What if you did not have to be haunted by your past anymore? What if every painful memory you carry — every regret, every wound, every experience that still stings when you think about it — could be transformed from something you run from into something you have genuinely learned from? That transformation is not just possible. It is the foundation of real change.
How the Past Keeps Living in the Present
How our memories affect us can be so hurtful at times. To embark on the idea of making a better life — or to make a conscious change of the way we look at life — there would have to be a lot of focus on looking at our past and how it has affected us, and how it continues to affect us today.
Sometimes we go into memory and do not even know we have gone there, but we feel old feelings. We are inundated with feelings that are familiar and repetitive that have come from memory. Then we have to find out how we went back there — or what is going on — and try to change the way we see the world we live in. Because what we are doing is feeling a by-product of yesterday’s traumas and emotions in today’s life.
Recontextualizing Memories With God
To neutralize the past in one broad stroke, we take our past lives, their memories, and the effects of those memories, and recontextualize them — put a new frequency or a new spin on them. That new frequency is this: when we go into memory, or a memory pops up, we have an opportunity at that moment to rearrange that memory with God.
We go to our Creator and ask our Creator to help us rearrange that memory in the way that our Creator would want us to see it. We know we have found the right way of rearranging it because we have benefited from seeing that memory in a new way, or somebody else has benefited from our new way of seeing it — or the pain that memory used to represent is not so severe.
We are trying to create a new foundation of change. The first part of that foundation is becoming aware of when we go into memory, and what we are like when we act in memory.
What we have got to do is change the way we see our yesterdays as we start to see them affecting our today. That happens through awareness. We need to become aware of when we have entered into memory, and then in that moment ask our Creator to recontextualize that memory in a way that is harmonious — that does not hurt to look at. We need to practice this over and over again.
Turning Over the Memories and Their Effects
Making a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God is about turning over the memories we have and their effects — the feelings we get from them. The only way to do that is to repaint them, to rebuild them, to recontextualize them. We have to create a perspective that allows us to benefit from these memories — to see that these memories have helped us grow, that these memories do not have to be shut out anymore, that we can engage with the idea of not regretting our past nor wishing to shut the door on it.
The way we do that is to see our past in a different way. That is a bigger job than we ourselves alone can do. We must reach for a Power Greater Than Any Human Power to see our past differently, because we have stored those memories, those pains and those feelings in a way that has not benefited our lives. We run from them — and we must expose that.
The way we do that is to take each memory and repaint it with the vision of what we want it to be — in terms of how we have grown from it, what we have learned from it, and how we can better our lives by no longer recreating the memory. We learn what we should do that we did not do, and what we should not do that we did. And we feel that great feeling of not being afraid of our past anymore.
Embracing Your Memories Instead of Running From Them
We are going to recreate the whole vision of what our past is — what the memories are and the feelings that are attached to them — in a way that is productive and healthy for our life today. Your memories and all their effects are going to become something you want to embrace, talk about, feel good about, and show others how you have benefited from as well.
- Past memories continue to affect the present without us realizing it — we feel old feelings and mistake them for today’s reality
- Recontextualizing a memory means asking God to help you see it in a new way — one where you benefit rather than suffer from the experience
- You know the recontextualization is working when the pain of that memory decreases, or others benefit from your new perspective on it
- Turning your memories over to God is an active, practiced process — not a one-time event but a daily spiritual discipline
- The goal is not to forget the past but to repaint it: to see what you learned, how you grew, and how it no longer has to drive you
- A Power Greater Than Any Human Power is required — no one can fully recontextualize their deepest wounds on willpower alone
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