Fresh Starts
 By Brenda Shoshanna, Ph.D.
 Health Articles/Self-Help Title/Relationships

       It is easy to hang onto familiar patterns, friends, hopes and choices, and to live a life based upon the past. There is a great momentum which drives us to this – the momentum of comfort and familiarity. But yearning for the past, for security and familiarity, can prevent growth, aliveness, new experiences, and the taste of deeper relationships in our lives. Out of the brittle earth, new flowers bloom. Making a fresh start is a time to allow for new growth and beauty in our lives.

     A fresh start always includes a time of house cleaning, going through our possessions and seeing what is valuable and relevant now, and what is finished, what has been completed, or used up. In gardening, that which has been used up, is used as fertilizer for the soil. In our lives, our past experiences, what is handled wisely can also act as fertilizers for the rest of our lives. It is important to allow a time of personal house cleaning, going over the year, going over our relationships, choices, experiences, realize where they belong now, and learn how to digest them well.

     Before we can move forward constructively and make a fresh start, either in relationships or in our personal choices, we must take some time to stop and appreciate what has happened to us, realize that which is over now, what has been used up. Then we notice, how it too, can become fertilizer for our lives.

     We do not then simply throw away or discard an experience or relationship, but must discover the lessons we learned from it. We must ask ourselves, what gift did this person or experience bring to my life? How will it help me in the future? Then it is helpful to give thanks for the experience or relationship, (whether or not it was sweet or bitter). If possible, write a note to the person, or find some way to commemorate the experience you’ve been through, transforming it into something positive and constructive for you. Feel a sense of completion. When one relationship is completed, it makes room for a new one to appear.

     When we do not go over our lives in this way, when we do not put the past in the past and make room for the future, clutter remains, preventing newness and clogging up the space for wonderful new experiences and growth.

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