Regret is one of the hardest emotions we can feel. It can be a relief to realize that regret is a secondary emotion, and by addressing the primary feelings regret can be released.

The primary emotion in this case is grief.

Grief occurs when something is lost that cannot be regained. In the case of regret, what has been lost is an opportunity. It may be an opportunity to love, to live, to excel–to have an experience that is no longer possible.

While regret can be very difficult to feel and process, it is a much bigger tragedy to not deal with it. When grief in any form is not felt, then it sticks around and weighs on us. Regret that is not processed will stop you from seeing and letting yourself have the opportunities to live, love, be, and do that you actually still do have available to you.

Regret has a component of self-blame which keeps the grief stuck.

Regret is a mixture of grief and self-blame. While grief is difficult to feel by itself, it’s actually the self-blame which keeps us from fully feeling and releasing the pain of what we have lost.

The attraction of self-blame is the idea that if we blame ourselves, we will not repeat the same mistake. If we keep reminding ourselves of the pain we caused ourselves or others, and hold our own feet to the fire, that will protect us from future pain.

This logic is present in all self-blame, and it is completely false.

What really happens is that self-blame shuts us off from the natural flow of feeling and letting go that lets us live in the moment. By repeatedly reviewing the past, you shut out the present and therefore lose any opportunity to repair damage, to change patterns, and to create new experiences that you want. By not working through regret and learning from it, we inevitably create more of it.

Forgiveness is a spiritual process of repair.

Self-blame can make forgiveness hard. The good news is that once you start to repair the situation, you will feel better about yourself and it will not be so hard to forgive yourself.

If you do not feel you can forgive and let go, then take real action to repair any damage you regret causing. This includes damage to yourself.

Sometimes what we have done has hurt others, and to forgive ourselves we have to make amends first. So begin. Find the point of integrity in yourself and live from that point. You cannot change the past, but you can find something to do in the present that addresses the hurt you caused. You can learn to be a better person. You can contribute in ways that are meaningful.

Sometimes what we have done or not done has hurt only ourselves. This also requires amends. We need to honor our needs and our truth, and stop betraying ourselves. If your regret is your own inaction, then take action now.

Regret is a powerful teacher.

Sometimes spinning in self-blame becomes easier than changing. While it is painful, it can become familiar in time. If you are not willing to change, then you are not learning the lesson the regret is here to teach you. Regret is a powerful mirror that who you have been is not working. Listen to it; let it be your teacher and you will expand through it and experience healing.

How to heal regret: three components.

I find these don’t really go in order–it is an organic process.

Component 1: Feeling (without judgement or blame)

Things you can feel:

• Sadness
• Despair
• Anger
• Hurt
• Loneliness
• Longing
• anything else that comes up

Component 2: Acceptance

Things you can accept:

• Your own limitations.
• Others limitations.
• The limitations of time and space.
• That the past is irrevocably over.
• That you didn’t know better at the time.

Component 3: Action/Repair

Things you can do (this depends a lot on what your regret is about):

• Call someone and apologize or reconnect.
• Create a new habit/pattern.
• Journal or get help to recognize your part in things.
• Speak out (or write) about what happened.
• Make amends in some way.
• Start following new opportunities for love and life.

In the movies, there is always a big motivating factor, and then a montage of activity toward a goal, and finally a triumphant success.

In real life, it rarely works that way. We get the initial burst of energy. We make a plan. We do it faithfully for a few days. And then our old habits and patterns emerge and we are back where we started, only worse because we feel bad for “being a quitter”.

Steve Pavlina elucidates this: willpower is just a jolt at the beginning, and willpower alone will not carry you.

So what is required to make conscious progress toward a goal?

Necessary Ingredient #1: Internal Alignment

Intrinsic motivation describes something you want to do for its own sake. Extrinsic motivation describes something you do to make others happy, or to get a reward that is not directly related to the activity. Intrinsic motivation is a much stronger motivator, and an essential component of self-discipline. The problem is that extrinsic motivation can supersede intrinsic and we can lose our sense of why we are doing something. When the goal is hard and requires discipline to achieve, this can kill our internal alignment.

Many internal conflicts about self-discipline boil down to a conflict between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Take losing weight for example. Instrinsic motivations would be to look and feel better, to enjoy more fashion options, to live a longer and healthier life. However, the extrinsic motivation to lose weight and be thin no matter what is a huge unspoken pressure that we all feel every day (especially women). When outside culture is handing us extrinsic motivation reminders daily (“you’ll be sexier! people will like you more! you’ll be a better person!”) it can be hard to remember your own reasons and not feel like a tool for cowtowing to pressure by wanting to lose weight.

Here’s another example: I have struggled to change a habit of going to bed really late and waking up when half the day is over. There is definite external pressure to not do this, because I don’t feel “normal”. I feel like a freak, like I can’t get my life together. But these kind of messages are not motivating at all. It’s actually de-motivating to criticize yourself or hold out threats (“You’ll never have a normal life if you don’t get this together!”). Instead, I need to focus on my own internal reasons to want to get up earlier – i.e. I feel better and am more productive. And yes, I get to feel like I’m more a part of the society I live in as I share their hours. But to be motivating, I need to connect to that as a positive internal desire to be involved in life, not a negative threat that there’s something wrong with me if I don’t fix this.

The workhorse of intrinsic motivation is inspiration—a compelling positive replacement for the current pattern. I was recently talking with a friend about quitting smoking years ago. She had berated herself for years, and tried to quit a dozen times. But it wasn’t until one summer where she was a counselor at Girl Scout camp that she finally quit. It was because she had something new to do that she loved: play with kids, outside. This was fun. It wasn’t about adding more force to quit, it was about finding something even better that made her feel alive.

Necessary Ingredient #2: Self-Trust

Self-disicipline involves a little bit of force. You are pushing yourself out of your normal grooved way of being to try to establish a new groove. This is hard. Self-trust means you feel an agreement with yourself that you are not going to push yourself too hard or too fast, and will pay attention to your real needs in the moment and accommodate them. The image of a person with iron-clad willpower-driven self-discipline is not how you want to be with yourself.

For example, my first goal with getting up earlier was to set my alarm for 10 am every morning. The first few days I was really tired all day and that makes me unhappy after awhile. So I checked in with myself and considered changing my goal to 11 am instead. After a few days it turned out I adjusted to 10 am so I kept it, but knowing that I wasn’t going to consider myself a failure if I needed to adjust to an easier goal made me feel good and happy about the project. It creates an internal culture of positivity instead of forcefulness.

Think of training a horse. You can’t just force the horse to do what you want it to do. You have to gain its trust and go slowly. It wants to learn, but it needs gentleness and trust. Same with yourself.

And you?

I would love to hear your experience with this. What has helped you establish new patterns? What is your experience with positive motivation vs negative?

Nurturing helps us grow and flourish.

We All Judge Ourselves

We all struggle with feelings of inadequacy. We worry that we are not good enough, smart enough, strong enough, talented enough, pretty enough, or far enough along in our life. We wonder if we are too much: too emotional, too easily upset, too bossy, too critical, too gullible—take your pick.

These constant self-criticisms feel awful, so why do we keep doing them?

We Reject Ourselves to Protect Ourselves

As children, we got many messages about what was and wasn’t an acceptable part of ourselves. Because being rejected in our entirety would mean abandonment, we learned to hide the parts of ourselves that weren’t acceptable. We gradually become more and more divided into the parts of ourselves we know others will approve of and the parts we keep hidden, eventually even from ourselves. And what we can’t hide, we start to hate. We want desperately for these parts of ourselves to just go away so we can finally have the sense of belonging and acceptance we crave.

Ironically, it is by accepting ourselves that we can finally feel the peace we want.

The mind invents many hurdles and tasks for us to pass before we can be happy. But we can actually begin to be happy exactly where we are today, even knowing there is so much more for us to learn and grow into. We can be happy on our journey by accepting who we are today.

Self-Improvement Can Sometimes Mask Self-Rejection

In Towards a Psychology of Awakening, John Welwood explains a traditional Tibetan analogy that describes three levels of spiritual practice. They use the metaphor of a poisonous plant, which represents the basic tendencies that produce suffering: grasping, aggression, ignorance, jealousy, and pride.

The first level of dealing with these is to replace “poisonous” tendencies with virtuous tendencies. This is like uprooting the plant. But by doing this you lose the power invested in these mental constructs. Metaphorically, you lose your connection with the earth. You are not grounded and at peace—you are striving to be good.

The second level is to develop an antidote. In Buddhism for instance, cultivating emptiness does this. However, this “may leave us with a subtle preference for emptiness over form, which can also leave us inwardly divided.” This is a more subtle form of self-rejection, but it has the same effects: you may appear to be at peace, but you are working hard to maintain it.

The third level is to develop immunity by eating bits of the plant. Meditation and mindfulness accomplish this by encouraging you to watch the mind as it plays its tricks. By experiencing upsets from this witness state you develop an awareness that your thoughts are self-created. This takes the power out of the poison.

I would add a fourth level—where you see that the plant is not actually poisonous. It’s sick, or malnourished, or has grown crooked. Our patterns are not wrong; they are adaptations to situations that hurt or fail to nourish us. When we can see them with compassion and perspective, we can learn to give ourselves the nourishment and care we need to grow into healthy, flourishing adults.

Acceptance Is A Prerequisite to Transformation

By seeing yourself with compassion, you take the power out of your patterns and unlock the energy and aliveness that are wrapped up in them. This transforms you internally and you feel at peace and whole, without having to try to be good.

Start where you are. It is enough.

Oh noze! What's that noise?

As an adult, this can continue as a chronic sense of fear and a predisposition to overreact and take things personally, especially in intimate relationships. We carry the war with us.

We Make Up Stories That Make Things Worse

A new friend cancels your plans to meet for lunch. You start wondering why. You scan over your last few interactions. You start obsessing. Pretty soon you are convinced that she is judging you.

Taking things personally can be very painful. If we already believe that people might reject us, or we believe we have certain flaws, others words and actions can seem to confirm them. Because we are prepped to hear slights or blame, we react as if it is true and as if it is truly threatening.

In reality, either your friend is judging you or not. You can ask and find out. But even if they are, it is not as life-threatening as it can feel.

We Are Still Seeing Out of a Child’s Eyes

As a child, emotional hurt like being judged or blamed signals a threat of abandonment. Because children cannot fend for themselves, their systems take it as a threat to their life. It’s serious.

As an adult, we can learn that others opinions of us will not kill us. Their moods, their judgements, their feelings and thoughts are their own. They don’t literally threaten us.

The perspective of a child to a threat is different than the perspective of an adult to that same threat. The threat is smaller as we are larger. What is stuck is our perception of the prospective hurt. Yes, it is painful when we hear judgement or blame. But it no longer has to threaten our very well-being.

Relaxing Hyper-vigilance Takes Time

You won’t magically stop caring what people think, and then breeze through all your relationships. It’s not as simple as knowing that the threat isn’t real.

It takes time and persistence to retrain your brain to perceive input differently. Because the threats were very real at one time, your brain grooved those pathways in to protect you. So give yourself a break. Expect slow and steady progress instead of overnight transformation.

Affirmations and Self-Talk Can Rewire the Brain

These aren’t affirmations to make you feel better or more powerful. They are grounding statements designed to correct a tendency for your brain to misinterpret data.

When you feel yourself start to analyze, obsess, worry, defend, attack back, retreat, or make escape plans, try these statements out.

My feelings are not always in proportion to the situation. So I might be making a bigger deal out of this than I need to.

Others actions are probably more about them than me.

I’m actually OK. I’m not in danger here.

Questions can also help invoke the adult self.

What is feeling threatening here?

What do I need—what would help me feel safe and OK right now?

As you talk to yourself and work to mentally re-assess the situation with a clearer perspective, take deep breathes. Engage your body in a way that helps you relax and release stress and anxiety. Take a walk, talk a bath. Do something that makes you feel safe and warm and cozy. Remind your body that you are actually safe now.

Working with the body is essential because fear and emotional responses are stored in the body. It’s not enough to tell yourself you are OK—you need to start having new experiences that overwrite the old ones.

We Can Survive Our Own Feelings

The hardest thing about healing is learning to manage overwhelming feelings.

“Manage” is a complex word. A good manager provides boundaries and structures, but does not control or force those who work under her. Similarly, to manage our feelings we need a gentle but firm hand. We need to keep the wider perspective in mind while attending to the needs of the moment. We need to be a great parent to our own small selves.

We do this by developing a part of ourselves that can watch over the emotional self as it goes through its ups and downs. This “Witness Self” can be objective and neutral, and provide a supportive voice and compassionate presence to ourselves when we encounter situations that trigger us.

We Can Learn to Find Peace In Any Situation

As children, we yearned to feel a relaxed sense of feeling safe, loved, and cared for.

As adults, we still seek this. But we often find that we are blocking it ourselves. After searching and searching for people to love us the right way and say (or not say) the right things, we find that we have built a small world to live in—a world that we can control.

To expand that world and create true freedom requires us to become OK with more circumstances. Instead of wanting the world to conform to our wishes and never threaten us, we have to learn to become resilient and not be blown about by every wind. We need to adjust our threat-meters and realize that even though many people make mistakes and accidentally say things that hurt us, they are not out to make us feel helpless or powerless. They are just doing the best they can, and so are we.

The final step to peace is realizing that the war is over; we can create a life we enjoy now.

Like her earlier book Organizing from the Inside Out, Julie Morgenstern takes an inner approach to working with clutter. Instead of  tough-love and admonitions that “less is more”, she offers a rational approach that takes into account both our emotional attachment to the past and the potential for our things to support us to create a better future.

She distinguishes between organizing, which is making what you want in your life more accessible, and SHEDing which is evaluating if the stuff in your life is right for your life, whether it is organized or not. So if you have a perfectly organized closet but it’s full of clothes that don’t fit you, you don’t need more organization, you need to SHED.

Julie emphasizes that we don’t let go of the old until we have something new to grasp onto. The key to moving through our stuff and our lives is to be able to recognize the new thing we are moving toward and support ourselves in the transition. By orienting to a theme for our present and future life, it becomes easier to release what is old and no longer serves.

spinning in circles can be fun

Our Culture Has Little Room for Uncertainty

Part of what makes it so hard is that modern culture emphasizes decisiveness, speed, and purpose. From grade school on we are encouraged and rewarded for knowing what we want and being aggressive in pursuing it. Our hero-stories are about people with strong missions defying the odds and building great works.

But what if we don’t know what we want? The pressure to be certain can be hard to shake.

Our cultural emphasis is overbalanced toward Yang-energy. Yin-energy (slow, gentle, organic) is equally important but is a neglected part of our culture.

Doubt and Uncertainty are Normal

There are times in everyone’s life (often several times a day!) when it’s natural and normal to pause, take stock, and let the next thing that is needed or wanted surface naturally on its own.

The trick to helping yourself reach a natural decision or direction (instead of a forced one that just ends up biting you later), is to trust that by taking time and letting yourself be in the state of uncertainty, you are giving your unconscious the time it needs to work out what the next best step is.

We learn early that indecision and uncertainty is not acceptable. So to truly give yourself space to be in the process of getting clear, you need to create a solid boundary around your psyche that lets you fully enjoy that time and space of not-knowing.

The remarkable thing about this space is that it’s where a lot of magic happens. The only place you can discover something new is in a space where you don’t know yet. So it’s vital that we give ourselves spaces of unknowing, uncertainty, and unformed creative potential.

Create a Nourishing Space to Be With Yourself

Sometimes I imagine myself inside of an egg–a potent symbol of a nourishing, waiting space. A cocoon or a cave are similar visualizations. I often will curl up in my bed as well–sometimes I pull the covers up over my head to really create a visceral sense of a holding space where I have nothing to do but be in the unknown of where I’m at. I will hang out there and soak in the nurturing feeling of it being OK to just be there.

(For more in this vein see Larisa’s post: The Importance of a Really Good Wallow.)

Inevitably, when I am in this space long enough, an impulse will emerge. I’ll have an idea or a feeling about what my next step is.

However, it’s not always “The Answer”. This is another key point: if you undertake any nourishing activity with an end goal of “This will give me The Answer”, it will backfire. You will be doing it with an agenda and you won’t truly relax.

Give Up Control and Surrender

The bottom line is that we are not in charge of Inspiration or the Great Works we are to do. We are one small spark in a giant Cosmos of interconnected beauty and artistry. To gain true clarity is to see your place in this giant dance–and that kind of clarity comes from watching and listening to the subtle movement of energy within you and around you. It comes from giving up control and seeking to align yourself with the natural harmony of the Universe. It’s a very gradual process and won’t give you instant clarity.

But over time, you’ll learn you can rely on it. You’ll start to get a sense of the timing of things. You’ll know deeply that if you don’t get something it’s not yet time to get it, and it won’t bother you. You’ll start to focus on what is in front of you and let the future sort itself out, all in good time.

• Am I becoming happier or learning more ways to name my unhappiness?
• Am I becoming more open-hearted and curious, or learning more clever ways to act wise and knowing?
• Am I working on myself to awaken to my true nature and release suffering, or as a standard of perfection I am striving to accomplish?
• Do I want to help others out of love for my fellow creatures, or to prove my worth?
• Am I becoming more relaxed and trusting about money and abundance, or am I so focused on it that I feel strained and tight around it?
• Is my work helping me be more compassionate toward others, or judge them for their lack of growth?

Three Ways the Ego Can Show Up

Striving to Become Better

Personal growth work can be about opening up to our true potential, or it can be a yardstick by which we measure ourselves as never enough. It can be about awakening to the truth of our undeniable lovability, or a strategy to try to become a person who is good enough to deserve love.

If this rings a bell, make self-acceptance a primary part of your work. Learn to feel the fear of abandonment, the fear of being judged–whatever it is in you that has you striving  to be good enough.

Analyzing Instead of Being Present

It’s easier to think up a theory of why you are in pain (and how it relates to your mother), than it is to feel the pain. Always. Being present is hard work, and sometimes analyzing can seem like progress. And I’m not against it–I’ve certainly done my share of explaining myself to myself (and others). It helps us to construct a narrative we find understandable and comforting. But ultimately it can only help us feel a bit less anxious–it does not repair trauma or bring us joy, and it can block these things if we become attached to it and use it to avoid feeling.

If this sounds like you, develop a mindfulness practice of saying “Analyzing” to yourself when you notice yourself doing it. You don’t have to stop, but notice how you feel. Is it helping? What do you need? Was it prompted by something?

Feeling More Enlightened than Others

You visit your Dad and sigh at how stuck he is in his patterns. How can he live this way? You offer sage advice to your co-worker about her communication skills–unbidden. You feel self-satisfied and miss the eye-roll she gives you behind your back.

We’ve all been here (and many of us cycle back through it from time to time!). If you resonate with this description, notice when that urge to feel better comes up. What precedes it? Is there a moment of discomfort when you don’t know what to do, so you offer advice? Is there a tight feeling in your chest of helplessness or fear which you quickly usher away with righteousness? Like all these ego-strategies, judgement or superiority is a strategy that masks less pleasant feelings. Notice the mechanisms by which your strategies get activated and you can gradually change your habits.

The Ego Never Sleeps

The ego is there when you read that book about relationships. It’s there when you attend that workshop. It’s  there in therapy. It takes in the information you learn and starts to slowly warp it.

I’m not against the ego. It has a function, which is to keep you alive by being afraid and protective. The problem is that it has a very limited perspective, and yet it thinks it knows best. That’s why the game is just to become more aware–when you know what the ego is up to, its perceptions lose their teeth.

There are many more ways the ego can show up. Where do you feel stuck and closed down in your journey or practice?

This book and the included test identify your top five strengths and explain how to maximize them. The authors advocate working on your strengths rather than your weaknesses, arguing that you will only see marginal improvement if you try to strengthen a weakness, whereas you can polish a strength to genius level.

I am not sure I am 100% on board with this theory, but I found the test to be quite helpful and more enlightening than personality-based tests like the Myers-Briggs.

For example, one of my strengths is Relator, which means I prefer to deepen relationships with people I already know. This helped me accept why I don’t enjoy small talk or “socializing” and prefer to talk about more meaningful things in any conversation. This test can help with self-acceptance, and by giving yourself permission to shine with the talents that are uniquely yours.

The book includes specific suggestions for each strength which includes which kinds of folks have complementary strengths that you should pair up with and how others will react to your strength. For instance my top strength was “Ideation” – a love for and facility with ideas – and it suggests that some folks might not follow my leaping train of thought so I’ll need to connect the dots for them. That’s good to remember.

I am not sure sometimes if all my strengths are inborn talents or which ones are the result of coping with trauma. For example, Strategy was one of my top strengths. This can be helpful in business, but I notice that my tendency to strategize in relationships has overtones of manipulation and seems rooted in codependency and fear rather than shiny happy strengths. But one could argue that this is merely a healthy strength that got “corrupted”. Still, I would have appreciated some discussion of “strengths gone overboard” or when you need to reign in your strength or balance it with other strengths.

I enjoyed the way this philosophy celebrates diversity by promoting the idea that we all have different strengths and we need to work together so we can benefit from others strengths in areas we are weak in. I think this is a great model for the workplace.

Note: be sure to buy a new copy of the book as there is only one test code per book.

I love this book. Louden weaves stories about her own life and journey into a book of journal prompts for connecting to Self. She emphasizes “living the questions” over finding the answers.

The first prompt I picked from the book was, “What do I really need right now?”. The answers turned out to be simple, but asking the question shifted me from being tuned out to being tuned in. I hadn’t been ignoring some major suppressed calling. I just had been ignoring myself. I had been tuned to the “outside myself” station instead of the “inward” station. After writing for awhile, I felt that surge of energy I get when I reconnect to myself.

The message in this book is that the content of the answer doesn’t matter as much as the spirit in which you ask and listen. It’s not about getting the answer, setting some goals, and making a plan to solve all your problems. It’s about asking the question and listening each day for new answers. It’s about staying in touch with the deepest part of ourselves on a regular basis. It reminded me that my Self is a mystery to explore, not a puzzle to solve. The answers may change from day to day, but only by continuing to ask will I be in connection with my own aliveness.

humor and play can help you shift states

Recognize what you feel when you get triggered.

Think back to the last time someone did something that had you worried about what it meant. What was your first response? And your second?

Perhaps your heart starts to race, or you discomfort in your stomach, or you clench up. You might recognize emotions such as anger or fear. Perhaps mental spinning is your first sign, or you might go numb and have a far-away feeling. You might notice that you first felt dread and fear, and then the next thing you did was start rehearsing conversations with them in your head, imagining both your part and theirs.

The more you know your own responses, the easier it will be to take pro-active steps when your next trigger happens.

Use self-talk to hang onto the awareness that you are actually triggered, so your thoughts are suspect.

It’s important to stop the mind from starting to make up stories and spin around in blame and defensiveness. Instead, tell yourself:

I’m triggered. That’s OK. It happens to everyone. My mind isn’t going to be clear for a little bit so I’m not going to take the things it says too seriously. Instead, I’m going to do what I know will help when I’m triggered.

If you are with someone, you will also need to coach them so they don’t make it worse. Say something like this:

I notice I’m getting triggered. It’s OK, I just need a minute to calm down. What would help is if we could be quiet for a few minutes.

Ground in something neutral and factual.

This is a magical step that seems too easy to be actually helpful.

It works because it literally engages a different part of your brain. Instead of spinning in an emotional whirlpool or staying in a heightened fight-or-flight mode, you are forced to direct your attention to factual, neutral things that are outside of your own mental stories. It has an immediate grounding effect.

From easiest and most direct to more difficult:

1. observing things around the room: “That lampshade is red.” “I’m wearing a blue shirt”. The key here is “what a camera would see”, not your opinions on that lampshade or shirt.
2. observing your internal state: “My heart is racing.”
3. observing your feelings: “I feel angry and hurt.”
4. observing your needs: “I have a longing for comfort and quiet.”

Another trick is to notice, on a scale from 1 to 10, how upset you are. If you are in a relationship, it is helpful if both people can use this metric. Know what you need when you are at a 3, or a 5, or a 9.

Decide to do these steps whether you feel like it or not.

I can’t emphasize this enough. You may not feel like doing these when you are triggered. The problem is, feelings are not reliable when you are triggered or upset. They will direct you to protect yourself, not to be grounded and neutral. They may push you to attack or defend yourself, not try to see the situation from an objective perspective. They will lobby for drama, not something boring and blameless like being calm and rational.

So you have to make it a commitment:

I will do these steps whether I feel like it or not, because I know they work and will help me calm down.