Regrets, choices and mistakes

When thinking about the future, we can feel anxious about all the unknowns of our life and try to predict the best outcome for us. Our ego mind is a brilliant computer that helps us to navigate the world. But that’s what it does: it computes. And only sees data. It’s a left brain activity: logic. But its efforts are usually futile, because the world has a will of its own. And intuition is far superior to logic . Intuition is the right brain counterpart, immensely powerful; yet, our western societies have overweight logic and distrust intuition. And when thinking about the past, we can find ourselves over-analysing decisions we’ve made and how they’ve unfolded till today. That can easily lead to regret.

In both cases (anxiety and regret), the ego mind is fooling ourselves. Why? Because it can only perceive a tiny portion of reality: its own point of view. It does not perceive the whole. And when things are perceived holistically—like the Higher Self knows how to do—then we see things in context, over long period of time. And it will appear that what started as a bad thing, could actually lead to a lot of good things, the so-called blessing in disguise. So, for a same past event, depending on when we will assess it in the future, we may come up with different outlooks. Isn’t that powerful? Isn’t that a sign that we can never know for sure what truly is a good or bad choice? Or what truly is a good thing?

Examples:

• that job you didn’t like much, but that acted as a springboard in your career because once you had that on your CV, it opened doors.
• Covid-19! All the blessings in disguise behind that 2 years collective mental health episode are becoming difficult to list…

Here’s one of the tricks about reality: we perceive reality in context, because of how we feel in the moment. Our memories are not even reliable… Instead, everything we perceive is coloured by our current emotional and mental state.

It’s like we mentally re-compile our reality in each instant, so things are much less carved in stone than what we usually think they are. In fact, a change in our beliefs—especially core beliefs—will alter the information field instantly and produce results that are beyond rationality. That was beautifully exemplified in the movie The Secret that talks about the Law of Attraction.

But regrets don’t participate to our happiness, they are a form of mental rumination that leads us nowhere. Regrets can trap us into a victim attitude and make us feel disempowered in our life. We can fantasise and live in illusions because of perceived mistakes. When we have regrets, we are feeling guilt and/or shame. Those emotions are so toxic and low-vibration that they actually weaken our aura, making us vulnerable; for example, that’s when entities can infiltrate and cause us harm. The price to pay for guilt and shame is too high and those emotions need to be surrendered as soon as possible.

Let’s talk about choice now. In business, decision making is the skill of the leaders. And they’ll tell you this: “Making the wrong decision is better than making no decision at all”. Why is that so? Because over-analysing and being indecisive is damaging. Paralysis by analysis is detrimental to the willpower of someone. So a leader avoids it. A leader needs to be able to decide and move forward. Often. In fact, every day. It doesn’t mean deciding in five minutes. But it means taking a stance on something after analysing the pros and cons etc. A leader may well say 6 months down the road “oh if I had known what I know now, I would have made a different decision” but it doesn’t matter. Because with continuous improvement, the leader fine-tunes his course along the way. And it’s far better than staying in the harbour and never sailing out, by fear of taking the wrong direction. So are the waters of life: unknown and unpredictable. Fear is what keeps many people frozen and unable to take action. Courage is when you feel the fear, but do things anyway. And one day, you look back and realise it was so worth it!

Therefore, making a choice is a powerful act. In fact, an act of pure creation. Think about it: given the thousands of choices we make every day, our day could unfold in millions of different ways. Granted, deciding to have a sandwich or a soup for lunch will probably not alter the course of your life, but some big decisions certainly will. And all the choosing is done by us, individuated consciousness in this large game called life. We are truly artists, weaving the tapestry of our own life with the succession of choices that we make in every moment. Some physicists argue that each other alternative we didn’t choose exists somewhere in the multiverse—the sort of things that can easily give you a headache if you seriously start thinking about it… As illustration, there’s this special episode of the series Black Mirror called Bandersnatch. It’s an interactive movie where the viewer—that is you—is given dozens of choices at different moments. The result is this: there are reportedly over a trillion unique permutations of the story… Mind blowing, isn’t it? I also find that liberating. If you believe in destiny, it also means that no matter the decisions you make, you will eventually meet your goal because all roads will lead to the same destination… it’s just that there are fast tracks and detours.

I’ve written before about making decisions , living with no regrets and the myth of perfect choices if you want to go further. But today I want to make a point about something else: the inevitability—and actual necessity—of making mistakes in your life. That is something I didn’t realise till later in life. I was so obsessed with getting things right all the time, and fearful of fuc**** it up that I didn’t allow myself to fully grow from my mistakes. I didn’t even acknowledge and analyse my mistakes because I was too ashamed of my failures… But we all make mistakes, and sooner or later we’ll make a big mistake. And that is not the sort of things advertised typically on social media where people promote the curated version of their ‘perfect life’. Because social media tell a happy story, they are entertainment, they don’t depict life as it truly is—and the worst is that generations of teenagers now take what they see there as goals and will inevitably meet failure.

They say you should celebrate your victories, I say you should celebrate your mistakes too. But not any random one: those that have triggered growth in you, because the cost of the mistake was so high that the lesson resonates throughout time and it’s something you’ll never forget. Those mistakes that have been teachers and allowed you to master a valuable lesson. In hindsight, you’ll realise that you may have committed the same mistake over and over and over again. It could be in the areas of: relationships (e.g. where you keep attracting the inadequate type of partner), job (e.g. difficult relation with the boss), money etc. But one day there’s the same situation again but you make a different choice, because now you see something you couldn’t before. And in doing so, you finally pass the lesson!

We should own our mistakes to move forward in life. We should realise we are now a different person, the one that has been through the mistake and has emerged on the other side: in the land of knowing the truth. Our truth. Therefore, we can forgive ourselves for wandering and sometimes getting lost. We can truly forgive ourselves for our past mistakes. We can see them as past learnings instead. We can take our losses and move on. We can truly let go of the past when we understand the iterative process that is life. Because there’s always new opportunities presented to us to evolve. So, again, it’s never worth getting absorbed by our rumination.

In the end, we should have no regrets at all. We should not be fearful of making mistakes—at least new ones. We should embrace our free will and capacity to create the life we desire for ourselves using our power of manifestation. We should just take life as it is: moment by moment. There will be beautiful times, and there will be difficult ones. But we came here as souls incarnated to experience all of it. Emotions are key for our quality of life, and that’s often where we need to do the work. The more we release what no longer serves us, the more free and liberated we will feel.