Im going to make a really bold statement here and say there is almost no such thing as true grounds for regret.
What does this mean?
I realize in one sense regret is an emotion or body sensation, but for the purposes of this entry I’d like to focus on the verb form: the act of regretting something.
Certainly we can wish an event did not happen- or that we could take back something we said or did.
However if you really think about it, we had to do the thing in order to arrive at the level of consciousness where we wish we didn’t do the thing.
Action is a necessary prerequisite to experiencing the “oh sh** ” moment.
Sometimes it takes doing the thing for our eyes to be opened- or for a series of events to be set into motion.
Only then can we know the end result. Prior to that we were operating at a deficit of intel (military people, is this a thing??) due to most situations having way too many variables and moving parts to accurately predict what will transpire.
There’s only so much we can see or know from a certain vantage point.
So. What would I call true grounds for regret?
It’s those situations where we knew what the “right” decision was, but chose not to do it.
. ..where we ignored the gut feeling.
There are also times when we unintentionally cause harm to someone.
I would say both of those scenarios are the hardest to reconcile if they go “wrong.” Those are the ones we cry to our closest people about, do EMDR on, or hope to gain some insight into during a plant medicine ceremony or intimate and sometimes desperate conversation with our Higher Power.
Regardless, even those times can provide little gems we may not have accessed otherwise; and can help peel back another layer of whatever is in between our current self and the truest version of SELF that we’re transforming into.
Photo: Black Mountain, NC December 2020
Anatomy of an Awakening 