Have you ever felt weighed down by your past?

As though no matter what you did, you can’t seem to shake the hurt, pain or the negative thought patterns borne of some past experience, and move forward to your dreams?

It can feel like you’re stuck in a pessimistic loop, unable to move forward toward greater happiness, joy and fulfillment. If your past is holding you back from creating a life you truly love living, remember that you are far more powerful than anything you may have faced or are currently are facing.

You have the power to design a life you love and turn your dreams into your reality!

And here is where the secret lies …… in learning how to release the hurt, sadness or grief that you may be holding onto about things that have happened to you in the past. Otherwise, this pain can grow into resentment, or a belief that you don’t deserve a life any better than what you’ve experienced up until now.

This is why I want to show you how to release the past. Because when you can shake off the past, you free yourself to truly live in the present and create an inspiring future.

In a moment I’m going to teach you the three steps you can take right now to release what’s happened to you in the past. When you take these three steps you will be able to powerfully keep moving forward to your dreams.

But before we explore these three steps together, let’s start by taking a breath and realizing that you are not alone in your pain. As a minister and worldwide trainer for a combined 40 years, I’ve heard countless stories about trauma, abuse and all the other difficulties that can happen in a human life.

The truth is, every single one of us has suffered. And for many of us, this kind of pain can be very difficult to release. So know that no matter what has happened in the past, you can find a way to release the suffering. You will never be able to take away what happened, but you can take away its hold on you and its ability to keep you from living a life you love. You can choose to be stronger than your circumstances.

So now, let’s dive into how you can release past pain, because freedom and bondage don’t live on the same frequency.

If you want to be free, you’re going to have to learn to let the past go with these 3 powerful steps:

STEP #1: Acceptance

Acceptance means recognizing you’ve been through some tough stuff in your life, but you still want to move forward.

No matter how many times you may have imaginary arguments in your head with this person or that person, no matter how many times you may blame yourself for not seeing it sooner or stopping it more quickly, none of this will ever change what happened.

What happened, happened. There’s no turning back the clock and there’s no changing it. Once you accept the past for what it is, you can begin to move forward.

Practice acceptance by taking a deep breath and saying, “Okay, it happened.” The more you practice just accepting it happened, the less power it has over you.

STEP #2: Forgiveness

If you want to move forward and live a happy life, the next step is to start practicing forgiveness.

If forgiveness feels difficult for you, then I invite you to re-define what it means for you. You see, many people misunderstand forgiveness. They think forgiveness has to do with letting someone off the hook – as though you’re saying, “Hey, it’s okay that you hurt me.”  

But forgiveness isn’t about letting them off the hook… it’s about letting your mind off the hook of your pain, so that you can move forward toward your dreams. In other words, it means releasing the situation from your mind.Forgiveness doesn’t mean you want to see that person again, or that you want to rebuild a relationship with them, for example. Forgiveness simply means you release the hurt and pain about what happened from your mind.

Buddha said that holding onto resentment is like picking up a hot coal that you mean to throw at somebody else. In holding the coal, you suffer the worst burn. And so, as long as you hold onto resentment over past hurts, you’re actually harming yourself much more than anyone else.

The freedom to engage with love and life does not happen on the frequency of resentment, and it does not happen on the frequency of self-loathing or rejection of others.

Once you remove your resistance, through the practice of forgiveness, you become free to re-discover that the power of love -the power of LIFE- hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s always been within you and a part of you, and you can begin living from this place anytime you choose to.

STEP #3: Gratitude

The third step to letting go of the past is to identify the life lessons that this past experience may have taught you. Once you see what you have learned, you automatically shift away from blame and resentment and into gratitude.

Remember: We all learned to walk by falling down first.

Life gives us the opportunity to learn through making mistakes, by sometimes getting it right and sometimes getting it wrong. This applies to every area of our life, including our hurt, pain and difficulty.

Once you open yourself to feeling gratitude, even for the painful moments in your past, you free yourself up to pursue your dreams and creating a life you love living.