Change Your Past To Change Your Future

What I’m doing for the next 90 days to reset my life

This piece follows the last essay I wrote: catch up with it here.

Secure attachment with self and reality is a precursor to change.
If you can’t trust yourself and the universe, it will be downright excruciating to create positive change.

It’s hard to take risks if you can’t trust yourself and the universe.

If you can’t clean up faulty coping mechanisms and self-sabotaging behaviors, they will make their way into every last up-level, promotion, or brilliant new opportunity that you create. Wherever you go, there you are.

Long Covid and many situations, ruptures, and awakenings of the last 5 years exploded my nervous system in ways that have made inner security a challenge.
I remember in 2018, teaching a workshop, I flippantly said, “The awesome thing about trauma is that it can happen at any time.” Unfortunately, the last 5 years were characterized by Tower moment after Tower moment for me. (You too?)
So much so that I really couldn’t fully catch my breath, let alone process. Now, lucky to be in a safe, stable zone, progressing on my LC recovery, I am ready to return to the bright, resilient, and optimistic person I was—or better.

After my deep dive into Dr. Brown’s theories around CPTSD creating insecure attachment styles, I knew that creating a secure connection with myself, and reality herself, needed to be my focus next.

I have also been circling this subject for years, with my background in hypnosis and somatics. I had brought consciousness theories, quantum physics, neuroscience, and holistic change theories into my most recent Intuition class. The research seemed to point towards cleaning up memories of the past, also known as memory reconsolidation.

Dr. Brown began his secure attachment process with an exercise he called “the Ideal Parent.” ¹This is a meditation where you go back through your childhood with an imaginary set of parents, the ones you needed. You do this multiple times: by remembering the past differently, you give your child self everything they needed to thrive. Over time, through this reparenting technique, you can program your brain to be someone who experienced a childhood where you were safe, protected, nurtured, and celebrated, which results in secure attachments.

In 2004, neuroplasticity researchers found that the brain can rewrite or edit and update existing emotional patterns through a process called Memory Reconsolidation. Memory plus emotions plus story create new foundations. Instead of remembering an event or relationship as the one that broke you, tell a story about how it taught you about who you are and how adaptive you are. Rewriting the story changes reality.

If time moves forward, wouldn’t it move backwards, too?
If you are racing towards the future, wouldn’t it be rushing towards you, too?

In quantum physics, this is called retrocausality: the double-slit experiment reveals that the act of observation can change the material properties of particles.²

In 2012, physicists in Vienna ran an experiment that also challenged linear time. They discovered that when two light particles were entangled and then were fired into a quantum setup, the first photon seemed to be influenced by the photon that hadn’t been measured yet. It appeared as though the future was affecting the past. Some physicists believe this could suggest that the universe is interconnected across space and time, and time doesn’t function in the ways we think it does. ³

What if you consciously rewrote the past and the future?
What would you want?

Even the homie Aidan Wachter discusses this practice in his book Weaving Fate, a book about telling true lies.⁴ Related ideas and practices can be found in spiritual modalities across the globe, such as soul retrieval.

You can try this in so many different ways, all of which we explore in animism, mysticism, and witchcraft.

What if a team of helpful spirits were all around you, guiding you and supporting you?
What if you are connected to the greater web all simply through thoughts and telepathy?

What if your dreams are also dreaming about you?

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Here’s what I am going to do, every day, for the next 90 days.

In the morning, I’m going to do a secure attachment meditation.
Then, I’ll recall the previous day and pick one reaction or behavior I would have liked to change.

I’ll reimagine myself responding in the way I would have liked.

Then, I’ll do energy work around the energy I want to feel most frequently that day, flowing into the day.

Before I go to bed each night, right as I’m drifting to sleep, I’ll think back to the events of the day, and change one thing for the better, in a believable way. Then, I’ll go to sleep in the energy of what I want to feel most the next day: peace, love, clarity, focused, or joyful.

The creative, connective piece comes in through weekly art play dates and movement.
I’ll be including my spiritual and archetypal practice here, as well.

I’ll see what changes at the 40-day mark, and then at the 90-day mark, which is what habit and behavior specialists say it takes a new habit to form. Nature confirms this: that is 1 entire season.

My neurofeedback practitioner confirmed that this practice makes total sense. If your thoughts are on a track (pathways), then where your track has been will influence where that track will go. By going back into your memories, both large and small, and choosing to remember them differently, you are creating better possibilities for your brain to think in different ways. This also helps to develop the skill of metacognition, the observer, the compassionate witness, the vantage point of the Universe.

By doing energy and embodiment work, and moving as love, as peace, as creativity, as openness, you convince your nervous system you are safe to do so.

Your brain doesn’t know the difference between a movie screen and reality, between reading a book and it happening in front of you. Your nervous system needs practice, and the oft-repeated somatics adage is:
You become what you practice.

Might as well practice consciously.

These kinds of ideas and practices are also going to be brought into my next 2 offerings:
Clear Channels, our upcoming newsletter course and accountability challenge, and an Autumn Equinox Devotional challenge I’m hosting for paid subscribers to my Substack and Patreon, if you prefer.

All of this is of course, perfectly timed with eclipse season. ;)
Who’s in?

1. Brown, D. P., & Elliot, D. (2016). Attachment disturbances in adults: Treatment for comprehensive repair. W. W. Norton and Co.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

3. AkA The Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser.

4. Love Aidan’s work. He’s a cool person and friend, too!