How Does My Past Teach How to Redesign the Future?
In my elder years, I have reflected most on my past, like a “Life Review” while alive. I ask, “What did I learn?” Now, at 90, it’s, “How does it help others?” Today’s Boston Globe says: “Life begins at 90”😍
Sparks from the memory of what to write come to me by its relation to something I read. Joe Keohane, Boston Globe, Dec. 12, 2023, wrote, Rethinking our relationship with the past.” He talks about Tobias Becker in a book he writes: “What the nostalgic impulse means and how it works. …’I wanted to find out how people use and experience the past in a nostalgic way.”
I am nostalgic when learning from past experiences, and I hope that others learn from their past as well.
Early life experiences that are continually recalled have something to teach about a personality trait or a purpose in life. As you read, ponder on your own early life experiences and what they taught you about your life.
A strong will was first experienced at age 2 ½, in 1937. My mother took me to a church supper, and left me alone at the back while she worked with others. I spied an open door, toddled toward it, and said to myself, “I can find my own way home.” After two streets, I was lost and cried. A woman helped me find my home. After a few decades and a spiritual awakening, I came to realize that I was a very powerful leader in a past life, and had to learn from karma, to manage a powerful nature — which, as a woman in this lifetime, became more difficult.
Life’s Purpose of learning and teaching was first experienced at age 5. I came home from kindergarten and gathered a few kids on my front stairs. I drew on the sidewalk, with chalk, a circle for a body another for a head, and two arms sticking out from the body. I said excitedly, “there is a body between the arms and the head.” After learning and accomplishing many things in my life, I always found people, businesses, students, and proteges to teach it to. Do you know your life’s purpose?
Fashion Career started at age 8, when my strong will pushed me to sneak and try my mother’s sewing machine, one that moved by pedaling feet back and forth. By age 12, I was inspired by Aunt Myrtle’s “sock dolls”, and I started sewing doll’s clothes and selling them at gift stores and fairs. How did you start your career?
Listening to Inner Voices, seemed natural most of my life. It was in the 1980s, in my fifties, that a group of friends helped me name these inner personalities: William (male intellect), Eve (female creativity), Heather (6-yr.old dreamer), Harriette (authoritarian), Gertrude (temper), Arther (buddha), Willy (12 yr.-old risk-taker). They were all friendly with one another, like an inner family, and taught me a great deal about myself. Do you listen to your inner voice, and not listen to outer society’s multiple personalities is an illness?
Mental illness or Spiritual Discovery? The first mental hospitalization was at age 30, after my mother’s death. Psychiatrists said that I was “too close to my mother”. I don’t know much because they gave me ECT, shock treatments. Years later, after studying my inner self, it was because I wanted to follow my mother into the Afterlife, spiritual for me and came to know and love as I learned more about my past lives.
A second one in 1975 was from “inappropriate behavior”. I had started Transcendental Meditation and went on a retreat. When I was doing asanas, like yoga, that I learned would help get rid of trauma pain from ECT, my roommate called my brother, and they took me to the hospital again.
Lori Smith, Quora.com explained, “I heard from different sources that some people end up in a hospital or mental facility due to spiritual awakening. In psychological evaluations of people who came into the emergency room to get help, I find that sometimes, what is most labeled as a psychological problem is actually a spiritual one. I remember reading one evaluation where the patient was seeing shadow figures. Do you know what the evaluator called it? A hallucination. They never take into consideration that what the person may be experiencing is something spiritual. This logic was other intangible, unquantifiable phenomena is dismissed. It can’t be relied on that this 3D world that’s based on logic will understand or acknowledge that spiritual things happen in ways that we can’t understand. It sees it that there’s something wrong going on and tries to remedy it.”,
In conclusion I ask myself, before I pass: “Did I do enough for others and humanity?
Thank you for reading, and I hope you learned something.😍
