Can you make a post about missed opportunities and how to deal with the feeling of regret of not acting on the opportunity? And the feeling that nothing else will come along.
Thanks!
Regret is one of our heaviest energetic burdens and with good reasons. The egoic mind finds all sorts of ways to torture us, and lament about what ‘could have been’, convincing us we forever missed out on some great source of happiness or success we can’t do anything about now is one of its greatest hits.
And like many answers I provide to these questions, I will touch on some deeper, more broader issues at play behind the questions.
I Don’t Believe in What We Call ‘Mistakes’
I’m a big believer in everything happening exactly as it should–not in the sense that everything is predetermined, but in that whatever a person decides to do in a given moment is based on a dominant energy, a dominant frame of mind, and that can’t be defied.
Whatever decision was made, whatever action was taken, was in perfect alignment with what was happening internally, and could not have gone any other way. The only thing that could have happened was what did. If something else was supposed to happen, if a different decision was supposed to be made, then things would have unfolded accordingly.
It would be like if you were driving a car and turned the steering wheel right–the car could only go right. It couldn’t go left or keep going straight.
If you were in deep self-sabotage mode in a moment, then you could only make a self-sabotaging decision. If you were deep in fear in a moment, you could only make a decision based on fear. If you didn’t feel worthy or deserving of something, you wouldn’t accept it.
And if we are making decisions, if we are taking actions, based on the egoic thought system dominated by fear, cynicism, self-loathing, self-sabotage, lack of clarity, lack of trust, skepticism and the like, we may not be making the most ideal choices In this space, we are never acting in our own best interest, because we are operating from a completely distorted way of seeing things.
And if we realize we are doing this, we give ourselves a tremendous opportunity to reflect on the circumstance and the thinking involved in it. We get a chance to change all of that.
We will make choices from a new frame of mind, we will view what happens in our lives from a completely different filter. And with this new filter, with this new frame of mind, we will make fewer ‘mistakes,’ we will make fewer ‘bad’ choices as the mind would judge them; things will seem to work out for us a lot better than they had been. We will start making more of what we would judge as the ‘right’ decisions.
But this reflection, this willingness to see the lessons, this willingness to change our mind so we can change our behavior and perceptions, is all completely voluntary. We aren’t under any obligation to do so. And if we don’t engage in that reflection, we will keep making choices and taking actions from that problematic thought system.
The lessons will never be learned so they will keep repeating themselves. The opportunity to change will never be embraced so surprise, surprise, we don’t change. And if we don’t change, our life won’t change because we will keep making the same sorts of decisions over and over again.
And again, those actions and decisions won’t be ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ as the egoic mind would judge them to be, but they aren’t the ones that will be in our best interest or highest good. We really won’t get what we want. We will seemingly have ‘bad luck’ or be ‘stuck’ in unwanted circumstances.
The idea that everything that happens serves us in some way is very very true because whenever a situation evokes any sort of negative emotion it means we are thinking in a way that isn’t helpful, and if we so choose, we can go into our mind and correct the erroneous thinking that is causing us the pain, that may have contributed to where we are in the moment.
But if we don’t embrace this idea, and don’t examine the ‘feedback’ that is our life experience, we will continue to ‘miss opportunities’ or make ‘bad’ decisions indefinitely.
You Don’t Know How Something Would Have Turned Out
Our mind is really really good at creating alternate realities, at pondering ‘what if,’ and at the core of this tendency is the assumption that things unquestionably would be better than they are now.
If an opportunity seemed good, it assumes that it absolutely would have been good, and you definitely missed out, you definitely made a huge mistake.
If this opportunity even checked just a few of the boxes of what the egoic mind wants, it will be convinced the experience definitely would have given you these things, and woe is you.
It is so afraid of not getting what it wants, it is so resistant to all of your negative emotion and wants nothing more than to minimize it as best it can; it can’t bear thinking you missed a chance to accomplish this goal. But it will actually want to think about it quite often!
We spend a lot of time in our head, and we can weave very, very detailed stories of what would have been; our fantasies can be very, very rich. Your mind can create a whole new life for you based on taking the opportunity missed or the road not traveled.
It takes all of the good things it thinks would have happened had you done something differently and builds upon all of that, often quite intricately. And since there is nothing to refute the validity of this alternate life, it is easy to become very convinced this is how things actually would have been. If the mind assumes something would have been the right choice or better, then it unquestionably would have been without a doubt.
But ultimately, you have no idea how a situation would have turned out. You have no idea if that great opportunity would have actually been great. That job that seemed perfect on paper might have made you miserable. That apartment that seemed perfect might have had nightmare neighbors. Getting back together with your ex may have worked out horribly since all the same problems would have risen up to the surface again after the ‘honeymoon period’ of your reunion wore off.
This tendency is a perfect example of understanding something intellectually, but having a very different experience emotionally. Intellectually we understand the mind does this, but in the moment, we forget, and are convinced its mental concoctions are unquestionable truth.
A very helpful question to ask yourself anytime you find yourself thinking these sorts of things is ‘Can I absolutely know this is true?’ The reason asking this simple question is so powerful is because the answer always has to be ‘no’ without exception. You have absolutely no way of knowing if any of the things your egoic mind believes is true. And the more you remind yourself of this, the easier it will be to keep yourself from going down that path mentally.
You Never Run Out of Chances
There is infinite opportunity in this world; things can come together in ways we can’t ever anticipate or figure out with our limited minds. That this idea is one of the hardest for the egoic mind to accept isn’t surprising given how a belief in scarcity is a core component of its thought system. It can’t be overstated how deeply this one idea affects us, how deeply it infects our mind and seeps out into every area of our life.
It is so afraid of missing out,of not ‘getting’, of having to be stuck with all these bad feelings forever, that it gets very attached to anything that comes into our orbit that contains even the slightest veneer of giving us what we want, of freeing us from all this emotional turmoil.
And if things don’t work out as it hoped, if it thinks we made a decision that will keep this particular opportunity to minimize pain away from us, all of that deep fear and belief in scarcity gets flushed up very, very strongly.
We can’t ever forget the extremely limited capacity the egoic mind has for understanding how things really work, who we really are. We see time and time again, if the mind can’t figure out how something would happen, it means it can’t happen, and we accept this conclusion.
We see time and time again if it can’t see a particular path or possibility, it concludes it doesn’t exist, and we accept this assessment.
If it can conceive of only three ways something can happen, and none of those three things work out, then we almost certainly missed our chance.
Relying on the egoic mind as the arbiter of what is possible is one of the most unhelpful habits we must break on our ‘journey.’
Understanding What You Truly Want
Understanding what we truly want is also integral to accepting this idea of infinite opportunity. We are always after feelings and there is no exception to this. There are countless ways to experience the feelings we want to feel, there are infinite ways this can be reflected back to us in the external world.
I would venture to guess that if people thought in these terms, they would find many of the things their egoic mind wanted would probably not fit the bill, meaning that a particular opportunity actually wouldn’t be what they wanted at all. And even if they thought it did fit the bill, again, it isn’t the only representation of what they truly seek so no need to lament it so much.
Clarity about what we are truly after is very helpful manifesting wise because with that clarity we can set powerful intentions. With that clarity, we are in a better position to make decisions and evaluate opportunities.
Two Important Reminders
Another very important thing to remember is if nothing outside us can truly make us happy in any genuine, lasting, consistent, meaningful way, then the idea you would have been happier had your life been different is patently false.
Even if everything turned out exactly as you imagine it would, went as well as you imagine it would, this would mean nothing in terms of whether you actually would have been happier. In fact, a lot of these great things could have actually made you unhappier, like the promotion that sucked up all your time, left you in a constant state of burn out and made you hate a career you once loved.
You also want to keep in mind the idea that just because your egoic mind thinks something is a good idea or would make you happy, doesn’t mean this is even slightly true. The space from which it wants everything it wants is very screwy and that muddy thinking can lead to a lot of desires that really aren’t representative of what would truly be best for us, that would truly give us what we seek feelings-wise.
This part of our mind operates from pain-minimizing mode, and this is very different than maximizing well-being mode. It is motivated by all sorts of fears and a deep scarcity mindset. It has a very narrow view of everything and is just focused on surviving and not thriving. When we start fully seeing how distorted its thinking is, that we would trust it so much with guiding our happiness and most important life choices doesn’t seem like the smartest thing to do. And in realizing this, we don’t let it guide us anymore.
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If there is any way I can be of assistance to you, feel free to email me at kellicooper1102@gmail.com. Would love to hear from you!
I just want to thank you very much for this article, it helped me really a lot!
Marta
You are very welcome! So glad it was helpful
Thanks for this 🙏.I never cared about opportunities and lived a blissful life in whatever little l had but than an opportunity fell in my lap from a lost piece of land from 25 years ago and I just took whatever they gave me so that I could get back to my life but than the regret started (a completely new emotion to me at this age of 48).The land was very very expensive and now all my bliss is gone.I don’t know how to deal with this right now.
Hey there
We can often have things going on under the surface that are more deeply embedded and are not consciously felt. And because we don’t consciously feel them, it is very easy to think they are not there. Naturally we would think if there is any strong sort of ‘energy’ within us, it would surely make itself known. If I have a great deal of anger or fear for example, of course I would feel something like that. So that is one possibility for you to explore.
It is also possible that maybe in more recent times, something has started brewing or you have had some experiences that have changed your thinking in certain ways, bringing up things like fear, regret,loss,etc…
That wouldn’t be something I could discern from the outside.
Regret can be particularly heavy to deal with because it tends to activate all sorts of stories and scenarios in the mind that can really do a number on us. We may beat ourselves up because we made a mistake. We may conduct a whole alternative life we may have lived and even though we intellectually understand we have no idea what would have actually happened if we did X instead of Y, on an emotional level, we respond as if this vision is unquestionably true.
There is always a story at the heart of our emotional discord. Every experience is essentially neutral–even though it may not even come close to seeming that way to the ego mind –and our emotional response is courtesy of our interpretation. So the best place to start would be that interpretation of what happened. Of course on the obvious level, missing out on more money may always sting a bit, but it usually will run deeper and there will be broader, more general energies and beliefs at play that are really the root of the suffering.
Hope this helps a bit!