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Dear Soul Arcanum:

Is there some way to find out from Spirit if we made the right decisions in the past? For example, lately I’ve been feeling like if I’d made different decisions over the past seven years or so, I would be on a higher or better path now. Can I find out? I’m a Christian, and at church I often hear that if I don’t do the right thing or act according to divine timing, things will go wrong for me. I believe that we do have to make the best choices for us to manifest good things in our lives, and the problem is that I don’t know if I’ve been making the best choices for me for the past seven years or so, because so much in my life is really a mess. Would my life be better now if I had made better choices? I keep going back to a couple of key junctures along the way, and a couple of key choices I made over and over again, and now I wonder if I was digging myself into a hole. I’m 26 years old and I’m ready to turn my life around, but I don’t know where to start.
– Elena

Dear Elena:

Congratulations – you are on the verge of a major personal breakthrough!

We’ve all known people who keep doing the same things over and over and expecting different results because they have not yet realized that they are causing their own misery. When they DO truly realize this – when they stop waiting for some outside force or person to save them, and they stop blaming other people for their problems – they will change.

Life brings many tests and challenges, and some are like entrance exams to the next level of our spiritual education. When the veil of denial begins to lift and we get an inkling that perhaps our old interpretation of life was somehow false or illusionary, what we do at that point is very important. If we push that thought away because we’re too “proud” to face the truth or because we’re just too lazy to do anything with it, we shift into denial and get caught up in limiting patterns.

If, however, we are ever consulting our hearts and souls and listening for the truth within, and we have the courage to face our faults and mistakes as soon as we catch a glimmer of them, then we’ll move on from false thinking before we dig ourselves into a rut.

There are basically three steps to healing and releasing the past so you can move on to new happiness: First you must face facts, then you must forgive yourself and others, then you’ll be free to focus on what you want for the future.

Step One: Facing Facts

When the past is haunting us, it’s a call for us to question some of the lies we’ve been telling ourselves. Negative emotion is the main symptom to watch out for, as whenever we’re caught up in sorrow, anger, fear, regret, etc., we are not seeing the whole truth. We should therefore question every thought that makes us feel bad.

We also need to let go of the need to judge everything – including the past. It was what it was, and we can safely assume that it was just what we needed it to be, and we did just what we needed to do, in order to learn just what we needed to learn.

To heal on a psychic/emotional level, however, we do have to face the truth about ourselves and our past actions and hold ourselves accountable for them. This doesn’t mean that we beat ourselves up about them forevermore. In fact, just facing the truth will launch us toward healing; the truth will indeed set us free.

When we have absorbed all the wisdom our experiences hold for us, we naturally graduate to a new level of life lessons, so when we’re hung up on the past, it’s generally because we’ve yet to learn something we need to learn. Until those lessons are integrated, the past will tug at us to go back and explore our experiences again. While I’m a firm believer in focusing on what we do want in life, in such situations, the only way to truly move on is to stop and review the past for whatever we seem to have missed.

It’s a bit like having a thread from your sweater snagged on something you’ve tried to walk away from – you have to go back to whatever you got hung up on, free yourself from it, and do whatever repair work is necessary if you want to move forward looking and feeling your best.

To accomplish this, you will have to examine your own choices and behavior and honestly ask yourself how you might have been more skillful. This will involve going back over any memories that hold a strong emotional charge for you. This charge may involve negative feelings about yourself such as shame, guilt or embarrassment, or they may involve negative feelings towards others such as anger, bitterness, jealousy or rage. These feelings indicate that there are psychic wounds that still need healing.

You might also want to explore the possibility that past life issues are at play in this situation. I don’t normally recommend looking for possible problems, but if you feel like the past is tugging at you or weighing you down, past life regression therapy may prove very helpful. (It would also be wise to stop and ask yourself what you may be avoiding in the now with all of this focus on the past.)

Step Two: Forgiveness

Once you have pinpointed those emotionally charged memories, it’s time to forgive yourself and others for anything you perceive to be a mistake or bad decision. While there are some transgressions that may seem unforgivable, it’s wise to understand that EVERYONE is always doing the best they can in any situation.

Granted, sometimes that best is really lame. In those situations, I recommend you do as I do: give thanks that you are not as lost and clueless as that person seems to be. It will help you find compassion for them, which will help you forgive whatever they did.

I’m reminded of when I was a kid and would try to tattle on my little brother, and my mother would wisely say, “You just worry about yourself.” We would all be wise to just worry about our own karma. Besides, when we forgive others, we don’t erase their karma for whatever they did – we set ourselves free from the pain and suffering of living with negative emotion and a heavy vibration.

Further, it doesn’t really make sense to second-guess our past decisions, because if we hadn’t lived what we lived, we wouldn’t know what we know now. So instead of regretting the past, it’s wise to give thanks above all for the bad experiences that led us to new wisdom and understanding.

If you really want to change your life for the better, I thus recommend you seek out everyone you believe you’ve ever wronged and apologize to them and try to make amends. Also, bring everyone who has ever wronged you into your heart and forgive them. This alone will TRANSFORM your life. It will free you from all sorts of negative patterns, send your vibration soaring, and open doorways to a rich assortment of new blessings.

Step 3: Focus on Fulfillment

Once you’ve faced facts and forgiven everyone you can think of, it’s time to start cultivating new blessings. At rudimentary levels of spiritual development, our main goal is to resist temptation and avoid making big mistakes. As we evolve, however, we soon realize that we have endless potential for cultivating wonderful karmic rewards.

Once you’ve healed the past, if you begin to actively strive to be good and kind, you will see miracles blossom all around you. By aiming to do the right thing, performing good deeds, and wishing yourself and others well, you can launch yourself onto a higher level of experience and reap the benefits of your wise habits forevermore.

– Soul Arcanum

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