of self who have extreme fear, feel unsafe, don’t want intimacy, think they will be abandoned, etc. In the past I often have locked these parts up somewhere deep inside of me, such that I don’t have to feel fear, abandonment, all those echoes from the past while another person is around me. That resulted in these parts emerging and possessing me, making choices for me, me acting these parts out. They wanted my attention. Through somatic shadow work I have learned to attend to these parts regularly. When they get my attention, there is more space to experience reality as it is, not through the lense of the past.

When we believe the parts of us who project the past into the future, we often might act according to the past and not notice that the present is different.

When we notice that we believe that the future will be bad, we can use that as a pointer to the past and assume that there’s something in the past that we haven’t integrated.

The parts of us who have experienced hurt and pain and things our past selves haven’t been able to process don’t have to change. They are okay as they are. They don’t need to be fixed. We can just become aware of them and when we think about a bad future, before we act or make assumptions or choices, we can ask ourselves “Which part of me is doing the thinking right now?”.

We want to integrate our past selves and our fear of the future. Through including the past, whatever it was, we make space for the present. We become more conscious and can take the actions that align with us. The future is undecided.

The ambiguity is not a problem. It may be a reason why the future can be different from the past. We don’t have to fill the ambiguity with something, to not feel the ambiguity. What we can do is to move forward on our path and include the ambiguity.

When we show up for our hurt parts, listen to their fears and feel their energy, we develop more capacity to experience the present moment, the only time there is.