Healing First

“The things you want are always possible; it is just that the way to get them is not always apparent. The only real obstacle in your path to a fulfilling life is you, and that can be a considerable obstacle because you carry the baggage of insecurities and past experience.”
—Les Brown

The older we get, the more open we are, and the more we experience, the more likely we are to have a lot of baggage to carry from these experiences. Life lessons don’t have to turn into burdens that move with us along our journey, but they often do turn into just that.

The way we avoid carrying a heavy load and living in the past is to heal from something before we start anew. Many of us have in our lives gone from a soured relationship with pain and anger and walked right into something else. It’s easy to do because beginnings are fun and it helps us to “get over” the last one. But if we didn’t feel our emotions from the breakup and heal from the pain then it just turns into baggage.

There is no time limit written in stone on when it’s the best time to move on because it varies by circumstance and what we do to heal from pain and loss. We will know when it’s right if we are honest and true to ourselves. But to move into anything new with baggage from our past is only going to cause failure in the new relationship.

This is not to say that we are ever over something completely, most likely we’re not, if that person meant a lot to us. But we do need to be able to distinguish the actions and behaviors of our new interest from those of the former so we don’t project the old onto the new.

Another thing to remember is just because a former relationship failed, it does not mean that we are a failure and that everything in the future will be the same way. We may have chosen the other person for all the wrong reasons, including getting over another person.

We may simply need to choose better and for different reasons than in the past. And we can trust ourselves in that a whole lot better when we aren’t burdened down with a load of baggage.

Shed the baggage by healing your heart and then move forward.