In the joy of now.

Change your thoughts. Change your life. Louise Hay

In Colors Personality Testing, I am primary colours, Green/Blue. A thinker and a feeler.

A trait of my two primary colours is that I have a tendency (okay it's more than a tendency, it's a habit) to look back -- Worst case scenario -- The green never forgets. The blue never forgives.

I have learned the value and blessing of forgiveness. I struggle with forgetting.

There are lessons to be learned in the past I tell myself -- the operative word being 'in', not 'from' the past. The 'in' keeps me immersed. It keeps me trolling the canals of memory searching for offal lying below the surface. It keeps me believing, there's still some gem of wisdom I haven't discerned from the past's journey. It keeps me building my case for 'why'. Why I feel the way I do today. Why I need to.... dance, sing, cry, bemoan. Laugh, leap, waddle, crawl.

Mix a large dose of heartfelt blue into the mix and you'll find me heartsick on the edge of the pond fearful of stepping into the waters as I justify my case for protecting my heart to keep me safe from drowning.

Enough!

This weekend, Thelma Box, founder of Choices, adventures of a lifetime, asked the question: If you didn't bring the past into your choices today what would you do?

At the time, she was asking the question of an individual who was at the 'fed-up' point with a relationship. If you didn't have the past would you want to be in relationship with this person today?

When the individual answered, "Yes," Thelma smiled and replied, "Then what's stopping you from being in relationship with them without the past present in today?"

Stop doing that.

Stop dragging the past into this moment to justify why you feel the way you feel and start living your true feelings today.

If it's not about reliving the past, what is keeping you mulling over, again and again, all the transgressions of the past?

Relationship requires trust. Unconditional trust. Someone does something to hurt you. Forgive them and trust them. Someone cheats. Forgive them and trust them. If you can't trust them -- you are setting both of you up to repeat the same mistake again. Because in your lack of trust, you undermine your ability to trust and their ability to act in trustworthy ways.

A tough pill for me to swallow when trust is an issue for me.

Trust.

Trust that someone will hurt me and I will hurt them -- not intentionally. But simply because we are human.

Trust that I will forgive -- and forget.

Trust that I am strong enough, confident enough, big enough, loving and compassionate and caring and giving enough to forgive -- and forget.

I have learned a lot in my journey -- the challenge is, I keep thinking there's still something I've missed in the past that I was supposed to learn today.

Truth is -- there's lots to learn today when I let go of looking at the past as holding the keys to my experience in this moment. Does it matter why I don't trust. Or does it matter more that I chose to trust in this moment to experience the other as trustworthy and myself as trusting.

My beliefs create my experience today. And when I believe I have to find my answers in the past, I limit my experience today to those things that make sense to me based on past experience.

Enough!

My daughter Alexis told me yesterday about her experience this past weekend at a program called, The Forum. "We're all just living out the decisions of a pissed off five-year-old," she told me. "Think about it. Pissed off five-year-olds are running our world."

She's on fire. Coming clean on past behaviour so she can create a life worth living today, exactly the way she is. Amazing. Magnificent. On fire.

I'm with her.

My answers do not lie in the past -- well actually, the answers in the past do lie in my today because they don't fit me anymore. They don't sit well in my peace of mind and are continually disrupting my joy in being present in this moment right now. They are the lie. And I've had enough of lies that won't lie quietly in the past.

Sure, the past has lots of lessons I have learned that I can share. But finding more lessons from the past only keeps me backwards focused. And being backwards focused only keeps me facing the wrong direction as I walk carefully into today for fear I might fall backwards or trip over something in my path that I can't see because I'm looking backwards!

I want to leap for joy into this moment, unencumbered by the weighty matters of my past.

And I can only do that when I stand in wide-eyed awe at the magnificence of this moment spread out before me as I let go of holding onto nothing but the joy of being me.

The question is: What's keeping you from leaping?