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Changing The Past
by Graeme Kapono Urlich

I watched the movie “Prince of Persia” with my son the other day. It was a typical swashbuckling tale of heroic triumph over treachery with a touch of romance thrown in. What interested me most was that the story centred on a magical dagger that could turn back time so that things could be changed to bring about a different outcome.

Many of us have had that sinking feeling with smoke billowing from our ears and wished that we could go back in time and do something over. Recently I received a question about this very thing. The person concerned had been through a very bad year and wanted to physically go back and relive that year differently.

In an infinite universe of course this is theoretically possible but I don’t know of anyone who has figured out how yet. Developing that level of belief, skill and power would take considerable time and effort.  It is much more effective to accept that past for what it is, learn from it and move forwards.

The past is actually shifting all the time without us being consciously aware of it.  Have you ever had a discussion with someone about the past and you seem to recall an event quite differently?  It's not that either of you have a bad memory but you are both remembering different pasts.

There are different theories about how and why this happens but I believe it is by shifting to alternate realities, parallel universes.   This in fact happens each time we change our thinking at a fundamental level which is also happening in small increments all the time.  When we get a cumulative change large enough then we notice the changes externally. Basically we need to cultivate a change in belief that would support the change that we want to achieve externally.  This is what Gandhi meant when he said “Be the change you want to see in the world”.

It can take considerable effort and practice depending on how big a change we want to achieve and it is usually more effective to change the way the past affects us in the present (which is really where the past and the future exist anyway) and move towards a future that we would enjoy. It’s the end result that is important and it makes sense to make the changes in the simplest and easiest ways available.
 
One way to do this is to pick specific events from the past and work with the memories to make the good ones more important and significant and to make the bad memories less important and less significant.  Techniques like EFT and Dynamind (my personal favourite) are very useful for this.  Working with a life coach or good counsellor can be very useful depending on what it is about the past that you want to change/forget.  All counsellors have supervisors to help them stay focused so I use a mentor/life coach in this way myself.
 
You can also take specific memories where you would like to have behaved differently or made a different choice and replay that memory making the corrections that you want.  This rehearses behaviour that you will use the next time such situations arise.  The more you rehearse the more that behaviour will take hold.

Another technique is to travel back in time in meditation and act as a spirit guide to yourself, give yourself advice in situations that you had trouble with.  I've seen people change in the space of an hour and not even be able to remember what they were like before with this technique.  By moving forward, making better and better choices, you automatically change the past.

I have had experiences where the present has changed dramatically because of a change in my thinking.  Just a couple of months ago I walked outside my house and noticed that all of the television aerials were pointing in a different direction from what I remembered. Often I have gone down streets that I have travelled many times and noticed a building or something that I have never seen before but that obviously had been there for a long time.

These spontaneous changes are happening all the time but are often so slight that we don't notice except in passing as curious events and often put them down to memory lapses.  They can occur when we are working towards a goal with sufficient focus but are side effects rather than consciously designed.  It is just as reasonable to assume these changes are reality shifts as it is to put them down to poor memory or poor powers of observation. The universe is too complex and there is too much information for us as humans to comprehend consciously but with practice we can begin to influence these changes in the direction that we want.

A good example perhaps to use is the re-patterning technique described in Urban Shaman.  If for example you were building a fence and you accidentally hit your thumb with the hammer you have two options.  The most typical option is to throw the hammer down, say a few choice words and jump around holding your thumb.  The effect of this is to reinforce the idea that something bad has happened and to you so your subconscious will increase the stress and injury.
 
A different option if you are aware enough in the moment is to repeat the movement of hitting your thumb over and over without actually touching it.  You can reinforce the idea by stating each time "Nothing happened".  After a few minutes the pain will have reduced significantly.  When this happened to a friend of mine the pain had reduced so much after a few minutes that he was able to continue on with his project and at the end of the day he remembered the incident but found there wasn't even a bruise there.
 
The effect in the present is that the event had never happened in the past.