What Happens When We Jump Ahead Or Go Back Into The Future?

“Piglet noticed that even though he had a very small heart, it could hold a rather large amount of gratitude.”       

                                                                                        A.A. Milne

Cool grey days are upon us with the harbinger of winter. I don’t know about you, but I am an outdoor girl. I love being outside…when it isn’t too cold or wet. So as the days are shorter and cooler I tend to pull inward and to read more and write more. With this more sedentary and indoor lifestyle I also plan more and visualize what is to come and what I am working towards. As we do this there is a warning also. Visualizing and planning have their merits, and we need to be careful not to jump ahead and start going through elaborate and not so elaborate fantasies and imagining of how things are going to be. There is a fine and important line between imagining and brainstorming and visualizing and jumping into the future based more on dreams and the unconscious than on conscious planning which also allows the unconscious to move within us. 

So what happens when we just jump ahead and jump into our unconscious instead of inviting the conscious along with us? When we jump ahead we go back to the future; we keep recreating our past over and over again. Most of us don’t want to do that. We want to create a future of love, wholeness, happiness and health. The only way I know of doing this is by doing our internal work of seeing and feeling what we are doing.  We need to see the genesis of this pattern within our lives and within our ancestors lives. We need to stop repeating the pattern, and we need to  keep our eyes open as we welcome a new way of being and living, which invites living in the present.

I have been working with a client who says all the right words, is very intelligent and good at reading what others want and are looking for, and then repeating what they want to see and hear instead of honoring herself. Does this type of pattern sound familiar? Many of us do this to different degrees. The problem is she isn’t able to do anything differently…right now. There is a fear that she isn’t good enough and she will be left and abandoned. So what she does is, when things start well in beginning of a relationship, she jumps ahead to an elaborate fantasy of all that is going to come and be in their relationship. We know, and she knows that in doing this fantasy the actual relationship is not able to develop. So we looked at the root of this issue within her and saw that her mother and father were teenage parents. Her father and mother divorced when she was three or four and dad left for another woman. Mom was angry and felt lost and abandoned and later remarried three more times, and is not happy. We even looked into her grandparents generation and saw a grandfather that left and had a totally second family in another city. She is seeing how she merges with her mother and becomes abandoned by the men in her life, just like mom and grandmother, and she creates a whole separate world in her mind like her ostracized grandfather who had two separate families. It is amazing how we recreate the past unconsciously. We do this in order to give us an opportunity to heal the past or resolve traumatic events in the past for us and for our families. In the Family Constellation model, we would say that we blindly love our family members by repeating and carrying the same fate as they did. If my client and others don’t do some kind of work to become conscious of these past magnetic unresolved issues, we then continue to traumatize ourselves and our future family members by jumping into the future to try to make and have something different, yet, because of the unresolved unconscious factors, we don’t really have a chance without doing the step by step process, guided by love and understanding.

Jumping into the future, or going back to the future only repeats the past. In my work, and the work of many committed to living fully in the present and in our soul’s truth, we help others to live fully, wholly, in health and in vitality planted in the present.

Small Shifts that Create Big Results:

So let’s take a moment and see how we might be doing the same thing in our lives; jumping ahead when we are in the present.

Grab a piece of paper and writing utensil. Write down in the last day when you might have done this…even just a little. If you can’t think of an example in the last day, go through the week or weeks until you find an example of you jumping ahead in your mind, imagining a different future. When you have the example, write it down. Next, go through, in your mind’s eye to what was actually happening…you were talking with someone, you were at the grocery store, you were reading a book,..whatever comes to you. Go back in time for a minute to that time and place. What was said or what was the trigger that sent you on this trip? Now, instead of leaving yourself as you did, imagine yourself at that time and place and staying right there and being in the conversation, or in the book, etc. See the trigger and what sent you and decide to remain right there.  Go back to your paper and write down the trigger. 

Put the paper away and bring it out the next day to read again. Do this for about 10 days and then pay attention to your present happenings, and see how this exercise helped you.