Internal Time Travel

February 12th, 2008

Previously I’ve discussed how it’s possible to change a belief at its root in order to make swift positive changes in the experiences it was creating, as well as how internal changes can produce powerful external changes. Today I’ll explain a technique I’ve discovered that will allow you to break negative patterns and heal old wounds almost instantaneously by interacting with past aspects of the self, which is another powerfully effective way to improve your life in the present. Here’s the story of how I discovered the technique.

Our story takes us to a college statistics class – thankfully the last math class I would ever have to take – but I wasn’t doing so well. Math has always been my arch nemesis, and this was no exception. After explaining the day’s lesson, the instructor invited anyone that was still having problems up to talk to him, so up I went. I explained that I had been following the book’s instructions on my graphing calculator, but the results still weren’t matching up according to what he had gone over; I asked if he’d take a look at my notes and tell me where I went wrong. He simply glanced at the notes, told me “if you’re using the calculator and still getting it wrong, you have serious problems” and sent me back to my seat. So, this guy that I’m paying to teach me insults me instead, and I still didn’t know where I’d went wrong. But instead of getting offended, the sheer oddness of the situation caused the dots to start connecting for me… back to an eerily similar event that had happened when I was five, that I had forgotten about years ago.

Rewind to my first grade classroom. We were doing partnered math work, and I had missed a step in my work without realizing it. Both I and my partner thought we were correct, a short argument ensued, and I was told on. The teacher walked over, looked at our work, looked at me and snapped “you need to learn how to count” and walked away. The parallels to the college incident immediately stuck out, except that from a child’s perspective, the event probably made a much greater impact. I was missing a crucial bit of info without knowing it, had just been insulted by an adult, and still had no idea where I went wrong.

More thinking on the connections between the two incidents (and many similar ones in between) led me to some important conclusions. The subconscious doesn’t recognize linear time. So when an aspect of the self (like this childhood aspect) is wounded, insulted or otherwise offended, and the incident isn’t resolved when it happens, the aspect continues to exist in that same state until it is recognized and addressed. It then expresses itself by causing the same incident to play out again and again in our lives, in hopes of drawing our attention back to resolving the original issue. Unfortunately this phenomenon usually gets misinterpreted, and we can end up in a negative cycle, thinking “this always happens the same way for me!” (and feeding the cycle with our thoughts) without knowing why.

After I made all these connections, I received some inspiration to do an experiment similar to the technique in my post “Beliefs Create Experiences.” When I started I really didn’t think I was actually accomplishing anything meaningful – but then it seemed to take on a life of its own, with things happening that I wasn’t deliberately causing .

I got into a relaxed meditative state, and asked to speak to the aspect of myself that had just been through the first grade incident. Adult-me basically took the position that the adult at the time should have – explained the missing math step, offered some comfort, explained that sometimes adults say things without thinking, but the teacher was wrong to say what she said. At first I felt a bit silly, like I was scripting both sides of the conversation, but then it sort of took on a life of its own. At the end, it felt right to hug mini-me, but when I did that, he absorbed into me with an almost physical whooshing sensation that made me gasp. Whoa.

Once I started using this technique with increasing frequency several things happened. The cycles I’m hoping to break do indeed stay broken; the incidents stop repeating. Additionally, once I’d address one incident, lots of others started rushing into my awareness; it was as if all these past aspects were jumping up and down at the prospect of being addressed. Also, I’ve heard and read of others having literal encounters with future probable selves. While I haven’t experienced this quite so directly myself, I have noticed that when I’m doing this exercise frequently, lots of insight and occasional feelings of comfort and encouragement seem to flood into my awareness out of nowhere, and I can only wonder if that’s where it’s coming from – future probable selves correcting mistakes and sending the results of life lessons backward so they can be learned in the most fun and efficient way possible, as opposed to playing out The Hard Way. In any case, this technique has been a huge boost to my development; try it out and tell me how it goes!