Dear Forgetful One,

advice from guidesI have a dear friend who’s struggling with a painful experience from the past. Ive been there, haven’t you? There can be a lot of anguish and suffering when those old stories grab us by the scruff of our necks and shake us.

It’s tough work, that – working with old stories of pain and sorrow, dealing with the effect those experiences had on us. Spiritually speaking, we know they are just stories, but just because they are stories doesn’t meant they weren’t real.

I was thinking about that this morning when I talked with my friend.

I know from my own experience that the key is in being willing to let the story go. But it’s hard to explain how difficult that is, isn’t it? My guides used to say to me, Dare to Forget. They weren’t suggesting denial. They meant it was time to forget.

I think that’s a profound thought, and such an apt one. When contemplating it, I was shocked to notice how very threatening that idea felt to me at a visceral level.

Even the thought of just forgetting it aroused many uncomfortable and conflicting feelings in me, some of which came from a deep survival level. I could feel that forgetting the story, letting it go, actually threatened me.

Obviously at some level I believed that holding onto and remembering the story kept me safe in some way. So much so that the idea of just forgetting it made me feel almost a little panicky, if I was honest.

It was obvious to me that the pain, the anguish and resentments tied up in the story came back into me through the story as disturbing frequencies each time I remembered it. I didn’t want that anymore. But I could feel the visceral difficulty of not engaging in the story anymore. It held parts of my identity and it kept me alert and on the lookout for trouble. And other such benefits.

Such feelings were strongly held by a part of me that is less subject to reason. It’s a very challenging spiritual bit of work to reprogram that. But I’ve learned that the intense impulse to keep the story does eventually give way to my stronger consistent intent to let it go.

The story begins to come back less and less often until it becomes quite infrequent. Even so, such a story can occasionally return suddenly and mysteriously. But because I’ve done the work of Daring to Forget, I find it fairly easy to affirm that I am forgiveness itself and that old stories truly have no more relevance to now than any other past lives.

To those of you now doing the hard spiritual work of Daring to Forget an old story from your life, my heart is with you. You not only have my compassion but also my admiration. Transformation of painfully held experiences is brave work that helps us all.

We’ve all faced this and will yet again. It’s an important part of the spiritual curriculum of these times. The phrase Dare to Forget gives me permission as well as serves as a reminder that this is the higher task. It helps me unclutch, loosen my grip and let go of stuff. Perhaps you’ll like using it too.

Here’s to the relief of being able to forget and the gift of still remembering what I learned in it.

♥️ Mayet

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