Unload Your Emotional Backpack To Move Forward
Each of us bears the weight of the situations we have experienced on our back in the form of an emotional backpack. Its content is memories and experiences of different sizes that somehow we have not released and are reflected on our skin.
If we do not learn to empty our backpack of toxic and negative experiences, the longer it passes the more loaded it will be and the greater weight we will have to bear, affecting our mood and relationships.
The weight of our backpack
In today’s world we tend to overload ourselves, not only at work but also emotionally. Each experience we live leaves its mark in one way or another. The important thing is that this footprint helps us to move forward and grow instead of generating chains that bind us to the past due to its emotional weight.
The ghost of guilt, the feeling of betrayal or abandonment, critical voices, the voids of absences or the burden of frustration make up, among others, that weight that makes us walk slowly and prevents us from enjoying ourselves. Experiences that color and transform us, and that make up part of our history. But, how can we empty ourselves of it if there comes a time when it is part of us?
Check your backpack and reflect on what you have inside, both what you have incorporated and what other people have deposited. Take your time. Although you cannot see it, it is present in your day to day. Keep in mind that many of your reactions have to do with the weight you bear: to alleviate it you will have to learn to differentiate between what helps you and what does not. Carrying your backpack overflowing is a drag on any advance you intend to make.
Unload your emotional backpack to move forward
Don’t let your backpack get overloaded to the point where you can barely move and life in general weighs on you. Do not lose the desire to move forward or leave your present at the hands of the past. Don’t be obsessed with forgetting either, because forgetting is not a friend of intention.
As uncomfortable and complicated as it is, you have to take out what you have inside, to learn to grow with it instead of anchoring yourself. The first step is to recognize what causes our weight and accept it.
You may even be flooded with a feeling of identity and attachment that prevents you, at first, from shedding the weight that makes up your emotional backpack. That vertigo is the masked fear fruit of the routine, you have become so used to those wounds that if they are missing it seems that you are nobody and a void is created. But trust me, it’s just the fear of uncertainty and the unknown: the fear of letting go.
Learn to empty it by releasing everything that has held you prisoner from the past and exhausts you. Accept your mistakes, identify and know your emotions, give wings to your dreams, discover your strengths, value yourself and above all, learn that growing is accepting what happens to you and not fighting against it, but finding a lesson in it. Remember that sometimes letting go is not a simple goodbye but rather a thank you for what you have learned to keep moving forward.
Letting go of the weight that paralyzes us from our emotional backpack is a great step to allow other feelings and new experiences to enter, some will help us to continue growing and others we will have to heal again, but that’s life. Let go of the weight that paralyzes you for your sake and that of your back.
Main image courtesy of Lucy Campbell
