Theloopylululog

What’s a personal mantra or philosophy I live by?

Yesterday I came across a prompt that asked me, what is your default state of mind?

I didn’t have to think. I answered, my default mode is happy/joyous/content/peaceful. Everything else in life has to figure out a way to work around it. Someone remarked, I’ ll have what she’s havin’!

It made me smile and ponder. How did I get here?

I wasn’t always this woman who masquerades as Master Oogway sometimes. I was that yo-yo doll who swung from mood to mood, emotion to emotion, dysregulated and dysfunctional to the core.

Until one day, everything changed.

Correction : Until one day, I forced myself to change.

Many years ago, during a guided meditation by davidji on the Insight Timer app, I heard a statement that didn’t waste a single second to become my second skin.

It sounded profound, and tasted like freedom. I felt like destiny had finally found my address and stood knocking on my door.

If only God could be distilled into a statement for me, this is it.

Keep Dying To The Past.

If you are a regular here, you know I have written about it umpteen times. It is not just something I wear and swear by. It is a practice, I practise every day.

I might still eat anger for breakfast, frustration for lunch and sadness for dinner. Add a few cups of disappointments every few hours and it is a perfect recipe for disillusionment to sit by my side and quickly put a ring on it.

BUT…what has saved me from living such a disastrous life is adhering to the practice of letting things go.

I have spent enough of my time on Earth fighting abuse, fighting trauma, fighting to be heard, fighting for my rights, fighting depression and fighting suicide.

A couple of decades rolled past me while I was too busy being lost in the lanes of my past and stories of my history, trying to figure out why I was the chosen one to suffer. Moments of happiness were like the tail of a comet… gone too soon in a flash.

It’s only after I seriously began to work on letting things be, letting things go to let newer things come to me did the sun begin to rise in my heart.

When darkness becomes something we get used to, light feels too foreign, hence too harsh for our senses. Light needs to reintroduce itself to our bodies and minds and awaken our hearts to its warmth. It takes time and patience to make light our friend first and then our default mode of functioning.

It has been a decade since I came across that statement. 10 years of dying to many yesterdays. To love and loss, pain and pleasure, success and failure, highs and lows, bliss and grief, pride and shame. To good times and bad. Choosing happiness every single moment despite the tears and fears. Holding the present moment like the PRESENT it is.

It is not easy. It is not that hard either. It is like washing your underwear. You don’t just wash it once and wear it forever, do you? The trick is to make the soak-wash-rinse-dry-fold-repeat process fun and deliciously attractive. How you do it is your USP to keep dying to your past.

No matter how painful the past is, it deserves freedom. Learning to untether ourselves from our pasts might be the most strenuous work out we will ever do, but on the other side lives the six packs we all desire : six packs of happiness, joy, bliss, contentment, peace and love.

Go on then, what are you waiting for?

Keep dying to your past, darling. Keep dying to the past.