‘Dont open the pandoras box!’ ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’ We’ve all heard these words, sometimes ignoring them and sometimes allowing them to influence who we are today. Secrets can lay buried and emotions can stagnate in the shadows of our personalities, brewing slowly, awaiting a time for release as soon as an opportunity arises.

Those opportunities can arise but are not always handled effectively. If the release of emotion is to be effective, we sometimes need to know its original source. Where did this emotion begin its story. Often people come into our lives to remind us of our original traumas and challenges, arriving with perfect timing for us to engage with our past, helping it to heal.

But what if we ignore that? What if we just assume it is all about the present moment, and whoever is ‘triggering’ this emotion is to blame.

What will happen to that friendship or that relationship?

In my own experience it has been far better to sit with my own emotions and to ask myself, ‘what does this remind me of?’ Are there any memories connected to it? This feels like a mature and effective way of dealing with our own wounds within our history.

An effective route to healing our pasts without blame towards others.

In those moments of connecting to memory we can begin to form the images of what was true at the time. The images that come to us that hold powerful emotions are often the  ones that need to be explored a little deeper. The emotion is the gateway to what needs unfolding. It is the immediate guidance that we need.

If we have chosen a path of denial then those emotions will remain stored in our body and possibly force us into states of depression. To de-press ourselves; to deeply press into the body  the very life force that we need to live from.

We become immune to feeling, not just the negative and old emotion, but also immune to the joy that can be felt at its release. Life can become mundane, we can experience tiredness, fatigue and disillusionment.

Choosing to remember our past and all the destructive patterns and dramas may seem like opening a Pandoras box, where you have no idea what will emerge; but a life living with unnecessary care and caution, can be extremely boring.

Many habits and strategies are brought into place as we ride above the waves and undercurrents, that lurk in the depths of our heart and gut. Those habits and strategies will force us into a premature adult hood with loss of innocence and creativity, long  before our time.

As the memory and emotion fume away, unnoticed for what they really are, our lives can become dominated by one challenge after another with ill fortune and various circumstances that cause us to ask ‘why does this always happen to me?’

The reason is because something is asking us for our attention! Something deep inside, maybe a memory from our childhood or adolescence. Maybe even something that was pre-birth and that can be harder of course to deal with but not impossible.

We need to give it our time, not just to think about it or analyse it but to just be with it; sensing whatever happens to our bodies  ‘in the moment’. Acknowledging its fears, confusion and deep sadness, its losses and frustrations.

Memories can come thick and fast, we’ve been holding them back for a reason! A reason that has protected us until it is the right time for us to make some changes in our lives.

Getting support in this process is pretty vital as going it alone can be rather traumatic and it actually really helps to have some one there, as witness to your process. Rather than disappearing and ‘spacing out’ the simple act of making eye contact through the process really helps us to stay present and ‘in-body’

Honoring those memories as ‘part of who we are’ helps us to appreciate what we have lived through. And we have all had our challenges, very few are immune and if they are then they are a lucky few, but I say that lightly! Once we have begun the journey of re-membering there is a world of magnificence to explore, as each tear and each heart ache takes us to the truth of who we are. Without those challenges and our own ‘suffering’ we may never meet with the possibility that soul retrieval offers us.

The results of many journeys into those unknown places can be amazingly fruitful, inspiring us to live more fully rather than remain trapped and hidden inside a Pandora’s box of  memory forgotten. But the memory is never fully forgotten by the body, it lives through us as fear, frustration and arguments, meeting constant dysfunction and a way of being in the world that lacks presence and fulfillment.

To the spirit and essence of our soul this is a way to inhabit the body by living life from the neck up, lost in a daydream of unreality, lost to analytical assumptions about who we really are.

Remembering all of who we are and where we have come from can open us to the light of our own spirit, the source of our own magic and the change that our consciousness is ready for.

There is no better time than now to remind ourselves of our history and to do the work necessary to step into the future, a future that fits with the way our world is changing rather than the old way that no longer serves us.

It is a time for the opening of hearts, a stronger connection to spirit, with authentic  relationships between us and the realisation of what is really important now.