A while back I was chatting with a dear friend. At the time I was feeling down in the dumps about a break-up I’d gone through, and she was patiently listening to my laundry list of hurts.
Although the timing of the break-up took me by surprise, ultimately I knew it was for the best for both of us, but nonetheless I was still feeling down, almost in spite of myself.
My friend acknowledged that break-ups are indeed painful, but then she asked me how much of my feelings were pain about the break-up and how much were just old patterns of hurt?
Wow.
Stopped me dead in my tracks.
It resonated.
While of course the break-up hurt, it also poked at some old and lingering negative beliefs, and more importantly, they were patterns of belief that I had already outgrown. About being lonely, about being loved, and about being alone.
Something about being in this place of sadness poked at those old hurts, which seemed determined to hang on for dear life.
The beauty is that when you shed the light of truth on old beliefs, they tend to appear as what they are – outgrown habits. So once the light of day shone upon my old patterns, my intense pain began to dissipate, and I ended up finding closure from the break-up and healing quite quickly.
The next logical question to myself was, if I’m holding on to this old set of patterns of behavior around love and being loved, what other patterns of belief might I be harboring in the dark recesses of my mind? Patterns about money? About how I spend my time? Who I choose to spend my time with?
Once I unlocked that door, I began to unearth a handful of patterns that don’t serve me well anymore and needed to be shed. And what better time to rethink one’s life than at a time that is already in flux. A time of shifting and resetting. The perfect time to realign how I think about myself and my life.
Of course it begs the question…are you harboring old patterns of hurt in your life? Perhaps it’s time for a reset.