If we try to make a new beginning, motivated by an attempt to no longer be where (or what) we once were, we do start out, but not from what is new. On the contrary, we begin our search, and then reach our conclusions as to what we must come to possess to affect this newness, from within the confines of what has been our own past experience.

In other words, we set out to start a new life for ourselves from a place within us already known and rejected! Can you begin to see the implications of making such a mistake as it concerns knowing the correct “starting” place for making a new beginning?

Under the conditions just described, we cannot start anything over except the very life we hope to escape! We begin our journey in the wrong place because we have yet to realize that the content of our “new” future to come, however sweetly dreamed, is secretly an unconscious extension of our own unwanted past.

Unseen, but nevertheless active in our psychology, we carry within us a virtual string of “nots” by which we bind ourselves to our old life! And if we would be free to start life over, we must understand this spiritual truth: what we resist, persists — and this includes our own past!

No one can come upon what is truly new while walking the path of resistance to anything. Which means that the new life we seek cannot be born through a blind rejection of who we have been. If we can see the truth in this, then we know we must not only discover the root of this resistant self in us, but we must do the work of learning how to “pull” this earth-bound nature out of us.

The deliberate work of walking away from one’s past is a prerequisite for any true fresh start in life. But the lower nature will not sit quietly by as we work to break its hold on us. It may profess otherwise, but this dark nature loathes the Now because it is unable to enter into its newness. After all, how can it? Might as well try to take a shadow into the sun’s corona!

This thought-driven desire machine only knows itself by calling up and then considering its own images of past experiences. But in the Now there are no well-worn images of life — only the spirit of new life itself!

As we work to be in the Now, and from our new understanding strive to leave the old thought-self behind us, it will cry out something like this: “But you can’t live without me! Who will watch out for you and see to your well-being if not me?” And though it is necessary you learn to craft your own answer to this trickster nature who is the enemy of newness, here is one response worth remembering:

Let the following words be your heart’s answer. Send it out from your silently seeing mind to this deceptive foe of all fresh starts in life: “What I need, you cannot give me. What I long to see, you cannot show me. And what I hope to be, you cannot make of me. This conversation has reached its end.”

Then, just keep “walking” ahead, into the new and unknown Now. Remember that renewing your intention moment to moment is both the price of admission and your entrance. Keep the light of this new understanding before you and all the shadows that would stand in the way of your new beginning must remain behind you. Let this truth be your guide.