The Past No Longer Exists, It's Just A Thought

Hi everyone and welcome to the podcast. Today I’m so happy to be home. I've been doing a lot of traveling lately and it's just been a whirlwind of a year. I've literally flown so much overseas, more so than I ever have in my entire life. I've visited so many cool places from Italy, to France to Germany, to Dubai, and I just recently went to DC.

I planned a trip with my parents. It was a Christmas gift and it's been so beautiful to be able to give gifts like that, like experiences. So, I sent my parents on this treasure hunt basically at Christmas. Where there are all these little notes all over the house, including one in the washing machine. It took a while to find that one, but it was really meaningful, and it ended with this cabinet that my grandfather made out of wood and it's one of my mom’s most prized possessions and that was where the final clue was. There is a picture of my grandparents that led them to looking inside that cabinet and they opened up a file that showed the Cherry Blossom Festival that was going on in DC a few years ago and then they found their hotel stay for this big trip.

And the second part of the surprise is my dad didn't know that I was going to join my parents in DC to go and see all these amazing places. My dad and mom were eating at a restaurant at the hotel that we were staying at, and we just walked out to them and surprised them. And it was one of those things we'll never forget. Another really cool thing about DC is all of the museums are free. So you can go to the Natural History Museum. You can go to the zoo. You can go to the Air and Space Museum, which I really loved and my dad really loved too. And you get to go to all these national monuments from the Washington Memorial to the Lincoln Memorial.

And I arranged with my congressman to have really good tours for all of us when we got there. So we got to see the White House. We got to go on a private tour of the capital. It was really, really out of this world.

So, in today's podcast, I want to talk about the past, and specifically the fact that the past no longer exists. It just exists in our mind, right? There's no real past going on. We just have the present moment. The past is just memories. It's things we remember and things that we bring into the present moment that affect what's going on in our life today.

The interesting thing about this is I was just with my parents, and my parents are a huge part of my past and for most people listening, that's going to be you too, right? Our parents raised us with their beliefs, with their rules, with their ways of looking at the world, and not to get into politics, but my parents have different views than I do. Their views stem from their past, their background, how they were raised, their beliefs, the people they're friends with, you know. So, our beliefs are shaped by our environment as well, but we choose them and we can choose which beliefs serve us, and we can choose to let go of the ones that don't.

For a lot of people, especially people who are not really aware of this, they will look to their past and they will find pieces of their past fragments, if you will, and they will blame their current situation on that past. But we are adults, and we choose the baggage we take with us. It might not feel like it's a choice, and we might not be consciously aware of it, but when we become conscious of it, we have power. Because we can choose not to think about that situation that happened or not to dwell on a time when we got it wrong and feel shame and guilt about it. We can let it go. We can let anything go and we don't have to take those fragments from the past and cut ourselves over and over again on those shards from our past.

Every time we talk about a situation that wasn't desirable, or a time when we got it wrong, or when someone cheated on us or someone betrayed us or someone abused us in some way. And I'm not saying like if it just happened a week ago, or two weeks ago, or a month ago or even three months ago. I'm saying if this was years and years ago, if we bring it into the present moment, we relive it. To some degree, we are reliving it every time we tell that story, every time we dwell on it, every time we think on it and every thought that we have is having an effect on us. So when we have a thought, it can cause us to feel a certain way, and then that feeling can cause us to behave a certain way. And if you notice really moody people, right, it's because they have these negative thoughts in their head that are on loop and then they feel a certain way and then they kind of treat people not so great because they're kind of “moody”.

If we stop thinking about the things that happened in our past that weren't ideal. Then we no longer bring it into the present moment. When we can wipe those thoughts from our head or replace those thoughts with a better narrative, something that feels empowering. And I know that this is probably sounding really simplistic. I know that this takes work, and I've done it. I've done this work. So I don't want anyone to think that this is just like, “oh, just think a different thought. Like it's so easy”. No, I'm not saying that it will take time. It takes repetition. It takes creating a habit, a new belief. But if you've had really challenging things in your past, then that means you're very strong. It means you're resilient. It means you're a survivor And not only a survivor, you're a thriver.

So do you see how just shifting that, from victim to victorious? Sometimes that's a big jump to make, but we can we can move ourselves closer and closer to that victorious feeling. So we could go from a victim to feeling really good about the fact that we survived that, and not only did we survive it, we learned a lot from it. And not only did we learn a lot, we became kind of an expert in that area of life. And we can help a lot of people with that, see how it's moving ourselves closer to feeling good about whatever happened in the past. Even if it wasn't desirable. Because when we can take something really negative and use it to fuel ourselves and to help light other people up and help them find their way through this life, we get to feel good about it and we get to be a source of inspiration.

The most inspiring people to me,  are the people who have gone through the most. I get so inspired when I hear a story of somebody who really struggled and then kicked a**. I was just watching something on Netflix where a woman lost her leg in a car accident and then she started doing these marathons that were six times longer than a normal marathon. And I just thought, this is incredible and she was doing it through the desert. She was just showing how far she could push herself and it was really inspiring to see and no, I will not be running any crazy marathons, like that's really not my thing but I really appreciate people who do.

Something I find really interesting too about the parent child dynamic is, our parents often think our childhood was one way and we think it was a different way. But they're literally just thoughts. So their collection of thoughts is different than my collection of thoughts. It doesn't make their collection wrong, it doesn't make mine wrong. But there's probably some that you know are a little sugar-coated or embellished or pushed a certain direction. For whatever reason, our minds just tend to do that.

But if you've ever even been in a relationship too, and you thought the relationship was going really well, and then all of a sudden, like, the person gets upset with you about something and then has evidence that, like, something they don't like about you, right? It could be, “oh, you're really messy”. And you're like, “I’m not messy at all. I'm super clean, like you're the messy one”. But then they're like, “no, you left your dishes out that one day and you had your laundry on the floor and I had to, like, put it in the hamper”. Or, you know, they have all this evidence. You're like, wow, they see me totally different than I see myself. Interesting. And you can just take that in and you can learn from it and you can take in that feedback and work on yourself if you want to. But it's just interesting to see that everybody has their own perception and perspective.

If you have siblings or you do this with your coworkers and you just ask them about their experience with the same environment and see what their experience is and how it differs from your own. Because we all pick up on different things. And our brains are super powerful, they can be used to find the negative in just about any situation like you could think about anyone or any situation and you could find negative. Our brains are so good at spotting the negative and it's kind of the default. It’s really easy for our brains to pick out what we don't like about things. Like we'll eat a sandwich and we'll be like, oh, I didn't like the pickle inside it or I didn't like this, or I didn't like that or the bread was too hard. Maybe everything else was wonderful inside that sandwich, but we just picked out the negative.

And it's the same when we get feedback online, right? We could get a lot of really positive comments, but we'll remember the negative a lot of times. The negative just has this power because our brains are looking for what's wrong, often times. But we can train the mind to look for what's right. You know, when you get a thought in your head that is negative, maybe you don't like your car. You can replace that thought with three positive things. I love that my car gets me where I need to go. I really like the color of my car. You know, my car smells really good because I just put a really good air freshener in it. So you can think of positive things to replace the negative thing with. But I really love my car actually. I just got it and it's just so nice. I'm very thankful for it, but I'm just using this as an example. You know, it could be your house. It could be, you know, somebody you deal with at work. Maybe you can only see the negative in somebody, like a coworker.

Start picking out the positive in that person because you're going to start to train your brain to see what's good, what's right. And you're going to see more opportunities and you're going to have a higher vibration. People will react to you completely different if you do this. I'm telling you, it's like magic, you know, if you're thinking positive thoughts about a person. There's just an energy to that. They feel better in your presence, they feel less judged. And it's like, we all have body language. So if you're thinking a negative thought, it's very hard to cover that up with your body language. So if you're thinking it, it's showing. It could come out in your tone of voice, could come out in your eye contact. We don't want that. We want to be positive. We want to really like be loving. Because when we put love out there, that's what we're going to receive.

And what's interesting about our bodies and the research that has come out through Joe Dispenza and a lot of other great researchers out there. They have shown that our minds are so powerful that they influence our body and our bodies don't know the difference between the thoughts and the experience. So if we are thinking or visualizing something, our bodies are reacting. A good way of knowing this is think about if you've ever seen like a really scary movie. Your body tends to you jumped when things jumped out at you, Your palms were sweating, you know, you might have even been shaking a little bit, or your eyes were really wide. Your body was reacting to what it was thinking because you weren't actually in that situation. You weren't in danger and logically, you knew that it was on the screen and not in real life, but it was still affecting your body because you were thinking about it.

So our thoughts are affecting our bodies. So we want to think thoughts that affect them positively. So if we do the opposite, we visualize our success and we visualize ourselves as confident and having all the things we want, we're going to put on that energy. And then throughout our day, we'll carry some of that energy throughout the day and it can be very powerful.

When I first met one of my close friends, she was telling me about her husband cheating on her and she was saying it was so much emotion; and I had literally just met her, so I didn't know anything about the story. She was telling the story and she was tearing up and she just was feeling it so heavily. And I was consoling her and talking her through it. And at the end of the conversation, another one of her close friends came up and I was like, “oh, it's so horrible that she was cheated on”. And he was like, that happened seven years ago. And I was just blown away because she was telling the story as though it had just happened. And he proceeded to tell me that when it happened, her body kind of shut down. She had to go to the hospital. She felt it so deeply that she actually physically shut down. And she was continuing to tell the story with so much emotion that you could feel it. I could feel it in my body and everything. And then when I found out it was seven years ago, I was like, what?

So it isn't just like, “oh, like thoughts don't matter that much” or “I don't have to really monitor my thoughts”. No, you have to monitor your thoughts like your life depends on it because in certain cases it does. And if you want to have an abundant, amazing life, you have to change your thoughts. Now, I didn't know this for the longest time. I didn't know how important our thoughts are, but they literally create everything in our experience.

I'm going to go through this again- Our thoughts create our emotions, which influence our behaviors, which get us our results. And then the cycle continues. So if you have negative thoughts, and those negative thoughts give you horrible emotions, emotions that you really don't want to have, and then you take actions from those negative emotions. Let's say, like you're really insecure, you're nervous, you're paranoid, all those types of things. You take poor actions. Maybe it's at work, or maybe it's in your relationship. Imagine having that fear and that anxiety and that worry, and then you take actions. You're gonna repel people away from you, so you get those results and then you maybe think that people just don't like me, or I'm not good enough, or I'm not talented enough, or I'm not smart enough, or I'm not whatever enough. Or there's something wrong with me. Imagine how that thought can change your entire life if you believe that something is wrong with you, like, inherently wrong with you. Like, I'm not talking just an imperfection. I'm talking like you deeply believe that you're not good enough, you're not worthy. If you believe that, and you start to feel that emotion that leads to depression, that leads to deep uncertainty, that leads to a lot of pain and a lot of sadness. And I'm telling you, I know this from personal experience. I have been there. It is really an awful feeling. But how amazing is it that we can change our thoughts and thus change how we feel, change how we act, how we show up in the world and the results we get.

So just by having a good thought, the best thought you can possibly have. In many different areas of your life, it's going to change everything dramatically. There was a time when I didn't think so highly about myself, and that just got me terrible results, right? But then I started to think better thoughts about myself. I started to believe that I was worthy. I started to believe that I was good enough. I told myself I was enough. I loved on myself. I gave myself self-love, which I think is the cornerstone of a healthy, happy life.

You gotta get that muscle strong because once you do that then you're gonna have more confidence and you're gonna feel better. So put on some music that makes you feel powerful, work out, move your body in ways that feel strong to you. Love on yourself. Treat yourself like a great friend. Practice being a good friend on yourself and as you do that, everything will start to change and you just keep repeating the pattern by picking even better thoughts.

A great way to really notice this is finances. There was many years where I was dead broke. Like I made nothing. Like I I was just so broke, just barely getting by. For years I did this and I thought it was hard to make money. I had these thoughts that you know, money doesn't grow on trees, money doesn't matter. Like I don't do this for the money. All these thoughts that really negative. And it kept me broke.

To get wealthy, you have to believe you're worth it and that you don't have to give it all away to be a good person. That's the core belief. So I've worked really hard on this and that's why I've made a lot more money. You know your relationship with money based on how much you have. Right. So if you have a really healthy relationship with money, you probably have a lot of money in your life. And if you don't have a healthy relationship, you don't have much money in your life. You give it all away. You sabotage yourself. You don't save. You don't find ways to make more money. You don't put yourself out there. You just kind of settle for what is, right? And that's all based on thinking as well.

The reason I bring up money on this topic is because you can set a number in your head that you want to reach. If you're a coach or an entrepreneur or somebody who has a side hustle, even an Etsy account, you could set a number that you want to reach, right? And you could believe that you're going to reach that, like. Yeah, I could make an extra 500 bucks this month. Sure. Like I believe that. And if you believe that you can achieve that, right. And you might even make 700 and then the next month you can make it a little higher and a little higher and a little higher and a little higher and you'll notice that maybe when you used to believe that making money is difficult. You'll now start to think, oh, making money is easy, This is such a breeze. And then you'll start to see more of it flow into your experience because you believe it. You have better thoughts that cause you to have better ideas as well, but they also give you better emotions and you feel really good, so you take better actions and you get better results. So it's really that simple.

So whatever thoughts that we're telling ourselves over and over, whatever that story is, that's what we're going to see in our lives. So if you're saying something like “I never picked the right men”, that will be a self. Fulfilling prophecy until you catch it and break that thought pattern and start to pick better thoughts. Now I'm not telling you just lie to yourself because if this is a long held pattern and a belief then you want to ease out of it. You could just say, “I’m really enjoying the dating process. I love having fun with different people and getting to know them. I keep seeing good qualities in all the people I go out with” and do that thing we talked about earlier where you're picking out the good, even if you see a negative, you replace it with three good things. If you're doing that, then you can say these things and you can mean them.

And when you're dating, I want you to remember that for most people who want a monogamous relationship, you're looking for one person. So you don't need everyone to be perfect and wonderful in it to be like fireworks. You're looking for one person, so don't make it so hard on yourself. Have fun with this. Enjoy the process and then when that person comes in, if you've had a rough time, it's going to be even more meaningful. If we've gone through struggle in our lives, it makes it easier to really be thankful for the good when it flows in. If you have been thirsting for a long time and it's been a drought, when that rain comes, you are gonna dance in it. You're gonna just be so joyous in that rain. When we can carry that appreciation and gratitude through our lives without having to go through more negative experiences, that's really, really wonderful.

So when we think about our thoughts, a lot of times it can be kind of like the movie Groundhog Day, which is a movie with Bill Murray where he wakes up every day and it's the same day that he's going through and he makes different decisions that affect that day, but it's like every day is the same and our thoughts are like that. So if we continue to have the same thoughts, which most of our thoughts are the same from day-to-day, if we keep having those same thoughts, we're gonna get similar results. And it's going to feel like, oh, here's the same old, same old, and if we're having thoughts that attack our self esteem, we want to address those right away because those ones have the biggest impact. Sometimes we don't even know we're doing it.

I find that most people, when they stand in front of a mirror, they realize. What their mind is actually saying about them physically and it can be brutal. So I would recommend that to anybody. Stand in front of the mirror and just see what comes up in your mind, Stick through it, and then at the end after your mind has kind of gotten quiet, look into your eyes and love on yourself say, “I love you, I see you. You are worthy of love and I'm going to treat you better”. And then hopefully you've taken note of all those negative insults that you threw at yourself. I want you to replace them with positive ones. I want you to say nice things to yourself. Whenever you catch yourself saying something not so nice and this will change your self esteem. This will change the way you vibrate out there in the world. Because honestly, some of the most beautiful people I've ever seen in my life, you know, have wrinkles all over, have white hair, are in their 80s, nineties and beyond. But they just have that energy, a vibration of beauty. And it’s, it's intoxicating. I mean, I've seen men that are in their 70s, 80’s, bald, and they just smile and they light up the room. They're so beautiful. That is beauty.

And we can redefine what beauty means. It doesn't have to mean you're a 20 year old, you know and with a lot of my clients, this is something that they come to me with. They come to me wanting to be younger. This anti-aging industry is huge and it's OK to put your best foot forward and to dress in a way that makes you feel confident, that's wonderful. Or to, you know, do your hair makeup in a way that makes you feel good and to take good care of your skin and yourself. But there can be a time when it's too much, when it is obsession. And to be honest, if you are living into your 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, 100 and beyond. Wow, what a gift to be here for all these years. What a gift and you can be beautiful at any age because beauty is not about looks. It's really what's going on within you, because I've met people who the exterior was beautiful but the energy was not the behavior was not right. I think we've all had those encounters. I know living in Los Angeles, I saw it a lot. And, you know, I just think it's really important to remember what truly matters, which is who we are, our soul.

You know, and to be honest, like even even that, even talking about like, you know, beautiful versus not or good person versus not, I mean really, it's all perception. Maybe they were doing the best they could. And that's a thought I think often, people are doing the best they can. I don't know what happened to them that day. Maybe they are behaving in a way that isn't beautiful because they are hating on themselves. Or maybe someone hurt them.

We are all trying to get our needs met and we all want love. You know, it's not my place to judge. I'm here to love. In my opinion, that is the core reason I'm here. It doesn't get any more simple than that. And so how can we do that with our thoughts? My perception of them is just a thought. We just choose better ones. We continue to improve them. We keep working on it.

And let's think about it on an even deeper level. You know criminals who get wrongly accused and incarcerated when they're released. They could hold on to that anger and upset for years, for the life that was stolen from them. Or they can choose to use that painful past to see the world in an even more vibrant way, and they can appreciate their freedom even more because of what they went through.

There are of course, victims in this world and every child who goes through some trauma is a victim, but it's our choice in going forward as we grow up to remain a victim or grow through it and become victorious over it. Then we can help others who are current victims because we have left that pain in the past. This is not to say that we don't feel what we're feeling or give ourselves time to grieve a loss or heal a wound. I'm just talking about the times when we tell that old story like it's still here with us.

Now I want to give you a tool that you can take with you, and it's something I came up with when I was thinking about this podcast. And it's called “Lawyer for Your Life”. Now, I want you to have fun with this, but I want you to argue that you had a horrible childhood, prosecution. So you're going to prosecute everyone who made your childhood horrible, even if it's not true. So just think that you are, you know, a lawyer and you just have to fight this case.

Then after you've done that, I want you to argue that you had a wonderful life and an amazing childhood, defense. You're going to defend every situation that was harmful to you, everything that you just listed as the prosecution. I want you to defend your case that you had this amazing life. All the things that you learned, all the things that you gained, the person you are today because you went through all of that. Build that strong defense, that's strong case.

So Who Will Win? You get to decide because you are the judge.

This can go with your relationships, with your work, with anything. You can put a case together about why this isn't the right person, or this isn't the right work, or you can put a case together, why it is what it is, given you, what you've learned from it, or even a break up. You can go back and do a postmortem on a breakup.

You can think of all the things that you gained from it, and you know, like ease off all the negative that you've probably thought about a lot of times. When you think about that ex or you think about that relationship. Think about all the things you gained from it. Think about what's right about it.

And I'm going to give you one last tool because you guys are so awesome and I just love this work so much. So the other day I was talking to a guy who had just turned 21. He was telling me about his birthday party. He went to a club with his friends and they were drinking and partying and it was getting kind of late but he was still having so much fun and at one point some people from the club came up to him and they were escorting him through the club and he was like, “oh, I'm going to like a VIP room”. That's going to be so cool and then he was like, “wait, why is this so cold?” They had kicked him out of the club. So we talked for a little bit and I told him about reframing and he was like, “okay, so I just got escorted out of the club. After a wonderful night partying with my friends until 1:30AM and I had the best birthday.” And he has a great story, a funny story to share for the rest of his life which is awesome. So it just shows the power of reframing, right? You could say you got kicked out and feel really bad about it, or you could be like I got escorted out afterwards and got in my Uber and you know, got home and had a horrible hangover the next day -which was awesome because I earned it. So it just shows how you can reframe anything. Anything. Even something just funny and silly and and simple, Just have fun with it. Reframe something. Pick something in your life that wasn't fun and reframe it in a way that makes it lighthearted fun or something that is just way more positive.

And some final things you can think about are what do you want to feel about your past? What do you want the thought of a past relationship to bring up for you? What do you want to think about your parents? What do you want to think about someone who hurt you?

When I heard Eckhart Tolle say “If her past were your past? Her pain. Your pain. Her level of consciousness. Your level of consciousness. You would think and act exactly as she does.” That quote was really transformative for me. I'm going to read it a different way just for the sake of taking it in. “If their past were your past. Their pain, Your pain. Their level of consciousness. Your level of consciousness. You would think and act exactly as they do.” My mind was blown when I heard that quote because I realized it could be applied to everyone. Everyone who had ever been in my life. Everyone who had ever hurt me. “If their past were your past, if their pain were your pain. If their level of consciousness was your level of consciousness, you would think and act exactly as they do.” Really take that in. And if we have this level of consciousness, to be aware and to understand a quote like that? We are very fortunate because we understand our own power and we can choose to make our lives very harmonious instead of wreaking havoc and having a lot of chaos in our lives. And if we just look at others with a lens of love and realize the things that they've put into their mind for all these years that's why they're behaving this way. We are so fortunate that we know the truth and we can choose better thoughts that will create a completely different reality for ourselves and for everybody around us.

So have fun with this. Pick thoughts that feel really good, think them over and over, write them on post-it notes and put them in places you're going to see them. Write them in a notebook and read it to yourself and just allow yourself to feel really good. And I want to hear about your success stories with this, so be sure to DM me, e-mail me Kaden@kadenjames.com, whatever. Reach me in some way because I wanna hear all about these stories. I think it'll be a lot of fun. All right, have a great day and remember to do the things that light you up.