Dealing With Regrets
Hello everyone,
This week I thought I would share something on dealing with regret, inspired by a quote from my children's book "A Tale Of Two Ninja Kids: A Martial Arts Adventure Story".
In the book, one of the main characters, Martin, questions his ninja master on how someone can deal with regrets in life...
Regrets are often a response to us wanting the past to be different in some way. We feel that we should have acted differently with the aid of hindsight, and regret seems to be our way of trying to fix things.
We unconsciously believe that holding a feeling of regret will help change the past and make the future or the present better for us or others. It is one thing to know this intellectually, but it is another thing to experience this, and to see whether the regret is actually serving us at the moment.
The way we can notice if regret is helping us, is by yielding to it, by giving ourselves permission to actually feel regretful, rather than trying to struggle with the uncomfortable feeling.
There is nothing wrong with the feeling, but the trap is to believe that struggling with it or feeding it with belief will help to make everything better again.
If you really allow a regret to be felt, it is unlikely to hold the same amount of power over you. Regret can not live in a non-resistive environment. Perhaps there is something that you can learn from the memory, but the fight against regret isn't required for learning. In fact learning tends to happen more easily once a memory is no longer an enemy in our minds.
Regret can also be a form of self-punishment, where we seek to hurt ourselves due to a mistake we have made. Again, no longer fighting against the contracted feeling of regret will make it clear and obvious whether it is wise for you to suffer any more, or become free to operate from a higher state.
Regrets are a very natural to feel. If you can forgive yourself enough to let yourself actually feel them, you will see they might begin to transform themselves.
The book mentioned above is ideally for readers aged 8-12, but it's also one that adults have told me they've enjoyed. Book two in the series comes out next month, and if you would like to find out more about book one, just click here.
I hope that's useful for this week,
All the best,
Adam