Magic of Forgiveness Emotional Freedom and Transformation at Midlife

from Chapter 7 Acceptance, Integration adn Letting Go: Coming to Terms and Releasing the Past Unconsciously, we're all writing the story of our own lives. It's important that we unearth the details of our unresolved pain, tease out the meaning that we've made of the events of our lives and share our stories with others. We need to hear the sound of our own voices, to create, uncreate and re-create our own meaning, and write the next chapter with our eyes open. Lying to ourselves about how we've experienced the events of our lives doesn't work; our unconscious will hold us to our own truth, whether we like it or not. The truth will reveal itself to us, consciously or unconsciously, that much is for sure. The choice we have is not whether or not the sins of our past will visit themselves upon our presentthey will. The choice we have is whether or not that visitation will be conscious or unconscious. When it is unconscious, we live out our own cycle of hurt, blindly passing the pain on to others in one form or another, or keeping our own lives from flourishing. When it's conscious, we're choosing to use the circumstances of our lives to grow. We till the soil of our lives, turning over the contents of our inner worlds, digging deep, weeding, planting and nourishing new growth. We tend the garden of our own soul. Integration, by now, has been happening naturally as we honestly accept, confront, explore and experience parts of our personal history that have combined to make us who we are. That exploration has taken us from meaningful moments in time to relationships that have shaped us and formative family styles that have acted as our classrooms on how to live. By now we have learned what it means to process repressed emotions by feeling and understanding them, making connections between the past and present behavior, and identifying repetition patterns (dynamics from the past that repeat themselves in the present). When we allow ourselves to revisit these pieces of personal history and explore the impact the events of our lives have had on the person we are today, we reintegrate them with newfound awareness and insight. This allows us to use the events of our lives as opportunities for growth, to extract meaning from them, and to separate the past from the present. We learn to see how the past might be playing itself out today, getting in the way of our ability to have nourishing relationships and move freely and productively through our lives. We also learn to work through what was difficult and learn from it, while claiming what was good and using it as a solid foundation upon which to build a life. This is how we grow; it's an undoing and a redoing, a deconstruction and a reconstruction, a working through and a letting go. What preoccupied us moves from the foreground to the background of our minds, and though it may, at times, reemerge, it does so with greater understanding and less pain attached to it. Breaking theDayton, Tian is the author of 'Magic of Forgiveness Emotional Freedom and Transformation at Midlife' with ISBN 9780757300868 and ISBN 0757300863.