Love Your Past Self

Transcript

Welcome beautiful thinkers! I’d like to talk to you about the idea of loving your past self.

So, the other day, after we finished a little event, my friend Moni Charlie was driving us home and she said, “You know? It’s interesting how there is a lot of untranslatable words while we were getting into this discussion.”

But one word she brought out was “énouement”. This French word, and I found this definition of this word here, which is quite specific, and you hear what an interesting concept this is.

Katy Kelly said to us later, “Well, how strange it must be that, when you find an untranslatable word, this is a part of that culture. And this is something that people can take and people use in conversations, and people even build on this concept and have a whole cultural framework that, somehow, has this concept as a piece of it.

And you start to get an idea of what I mean when I say this definition.” So, here it is, this is the side, it’s called “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows”. And the word is “énouement”.

Noun, the bitter sweetness of having arrived here in the future, where you can finally get the answers to how things turned out in the real world.

Who would your baby sister would become, what your friends would end up doing, where your choices would lead you, exactly when you loose the people you took for granted. Which is priceless intel, that you instinctively want to share with anybody who hadn’t already made the journey.

As if, though, at some part of you, who had volunteered to stay behind, who was still stationed in a forgotten outpost somewhere in the past. Still eagerly awaiting news from the front. So you can hear that bitter sweetness there, in that definition.

And Moni Charlie, who was saying it in a French accent. Moni Charlie said to us, “Well, I guess we can really do that, we can send that wisdom, or that information, that assurance, to our past selves.”

But she said, “Maybe we can send love to our past selves”.

And sometimes I hear people talk about their past selves and they say, “Oh, you know. You probably wouldn’t have liked me back then. And when they say that, I gain an instinct that maybe they haven’t fully embraced, or accepted themselves now.

Cause if they don’t love their past self, then how can they really love their current self. We can do this as an exercise, as a meditation.

It’s a kind of meta-meditation that it is a living kindness meditation.

Thinking about the times maybe you’re in, primary school, or high school. Maybe you’re awkward, maybe you didn’t know exactly what to say. Maybe you were overconfident to compensate for your insecurity, or maybe you’re even just a happy child who just accepted things as they were.

In any case, that past version of yourself is worthy of love and you can give it to yourself anytime you want. Moni said to us, “There will be a point in the future where our future self is looking upon us now and saying – I love you, you’re cared for, you’re valuable.

You’re worthy of happiness.

Thank you for sending that care and attention to those deepest parts of yourself, so you can heal and become even more complete”.