It is not an easy thing to do, this “unpacking” thing. It makes you confront who you are, how you got here and why you happen to have the set of beliefs and behaviours you hold onto today. Everyone has a past, without a past we don’t have a present because yesterday always leads to the present moment. What yesterday doesn’t need to do though is pop up all over the bloody shop like a reminder of what you’ve already done and it certainly doesn’t need to be the reason you choose not to get on and thrive.
Good memories are fabulous, keep them, treasure them, look back on them. But bad memories need to be handled differently, they need a bit more thought. You can’t cuddle a bad memory or stroke it like a cat. Most of us want to block them out, or bury them deep, deep down into the pit of our memories where they can never rear their ugly little heads again. But it doesn’t work like that. If we truly want to get over something that happened to us or that we have done we have to “unpack it”.
So what is “Unpacking”?
It is the art of breaking down the behaviours you have and the steps and actions you took to get to the place where that thing happened and then dissect it and genuinely decide if that thing really needs to be the thing that stops you anymore. You get to decide if you want to change and then you get to choose to change.
Think about this.
When we experience things, we are left with an impression.
Our senses allow our mind to compare, judge, react and remember those times.
The impressions we are left with after we have experienced something are “energetic thoughts” or sensations.
It is only our senses that determine if they are pleasant or unpleasant. You decide that.
Our mind stores those sensations and turns them into memories. If they are good we like them, if they are bad we use them to avoid that thing the next time. In that moment we have built ourselves a barrier or we have planted a seed to help grow our ever-increasing wall of resentment hedges (we all have our own maze – let’s face it).
The accumulation of sensations produce our perception and our personal concepts and these lead to how we develop our language and behaviours, these directly affect our actions.
So this tells me that our experiences create our impressions and ultimately drive our behaviour and directly affect other people’s perception of you. We are all judged on our actions, behaviours and language.
This either drives us forward or is a debilitating roadblock which stops us from progressing.
So “unpacking” helps you to assess to see if that debilitating behaviour you have where you tell yourself the story about why you can’t do something, or why you aren’t good enough, or that you’ll never get there (wherever there is) is all in your head.
Have you reached the place where you are right now because you believe your own script based on the experiences you have had throughout your life and is that script stopping you from being exactly who you want to be? If so – it’s time to unpack!
Now, if you want to continue to believe yourself , and buy into your own pitiful story of why you cannot do something or how unfair your life is and that you don’t have the chance to do whatever it is you want to do then – go right ahead. Im not going to stop you. Only you can stop you. You created you and if you let someone else direct you – then you do have a choice, you can stop letting that happen.
This is your life, your story and you get to write the script. If you choose to let a “director” in to tell you what to do – then at some point you’ll gonna get fed up of that and things will go pear-shaped. Shit does happen. Life happens, but we are all on the same ride and there are plenty of people out there to help.
We all have varying degrees of shit to sift through. How you deal with it and how you move on from dealing with your various flavours of brown sticky goop will determine how happy you are in the next moment and the next, because all we have are fleeting moments that get sewn together into a tapestry we call “life”. Some of the stories in your tapestry might be a bit messier than others, but you can still create a beautiful scene even with a few frayed edges.
So don’t let the little or the big things in life eat away at you. Unpack them, figure out why you have that behaviour and if you don’t like it, change it, change your perspective, change the way you react, change how you deal with that thing.
If you don’t you will keep repeating the same mistakes and stay on the same boring ride forever. Only you can change you, only you can change your perceptions, sensations and actions and only then will other peoples perceptions of you transform.
If you want to have a go at actually “unpacking” I am running the first of many events to do exactly that. The first one is being held in my home town of The Sunshine Coast at Alex Surf Club. Its a half-day event that will be hilarious, fun yet cathartically confronting. Find out more here
