Everyone and their brother say you can’t change the past… But what if you can?
One of my favorite movies is ‘Back to the Future 3’
Somehow, by magic, our hero, whose name I forgot. Michael J. Fox plays the character. Yeah, I remember now. His name was Marty. Marty gets that when he hears someone call him a coward, a yellow belly, it makes him do things that destroy his life. So he makes a different choice, in that past, and changes his future… dramatically.
Every time I watch it, my eyes tear up… I find myself weeping. I am sooo proud of him.
The past is the past, and you can’t change it. But maybe what happened you cannot change, unless you have a time machine, but the past is a whole lot more than what actually happened.
The Playground, my flagship program, promises that by changing the past, you will have a happier future.
And, obviously, this is a very difficult task, because we, humans, think not in reality but in occurrence…
We think that what happened is what we said happened… and even when I ask you to look at what is happening from the sideways view, using the Driftwood capacity: looking from the side, from a slightly higher vantage point, you still carry your interpretation, your story into that view… instead of just looking without the interpretation. Looking as if it were happening to someone else.
What you would see there is the ridiculousness of your interpretation.
Why is this relevant?
Because you live the rest of your life repeating that same incident, trying to get a different result.
- The 40-year old dude, whose father frowned at his poopy diaper when he was a child. Today he needs to create himself, cover himself with poop, symbolically while he tries people to like him.
Of course today it is a more sophisticated poop, like not working for his wages, not taking care of himself, acting like a mini-Hitler in his household.
- Or another 40-year old dude, who could not get out of a the car… and now he will pretend that he can’t get from A to B… purposefully not doing what any intelligent person would do in his place.
Listening to this last dude re-telling his sob story for the 100th time, the exact same way, an idea came to me.
I Asked him what he would do today if he found himself in that same car.
Our past gets into our eyes, as the Charlie what’s his name says in the comic strip…
You can’t hit the ball, because the past gets into your eyes.
Your job, if you are in the ‘game’ of retooling your life, and make it a happy one, is to retool the past incident… by seeing it from the sideways view, and retelling it with a new, this time intelligent action.
It is more often a ‘communication’ than anything else.
Communication is an action. Talking, complaining, is not communication.
Communication has specific moves: requests, promises, and declarations.
Everything else is just talking.
Communication creates worlds… talk comes from a world that supposedly is already there.
The communication you missed when you were little is the same communication that is missing now.
Let’s take my example.
Here I am, 3 years old. My nanny goes to visit her family in the country and takes me with her. There is, maybe, a wedding, because there are a lot of people, pigs are slaughtered, music, smoke, crowd… and there I am left alone in the midst of that.
It is getting dark, and I am getting tired.
A man, dark suit, white shirt, no tie, walks up to me and reaches for my hand.
I say in my head: good, I am found, I am taken to my nanny.
But instead of the nanny, he takes me into a barn, thrown on the hay, and the next thing I remember it is morning, and I am stuck to the floor, and the whole village is hoo-ing and haa-ing, with grim faces.
My nanny washes me up, takes me back to my mom on a train that has wood slot seats… Not a word between us.
I have no idea what happened, I only make up the story from other people’s reaction: and it is not good.
Looking back I spent the next 50 years repeating this scenario… I am the victim, never the perpetrator. I never see how I am trying to survive the same incident, and get a different result.
In 1996, a turning point year for me, I get lucky and a dude asks me to walk back and forth in the story… and I start to see that I didn’t ask any question. I didn’t ask: who are you? I didn’t ask: where are you taking me?
And I also didn’t say no. I just went like sheep to slaughter.
I managed to live my life as a victim… and between you and me: that is no fun.
But every single person has a victim story of their own making.
And, believe it or not, having a victim story makes you the villain… the evil one.
Perpetuating a victim story is ‘desire to receive for the self alone’.
I lived my life, for 40 years, that the world, everyone owed me, because I was the victim.
Yeah… eat sh*t world, I am a victim.
My poor parents, the poor guy, my poor nanny, all my teachers, all my lovers… everyone. You owe me.
For a while it was like I lost my ground… I had no idea who I was. My life fell apart.
What was the glue that held it together is the victim story.
In the est training, and even in the early 4-day Forums, the trainer came in and yelled:
You have your sh*t together. That is all you have together. Your sh*t.
I didn’t realize what he was talking about for 10 years… until I realized that my sh*t was my story.
The story I used to dominate with, the story I used to make others wrong, to look good, to avoid being responsible for my own actions, my own lack of happiness.
In the What’s the Truth About You workshop we do this work… and at least give you a glimpse of what is using your life, what is covering up your real beautiful, glorious Self.
Small groups, maximum six people at a time.
Why is it worth doing?
Even just getting the whiff of an idea that you could be happy if you just gave up being unhappy is very liberation, and starts working in you, like yeast in dough.
Will it be tough? Yeah. Will it be fun? Probably not. But will it make a difference? hell yeah.
You may have to come a few times to the workshop, to go deeper and deeper, and because I am offering a 30% discount till Tuesday, May 5, you may want to stock up… the price will never be this low again.
The coupon code is SELF30
What’s the truth about you?
