How do I deal with past regrets and negative experiences?

My friend, our memories of the past are like the roots of a tree: As long as there are leaves to photosynthesize energy from the sunlight, the roots will keep growing in search for food for the leaves. Regrets are great if they lead to repentance and corrective actions, but if you are stuck repeating a negative story in your mind, your roots will only feed your future with toxicity. When you have a Purposehood Guiding Star, your memories will expand in search of positive lessons from your past.

Make sure that you have a clear Purposehood that shines the light on your future and journey forward, then allow your memories to recognize, reflect, and reframe past events to feed your Purposehood pursuit. When you recognize past events, you can identify the sources of your current nourishment and intentionally examine your memories of them. When you reflect on those memories, you can extract invaluable learnings, and you widen your views of the events themselves beyond your initial experience.

Finally, you can reframe your past experience correctly, as you realize that although the duality in existence dictates that every experience would necessarily have both positive and negative impacts, as long as you extract the lessons, then those events will always be a net positive for your future. Past events always produce net positive, so look for it. With this simple process, you can edit and re-edit past events as you move toward a better state of being. I call this crucial process of positively reframing past events: the Purposehood Life Graph, which is part of the extended “Life Design” course and a subsequent book.

The past is your connection to all that was, from the Big Bang to the trillion of magnificent cosmic events that led to you. When you will look at the block universe standing in the presence of iSH in the beyond, you will see that you are the past that created the future of humanity, and your intentional actions today determined that future. The past is a wonderful web of roots, so use it to nourish your growth.

Remember, the past is not fixed, it is memories written with interpretations and expectations, so keep writing your story and feel free to edit it as needed. The past is not written in ink, but scribbled with a pencil. It is not printed in a book, but drafted in a journal, so write and rewrite it to fit your future view.

(Excerpt from the book “Purposehood: Transform Your Life, Transform the World” page 178)