I’m writing from Portland, Oregon today, about as far away from my home in Nova Scotia as I can physically get in N. America. I’m here attending a Life Mission workshop with my teachers and fellow students from The Way of the Heart, and these weekends are always a great opportunity to take a look around my life and see if I’m doing what I really want to be doing and, if not, how can I do more of that.
Sometimes, looking at my life like this can bring up a moment or two of regret or remorse and this time it was a pretty deep one. So I’ve been reflecting on how any kind of evaluating that we do in our life can bring up moments of seeing something clearly, maybe for the first time, and wishing that it had been different. At these moments, it’s so very tempting to dive into hours of self-judgment, criticism, self-pity and just general moping and feeling crappy about it all. (Hours, heck, sometimes days or weeks!)
And I’ve come to see that how we handle these moments makes the most enormous difference to the quality of our lives and to our ability to learn from our mistakes.
These moments can be hard on us emotionally and they tend to bring up a bunch of old stuff relating to how our mistakes were handled by our parents and early caregivers. But it’s really, really worth learning a beautiful and empowering way of dealing with remorse and regret so we can approach our learning and growth in a gentle way. And that allows us to get excited about trying new things that we might make mistakes at.
My moment came in the Las Vegas airport, when I decided to download my email. I received a message from someone who had been expecting something from me and hadn’t received it, (as it turns out she actually did have it already but didn’t know it.) At that moment, I had a revealing look at a pattern in my life that was all about keeping me feeling “busy” and not allowing me to put my heart’s most important things first.
The realization was actually so quick and went so deep that I didn’t even read the whole message. And I definitely didn’t have the space I needed, sitting in the airport food court, to process it fully. I finished my meal and tried to find a space somewhere away from the Muzak to just breathe.
It wasn’t until I was on the plane, with my face turned toward the window and nowhere else to go that I was finally able to just let myself feel the regret.
As it washed over me, I realized that I actually wanted it. I wanted to feel it so that I would want to change the pattern that created it. And I realized that I wanted to stay focused on the other people that my pattern was affecting, those I wanted to serve fully, more than I wanted it to be about me.
And it was that caring that kept me out of the self-pity.
Oh, not entirely, mind you. I’ll admit to a short wallow. But I didn’t stay there. And before long, I started moving out of the remorse and into thinking constructively about what was actually creating the pattern and what I might want to do about it.
And I’ve noticed that this is what naturally happens when we manage to stay focused on what’s most important to us, instead of letting the feeling just take over completely.
So here are the steps that I use to deal with regret without getting stuck in it.
1) Breathe, slowly and fully (this can be harder than it sounds at the moment of remorse!)
2) Allow yourself to actually feel it, to whatever degree you can.
3) Have gentle compassion for yourself – be as kind as you can. (it feels icky enough without us making it feel worse!)
4) Notice that your regret means that you really do care about this.
5) Recognize and feel your caring about it.
6) Remember WHY you care about it.
7) Try to catch yourself in any self-criticism or judgment and remind yourself that what happened is simply about what you did and doesn’t change who you really ARE.
8 ) Remind yourself that you have the power to change this.
9) Allow yourself the space and time to process your regret.
10) Get constructive about changing things as soon as you’re ready. (This step is a great antidote to the icky feeling!)
11) Resist the urge to totally overcompensate for feeling badly about it by telling yourself you have to make some kind of huge impossible changes. Take small do-able steps to address or change what happened.
12) Congratulate yourself for how well you handled it and how you learned from it and how you’ll be OK with the next big “learning” moment.
I’m looking forward to finding a new way myself this weekend and I hope this might offer you a new way to handle your moments of regret.
I’d love to hear your comments about this below. How have you handled regret in the past? What helps you with it? What do you find gets in the way?
{ 4 comments }
Greetings!
Frequently badly, but I’m learning to do it better these days, tho’ there are still far too many mornings of what I call the “5 o’clock crazies”, so named because of the hour at which they occur. (And people wonder why I don’t like to be up at that hour!
)
One of the huge things that helps is remembering the scene from the first episode of ST:DS9, where Sisko is reliving his wife’s death with the help of the Prophets, who keep asking him “Why do you live here?”
Remembering that you do not have to live there has helped me let go of many of the more tenancious ties.
And from a more woo-based standpoint, something that Jacob (www.JacobSpeaks.com), a wonderful Spirit Guide channelled by Judy Crookes, recently explained to me is that freeing yourself from those chains to the past is what allows you to have a more pleasant future even be possible. Since I want my bestest-best future, that’s a great incentive right there!
And btw, thank you so much for being here. Your wisdom, and your sharing of it, are very much appreciated by this Avian.
Bright Blessings & Good Fortune!
Birdy from the Remarkables :>
Thanks so much for your comment, Birdy. Remembering we don’t have to live there is great point! And I’ve found, too, that just noticing when I’m returning to a regret over and over again is a powerful sign that I’m not complete with it yet and it’s time to sit with it a little more deeply.
It’s so easy to not even question the “chains to our past” that you mention and just drag them around mindlessly. So glad you stopped by!
A very touching post.
I had to deal with regret when my stepfather died of cancer a couple years ago, and in a lot of ways, I’m still dealing with it. The regret mainly focused around the fact that I ended up moving out of my parents home a month after he was diagnosed, to another city, for my career and I had little opportunity to see or help take care of him as he slowly got worse. It didn’t help that it was all over so quickly – nine months or so. Both he and my mother strongly encouraged me to leave and take that step after college, but it was very hard to do.
One thing I noticed is while your emotions are in a chaotic fury, life still goes on. The sun still rises. The birds still sing. It’s frustrating at first, but it ends up helping quite a bit with the healing process.
Thank you for your article, and thanks for letting me share.
.-= pbjeffrey´s last blog ..Business Secret #1: Trust Yourself =-.
Thanks so much for sharing that Paige. I had similar mixed emotions and regrets when my Dad died 3 years ago. And you’re so right about how helpful the rhythms of life and nature are in the healing process. I hadn’t thought about that at the time, but it’s really so true.
Thanks for stopping by!