How often do you find yourself thinking about something bad that happened yesterday and it ends up ruining the way you feel today?  I have to admit I have let myself do that at times, but I can also say that doing it has never once helped me nor made me feel better about anything…it’s only made me waste a precious new day when I could have been doing something awesome with it that would have helped make my tomorrow great.

I think we most often fall into the trap of thinking about a bad yesterday when something we wanted to happen doesn’t, or when someone else has hurt us. Perhaps they said an unkind word, perhaps they didn’t return our affection, perhaps they overlooked us, or perhaps they betrayed our trust…let’s face it, people can do a million different things that can hurt us and cause us to feel sad.

I love the following advice from Deepak Chopra about how to take control of our emotions and get passed it when someone has hurt us:

“When you feel frustrated or upset by a person or a situation, remember that you are not reacting to the person or the situation, but to your feelings about the person or the situation. These are your feelings, and your feelings are not someone else’s fault. When you recognize and understand this completely, you are ready to take responsibility for how you feel and to change it. And if you can accept things as they are, you are ready to take responsibility for your situation and for all the events you see as problems.”  

What awesome advice! When someone hurts us we need to realize that we control our own feelings, not that other person, and if we want to change our feelings we simply change our thoughts, because thoughts precede our feelings. We need to change our thinking to accept that what happened has happened and then we have to focus our thoughts on where we want to go from here forward.  We have to remind ourselves that forgiving someone else is more for our own benefit than it is for the other person’s. Then we have to choose to forgive and move on. I realize that sounds much simpler than it feels, but it’s just a fact – we can’t change anyone else, we can only change ourselves. And we have the choice to accept what has happened and to move forward with this new day.

And for those things we wanted to happen that didn’t, well we can choose to think that if it didn’t happen as we wanted then God must have a plan for something even better to happen instead. Accept things as they are and move forward with faith for something better to come.

Things could have turned out different than they are but they didn’t – so you have to deal with things as they are. But no matter how things are remember we always still have a choice – We can live in the hurts and disappointments of the past or we can live in the present and take responsibility for making it happy.

Have a great day everyone!

~Amy Rees Anderson