Sorting through the past is learning at its finest.
It’s true, and deep.
A hardy meal for our infinite and eternal soul.
It’s one of the most painful, yet revealing paths of spiritual exploration. To learn from regret requires a large commitment of energy. It requires being alone, facing darkness, and letting our mind and heart digest the history of our lives.
Facing our deepest, darkest aspects is spiritual time travel.
The 2 major rules to learning from regret are:
That we don’t become stuck in the psychic pain. We are here to be partakers of the physical realm, and to take part in the world as well as we are able. How we do that is left to each of us. To bring ourselves away from mental anguish sometimes requires that we become more physical.
As seekers, when we first become “re-aware” of our non-physical nature after immersion in the world, we long for the peace and exhilaration of those more ethereal aspects of ourselves.
All too commonly, we neglect the physical world.
As difficult as it is, we need to find the right balance between our contrasting parts.
We must be willful and participate in life by maintaining our minds and bodies, doing useful work, and establishing or maintaining healthy relationships. A key here is to build or rebuild foundational habits.
Yet, we must also be willing and allow the wisdom of our spiritual aspect to guide us.
Those two things, willfulness and willingness, describe the basic blueprint of the contradictory nature of spiritual seeking.
Practically, this might mean that we work out each day and spend time meditating afterwards — in other words, we build our capacity to conquer ourselves and to surrender (both are highly valuable skills).
That we don’t leverage our pain to garner attention. Attention seeking is a chaotic prerogative of the human world. Attention is sugar for the psyche, leading an otherwise well-intentioned seeker into confusion and distraction. It’s easy to bring up the past so we can get a quick fix, but it’s difficult to extract and embody the wisdom of the past.
This does not mean that we should forever stand alone and eat our pain in silence.
We should aim to constructively unpack the past as safely and expediently as possible. And, if necessary, with the assistance of others who are skilled in these matters. But we must avoid the temptation of fixating on or conjuring up the past so we can wallow.
This should be understood as a transitional period.
Ultimately, the goal is to let go, gain stability, and move towards better things.
