Recently whilst reading one of my favorite books I came across a passage that said "Let go of your past. Stop clinging to it. You are not going to drown without it. You are drowning because of it." This is something that most people are caught up in, living in the past. But why is it so important to let go of it?

It's important because people tend to identify themselves with their past and what they have experienced or achieved. But you are not your past. You are so much more than that. And identifying yourself with your past is preventing you from seeing yourself as you truly are.

It's rare for us to look back at our past and not judge ourselves for what we created, assuming of course that you realize you created it. We are not victims here. There are no victims in any circumstance, lest you choose to be one. Yet most of us consider ourselves to be victims if we've experienced something unpleasant or really terrible. I am going to take an example of someone I know that was sexually abused by her father for most of her childhood. Today as a grown woman, married with two adolescent children, she is still suffering from this abuse and so too is her family. She cannot accept what happened to her, and so she cannot forgive her father, neither can she forgive herself.

Some of you might consider my example as extreme, but know that sexual abuse such as this is not a rare occurrence. And there are many women as well as men, who remain in victim mode throughout their lives because of it. Yet I have said, there are no victims here in our experience as humans, not in any circumstance. How can this be?