Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Look Back on Your Past with Love


Cynthia Sue LarsonSee Cynthia Sue
Larson
summarize this ezine on YouTube

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Look Back on Your
Past with Love



"Nothing changes more consistently than
the past;
... the past that influences our lives is not what actually happened
but what we believe happened."
- Gerald W. Johnson


The provocative statement, "History is written by the victors," draws attention to natural human bias that reframes events according to current views and pesrpectives. We can feel strengthened by the way we mentally review our past, and as simple an idea as reflecting upon how much better things are now than they might have turned out can tremendously improve our ability to prosper through a heightened sense of confidence and commitment, as one study reports this month how looking back is key to moving forward. A book I read this month, The Imposter, is written from precisesly this kind of counterfactual reflection, telling the story of how a young man who ran away from home as a youth mastered some important life lessons that helped him overcame drug addictions and a variety of other negative life situations.

Sometimes we can look back at reality shifts we have experienced in our lives and see how things turned out better because of the shift. While I was writing this July 2010 newsletter, I took a break to make dinner while alone in the house. I had just put a macaroni and cheese casserole in the oven, when I noticed the front door was wide open, inviting sunshine and a fresh breeze but I had left it closed and locked. I could hear voices of my daughter and her friend outside. I said, "Hello!" to them, and turned away from the front door to wash my hands. When I turned back around, I saw the front door was closed and locked... so I opened it and looked outside, but
saw no sign of anyone. I wondered to myself, "Where did they go?" as my telephone rang, and I received a call from a friend wondering if I had time to talk. I replied "Yes," marveling quietly that I had just finished making dinner, and was still alone in the house. My friend and I talked for about twenty minutes, until my daughter arrived, which turned out to be just long enough for me to hear all about the wonderful book on angels my friend has just written. I asked my daughter and her friend if they had arrived home about twenty minutes earlier and opened the front door, and they said they had not been anywhere near the house at that time. The thought occurred to me that I had experienced a reality shift in which I caught a glimpse of another possible reality that showed itself to me like a truncated branch on a tree of possibilities. I had heard my daughter arrive home twenty minutes earlier... but then it was clear she had not arrived yet, and I had a chance to talk with my friend on the phone before my daughter actually appeared.

Observation of reality shifts is necessarily an exercise in noting changes in the past. If we didn't remember things being very different, we would not notice reality shifts at all. We would not be surprised, for example, if suddenly our keys were in a place they had not been before, because we wouldn't remember them being in any other place. There is a possibility in some reality shift experiences that our ability to reframe our memory of what or where something was can greatly influence physical reality. The important question thus becomes: Do we literally change our past, simply by changing our memories? When I encounter this kind of reality shift, I find myself wondering, What if all possibilities exist together simultaneously in many parallel worlds, all being tried at once by our consciousness which selects the one path which is agreed to have the most value? I sense at such times that there seems to be an organizing force afoot!

Psychiatrist Sigmund Freud noted how suggestible people can be to envisioning entirely different pasts in psychotherapy sessions, and now, many decades later, psychologists observe that on average, about 25% of a randomly selected group of adults will readily change their view of the past without consciously being aware they are doing so after having been provided with prompts suggesting possible early childhood memories. The field of advertising benefits from fond imagined memories when it attempts to remind us of happy moments in our past that we previously had never remembered, and such ads can occasionally be seen in TV and print ads.

There is a striking similarity between imagining something and remembering something, since similar parts of our brains operate in both cases. Studies have shown that people who practice something only using mental visualization and imagination can improve as much as those who physically practice, as the connection between our imaginations and our physical bodies is very strong. Asking yourself what part of your past could benefit from beomg reviewed more positively, with a view to recognizing ways you grew into being a better person, can greatly enhance your prosperity and well-being. There is healing possible to you now, in the form of simply asking this question.


time travel conference
Looking back on your past with love can be a form of time travel... a way to reinforce your own personal story in ways that strengthen those attributes you most care to develop. Simply imagining that you are being guided by your best possible future self, or high self, can immediately inspire you to imagine possibilities that otherwise might never have occurred to you, and help you to see your life from a position of more strength, courage, compassion and appreciation than you have ever felt before. You can learn a whole lot more about time travel at a conference dedicated to exploring it this year: the 12th Annual
International Language of Spirit Conference
happening in Albuquerque, New Mexico August 15th through the 17th. Discover what linguists, physicists and indigenous scholars have to say about time travel. I am honored to be part of this year's dialogue, and will be giving a talk there on Listening to Future Selves, Reviewing Our Pasts. I look forward to seeing you there!








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Would you like to view the video summary
of this ezine on YouTube? Feel free to check it out, as well as other video shorts summarizing other recent RealityShifters newsletters. Thanks so very much for being you, and for remembering to ask in every situation, "How good it can get?"




Love always,

Cynthia Sue Larson

email Cynthia at cynthia@realityshifters.com