#92 - Gratitude for the Past

We all have feelings about our past. Happiness, regret, hurt, fondness, and even gratitude. At least for the good parts. But what about the hard parts? Do we have gratitude for those parts of our past? On this episode I discuss not only how to be grateful for ALL your past, but why it will benefit you to feel it.

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Transcript

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I'm jamielynn Stephan and this is want to want it episode number 92 gratitude for the past. Welcome to want to want it a podcast for women of the church of Jesus Christ of latter day saints who are ready to ignite not only their sexual desire, but all of their desires to create a more fulfilling life and marriage. I'm jamielynn Stephan. I'm a certified life coach, a wife, and a mother of seven children. I'm excited to share my personal journey to desire with you and teach you how to desire more as well Hello, everyone. Welcome to want to want it. Last week, I talked about gratitude ahead of time. And as I was getting that podcast all sorted out, I started to see how gratitude for the past is really a powerful practice and how I had in some ways kind of ruined my own happiness by not having gratitude for the past. And kind of that, what did I call it in the last, like belated gratitude, right? This rear view gratitude. And so I thought I would speak to that today. Now, remember the past can be literally one second ago or a million years ago. Now my past isn't a million years ago, but no matter how long you have lived, if you've lived at all, you have a past. And in each one of the past, each of us has lived. We have things that feel easy to be grateful for and things that maybe feel impossible to be grateful for. So let's start with the things that are really easy to be grateful for. And the reason I want to start there is because one often the easiest things to be grateful for. We actually take for granted and aren't grateful for. And two, because as you practice being grateful for easy things, it will help you be grateful for harder things. So all of my life, my grandparents have had a cabin in a small mountain town and some of my best memories and experiences have happened in that little town and still happen there. As a child, I loved it there, but I don't know how grateful I felt to my grandparents for providing it for me or to my parents for making it a priority to take me there or to my cousins for being just the best playmates ever. But looking back, it is easy for me to feel so much gratitude for that little mountain heaven and for all the people who made it, that for me, I remember being so excited to get my driver's license. I had the test set up to take on my birthday. So like, imagine my disappointment back in the day of paper calendars and whatnot, when the person that I'd made the appointment with lost that sheet of paper. And so I couldn't take the test on the day. It turned 16, but anyways, side story. I got my license and my life became so much more free and so fun. And it is easy for me to look back and to be filled with gratitude for my parents who taught me how to drive and for having the courage to learn how to drive and for all the places I've driven because of that decision. I always knew that I wanted to have a large family. I have seven kids. And for some of you that seems large. And for some of you, that probably seems small, but for me, I always knew I actually wanted to have six kids. So when I got married and we ended up with seven, that is a large family. And every day, I'm so grateful that my husband and I made the decision to have each one of our children. I am so grateful that when we were considering if or when we should have our sixth baby, we felt that we actually needed to have a seventh as well. That little number seven. Oh, she has been such a blessing in our family and we really could not imagine life without her. So I am so grateful for her and for all of my children. I never, ever dreamed of being a life coach seven years ago. I didn't even know what a life coach was, but I was led to it. I trained to be one and I love it. And so I'm so grateful for Jody Moore, who was my first introduction into life coaching and to Brooke Castillo for teaching me how to be a life coach in a way that really resonated with me and for the women who trained with me and to have become some of my dearest and closest friends and for the amazing women and men that I've had the pleasure to work with, who bless my life so much, because I know them. And I'm so thankful for how my personal life is so much better because of all that I've learned and all I've been forced to face about myself. I am so thankful to God for guiding me to coaching and to me for having the courage to do it. Even more recently, I came back not too long ago from a week away with a group of women that I've known for over 20 years, at least for most of them and have been extremely influential in my life. And I had originally not committed to going on this week, long east coast adventure because of circumstances that I couldn't control in my family. And a different opportunity that I thought I needed to take, but in the end, quite last minute, I was able to go on this trip and I am so grateful. I have so much gratitude for the exploring. We were able to do the talking, the sharing, the unforgettable experiences that we had together and the closer bond we now have with one another, after being in a car and some small houses together, I just am so grateful. And even in my closer past, I'm so thankful to me for setting up my week in a way that allows me to sit down right now. And record this podcast. Okay. So there is past gratitude that is easy. And I really would encourage you to think about things in your past that you are grateful for, but not just in a passing way. Really think about them until you actually feel gratitude in your body. Don't just think gratitude. I want you to feel it, feel it so that you know what you're trying to create. When you go back to your past to create gratitude for the harder things. Just like every one of us has things in our past that are easy to be grateful for. We also have things that some may consider harder to be grateful for. But like I said, in my podcast where I talked about gratitude ahead of time, it is a really good practice to look back and see how your past. One second ago or 30 years ago has blessed your life, especially the hard parts of your past. By going back and doing this, you actually get to rewrite your past. It's not because you're rewriting the circumstances. It's just what you think about those circumstances, because your current story about your past isn't necessarily true. It's just what you think about it. And so you can renegotiate that at any time and by being able to have gratitude for your past, it makes it easier to have gratitude for the hard things you're facing now. And far the hard things you're going to face in your future. Now I know that some of you have past trauma. And that maybe you actually need a professional to work through that with you. And I would recommend that you do that. I believe all things can be healed with time and with help and with Christ. So, I don't want you to feel like I'm telling you to think about your trauma and tell yourself it's all good and roses and the very best thing. That's not what I'm saying at all. But what I would challenge you to do is to find the good that did come from it. You already know the bad it's obvious and it's real, but it isn't the only outcome. There's no way. There's always something good that comes from our heart. So if you have the capacity, ask yourself, what am I grateful for from this experience? Are you more compassionate than you would otherwise be? Have you been able to help somebody else who has suffered like you. Do you feel better equipped to know how to protect your children from similar trauma? Are you closer to God? Now I know that sometimes it can feel like the price you had to pay for those outcomes was too great. And I don't want to argue with you about that. Maybe right now, it feels that way. Maybe it will always fit that way. But just try this gratitude experiment and see what happens. It's okay. If it's too soon, or if you don't feel like it's helpful that gratitude isn't about trying to heal you immediately or to make it all better or not hard. The gratitude is simply looking for and appreciating the goodness that has come into your life no matter where it has come from. Did you ever see the movie returned to me? It's just a really cute romantic comedy, about a woman who needs a heart transplant. Or she's going to die. And as she's lying in the hospital bed on death's door, awaiting a miracle. Across town, a husband and wife are in a terrible accident and the wife dies. So the woman is given the heart of this man's wife and she's saved, but she's filled with so much guilt about the fact that for her to live, someone else had to die. And even though she's so grateful to be alive, it seems like a very high price had to be paid to make that. So. Anyway, I think sometimes we get so tied up in the fact that there was such a big price to be paid for the lesson that we learned, that we really can't feel gratitude for it. Whether it was his mistake that. We made that taught us a lesson or whether it was the mistakes of others that negatively impacted. It can feel hard to have gratitude when the lesson seems too costly. But I want to offer you that. You're welcome to believe that the cost was too high. And still have. So much gratitude that you are changed for the better for it. How do you be useful to others who have experienced this? And I'm so grateful that I'm the person I am now. Like I mentioned before, some of the hard things that are in our past are our past mistakes. Have you ever let yourself have gratitude for those? I have not been good at that at all. But let me share a few examples from my own life of how I have done better at this. So I remember what I was maybe six years old and I went to the dentist for my checkup. And after I was done, the hygienist told me I could pick a ring. Do you guys remember they had these little fake rings with these little gems in them, all different colors. And they were just so pretty and I just loved them. So I went back to get a ring and I decided that I would get one for my best friend, Jenny. I mean, the ironic part of this story is that Jenny's dad is a dentist and she probably had access to many of these rings. But I felt like I needed to grab one for her too. I didn't ask. I just took it. Anyways, as we were leaving the office, my mom asked me why I had two rings and I told her, and she just kind of said to me, that's not honest. I felt so sick. I felt like I had just won this ring. So my mom took me back to the office and I told the ladies at the front that I'd taken an extra ring. And I asked if I could put it back to him. He left. Oh, I felt sick for the rest of the day about the choice that I had made to take that extra ring. I'm looking back now. I don't even know if I would call it stealing so much. It's just not realizing that the prize box wasn't my personal gift. Giving supply. But at the time, I felt so bad that I'd stolen that ring. And it put me off ever stealing again. Even if I felt tempted for an instant to take something that wasn't mine. The remembrance of all the guilt I'd felt about that ring came rushing back and I just would not do it. So I am so grateful that I took that ring. I am so thankful that my mom saw it. I'm so thankful that she took me back to do the uncomfortable part of confessing making it right and putting it back because it taught me such a powerful lesson, honestly. It taught me about honesty and stealing. And I honestly believe that it saved me from making bigger, more costly mistakes at an older age. At the end of high school, I started to date a guy that was kind, but we really didn't have a lot in common. So we had a lot of fun together. We were good friends, but I knew for a long time that I needed to break up with him for his sake, as much as for mine. And I knew deep down that the relationship really wasn't healthy because both of us were dating each other out of more of a real neediness and not really out of genuinely liking or loving each other. Anyway, we dated way too long probably before I finally couldn't do it anymore. And I ended it. And I just had so much regret about it all regret about last time. Regret about how I had treated him. And I had shame as well. I felt so ashamed that I would date someone that I knew. I didn't really like, well enough. But I kept at it because it seemed better than being single. Anyway, I just felt quite heavy with regret about this relationship in general. And then I met my husband and we started dating and it was such a drastically different relationship. Not that we were as you know, so outrageously mature at 20 and 22, but the relationship itself was more mature. I respected him more. I loved him better and it just overall felt so good. But it was made even better when placed in comparison to how I had felt in my previous relationship. It helped me to really know that it was a relationship worth pursuing and a relationship I really wanted, not one that I needed, one that I wanted and suddenly my past relationship that I had regretted felt like the biggest blessing, because without it to hold against my new relationship, I wouldn't have had the certainty and the clarity about my husband and me that I had. So these are just two very simple examples. That my past mistakes have taught me so much. And I'm so grateful for them. And not just my things that might be considered sins, even mistakes in my business have taught me so much. So that's another thing I want to encourage you to have gratitude for. Be grateful for your failures. They are teaching you something. Some wiser people than me say you are never failing. You're either succeeding or learning. But sometimes we are too hard on ourselves about our failures. And instead of being grateful for the lessons, We beat ourselves up about failing. We always hear how Thomas Edison didn't fail a thousand times. He just found a thousand ways not to make a light bulb. I don't even know if that's exactly right. Or if he even truly said that, But that is gratitude for the past. That's gratitude for the failure. That's gratitude for the lesson. That's gratitude for a willingness to fail at all. And I think more of us could use this in our lives. I like to make bready type things. I like homemade bread buns, cinnamon buns, bread sticks, those types of things. But they take practice and I had to fail a lot at making bread. And sometimes I still fail at it. I'm like, wow. I thought I'd figured that out, but I'm so grateful to past me for being willing to fail at making bread for so long, because now I can make homemade buns when I'm craving them and they are yummy and lovely. And. Delicious instead of heavy, hard bricks, I needed those lessons in bread to get better at making bread. Another reason to have gratitude for the hard parts of our past is to stop you from missing out on the good that happens along with the heart. So last year, my husband and I went away for 14 or 15 days. We've never left our kids that long before we'd done 10 days, but never a full two weeks. And my kids are just getting a little older. Now, my youngest was 11 at the time. So I felt actually pretty comfortable about leaving them for that long plus my oldest daughter was coming to take care of them. So I was like, they're going to be in good hands. And they're going to be with someone they're comfortable with. And so that just took a load off of my mind. So we headed out onto our trip and I was so happy. And I am one of those terrible mothers. Maybe you might think, I like to consider myself a good mother. Who likes to be a way because when I get away, I totally shut myself off from my family. I actually have to like deliberately make effort to reach out and contact my kids when I'm gone, because I just want to break so badly. And I don't want to hear about everything that's going wrong here and have to feel like I have to put out fires from far away. So I was happily enjoying my time away with just my husband. And we did reach out to our kids a little, especially when we had internet, but mostly we just enjoyed ourselves. And every day I was filled with so much gratitude for all we were seeing and all we were experiencing. And I felt honestly like the luckiest girl on the planet. And then day 11 hit and on day 11, I thought. If I was going home today, I actually wouldn't be sad. I'd be so glad to see my kids again. And then day 12 hit and I wanted nothing more than to be on a plane heading home. And I was so shocked by this because I had not anticipated this feeling. And suddenly I was saying to myself, we should have planned to go home today. Instead of taking two more days to tour, I should've known that this was going to be too long. This is too hard. And because I was homesick for my kids. I went from being filled with gratitude, for what was happening around me to being filled with regret. And in that moment, the goodness of the trip tasted so bitter. And the rest of our plans sounded completely unappealing. And I suddenly had no gratitude for the past 12 days at all, because I was just too full of regret about how we planned our trip. Now, thankfully I've had a lot of practice with allowing emotions. I'm recognizing when my brain is on a runaway train. And I just did some self-coaching, because I didn't want my amazing trip to suddenly all go to ashes in my hand, because I was missing my kids. And we still had some amazing things we were going to see and I wanted to enjoy them, but I also didn't want to fight with myself about missing my kids. So I had to practice holding more than one emotion in my body that day. I let myself feel homesick. And I let myself feel so much gratitude for all we had seen at all. We were going to see. I had to remind myself that nothing was going wrong just because I missed my kids. It didn't mean that the trip was actually too long or that we hadn't planned. Well. It was simply evidence that even me, the mother who loves the break also starts to miss people after a while. And that's okay. I can miss people and still have the best time where I'm at. I can still have gratitude. So when we get so tied up in the hard parts of something, we can often miss out on the awesome stuff. So deliberately practicing gratitude for the past can help you overcome that. I think about piano lessons. I liked learning how to play the piano, but I didn't always like practicing. And my mom required me to practice 30 minutes a day, and that could feel so long. And sometimes it was a fight, but I am so thankful to my mom and dad for paying for my lessons and to my mom for requiring me to practice diligently. I'm so thankful to me for doing the work because especially as a teenager, playing the piano became an extremely important emotional outlet for me. I could sit down and I would get up feeling genuinely restored. It has been such a blessing in my life. So even though there was hard in it, I'm so thankful for. Piano piano, practicing and piano lessons. I am so grateful for my kids who haven't been perfect. From babies who would refuse to sleep all the way up to young adults who don't know what their next step is. It can feel so exhausting and frustrating and difficult in the moment, but I'm so grateful to each of them and their impact on me. I have learned to be more patient. I have learned to say, I'm sorry. I've learned how to pray with more faith. I've learned about my divine identity. I have more compassion for other mothers and fathers. I have learned to surrender. I have learned to manage a full schedule, my capacity for so many things has grown. I mean, I could go on forever. I feel like. So I can look back at hard parenting times and be so thankful for what I have become because of them. Uh, marriage. Need I say more. I know that nothing has refined me quite like marriage parenting is a close second, maybe even tied, but marriage, man, it has been awesome and hard, but my growth that happens in my marriage has been a huge help to me and to my clients and to others that I teach. I am so grateful to the hard parts that have humbled me taught me, stretched me. I adore my husband and I love our marriage. And I have to give things where thanks is due. And that is to the past me and passed him who worked and slogged through the hard and took the lessons and stayed committed to being our best selves in our marriage. And I'm so thankful for my past marriage that has brought me to my now marriage. No one has a perfectly happy, Easy past. And this isn't about trying to pretend you did. Right. I'm not saying go back and just pretend it was perfect. But I want to really encourage you to start remembering your past with gratitude. If you practice this and it will take practice, you will find your feelings about your past changing, but even better, you will find your confidence in the future increasing because you will start to believe that no matter what comes your way, no matter what mistakes you make, no matter what circumstances come along, you will be okay. And you will be able to be better for it all. I hope that this helps you. I hope you have a fantastic week, everyone. Bye. Thanks for listening today. If you like what you hear on the podcast, and you'd like to learn more, feel free to head over to my website. Jamilin Stephan coaching.com or find me on Instagram or Facebook at Jamileh. step in coaching.