Would it transform your life if you could go back and forth in time and create a different story? If you could talk to your younger self at any point in your life, what would you say, and how would it change your life today?
This blog is more than just a blog- it has the potential to be a ground-breaking tool for healing.
In this format, we introduce and teach the Transcendental Edit Technique™ and then apply it with examples to four key areas of life:
You can jump to the section you relate to or are most interested in by clicking the specific bullet point above. There you will find a personal, in-depth example from my experience that I hope demonstrates the power of this technique, helps you deepen your understanding of how the technique works, and invites you to dive deeper into how this technique can bring meaningful change to your life.
Imagine offering comfort or advice to your younger self during difficult times and “editing” your story to work for you, rather than against you? How much would it impact your current self and help you resolve painful experiences you still carry with you?
What if I told you that we can all do this through a simple meditation technique, my Transcendental Edit Technique™. This is a technique to skew positively and/or neutralize past trauma, negative experiences, and pain, and edit your past today for a better story tomorrow.
First, it’s important to know that time and space are man-made constructs which we tend to think of as fixed and immobile.
We see the past as a set order of events that cannot be changed, and while this is true in the physical realm, a different set of laws applies to our mental and emotional realms.
For instance, there really is no 2:00 PM. As a society, we’ve decided to mutually agree on and accept the illusion of the clock, in which time passes at the same pace, repetitively each day, always moving “forward.” This construct of time is real in the physical sense and is necessary to give us context and organize our lives to help our society run smoothly. But what makes it 2:00, 4:00, or 6:00? Animals don’t live in this way. They simply exist in the present moment, potentially revisiting past memories, but never really thinking about the “future.”
In the U.S. and many other countries, we delineate space and agree that this thing is here and that thing is there, but what makes it “here,” and what’s “there”? Does our construct of space require something to have mass that we can touch, see, smell, or engage in with our other senses?
However, some cultural relationships with time differ significantly. For instance, in many parts of Spain, events don’t start at a specific hour, like 2:00, but rather around a general timeframe, such as “after lunch.” Since people have lunch at different times, one person might arrive at 12:45 and another at 1:30, and neither would feel the need to apologize. This is because their concept of time is less dependent on the clock and more adapted to the circumstances and natural flow of people’s differing routines.
Questions of time and space may not have definitive answers, and maybe we aren’t meant to understand them all. But all this to say, rather than simply accepting the ideas of time and space at our limited understanding of them, and revolving our lives around them, what if we make them work for us rather than against us?
This technique uses these existential thoughts and questions to our advantage, helping us transcend time and space and edit our pasts today for a better story tomorrow.
So, if time and space don’t really exist, and if your mind makes little distinction between what’s happening in real time and what’s being vividly recalled in the mind’s eye, how can this insight transform your life?
To demonstrate this, I implore you to reflect on a difficult time, recalling it as vividly as possible. How did this experience make you feel? What did you see and hear? Notice how you experience this in your body. You may feel sadness, anxiety, or even tightness in your chest or a pit in your stomach.
Now, open your eyes, take a deep breath, shrug your shoulders, and stretch a little to clear your mind and body of the negativity.
Now, take a moment to think back to a time when you were happy, visualizing the people, sounds, sights, and smells that surrounded you at the time. Notice how you experience this in your body. Many people will start to naturally and organically smile or feel physically or emotionally lighter. Notice how, even though you aren’t physically living through those things in the present moment, you can relive them and experience a physical response through vivid imagery.
The Transcendental Edit Technique™ allows us to transcend time and space, revisit our younger selves, and rewrite our stories through meditation and visualization.
I know this technique is life-changing because I’ve used it myself many times to revisit childhood traumas and painful events that have happened in my adult life.
Let’s face it, as children, we are often stuck. We lack control over our circumstances and are often left to deal with the repercussions of adults' actions and messages that negatively impact our lives and often cause pain and trauma. As kids, we can’t say we’re done dealing with this, leave, and get our own place. With our limited understanding of the world and how we interpret events we don’t always have the tools necessary to effectively handle the challenges that come our way. We absorb the direct and indirect messages and “stories” adults give us. That becomes the lens from which we see the world, and that negatively affects us, albeit at a subconscious level. We are not consciously aware of how we are still carrying the experiences and consequences of trauma, and it often manifests in “problem behaviors” that keep us stuck, negatively impact our relationships, create distorted thoughts, undermine us, and cause suffering.
As adults, we have agency over our lives and we are more empowered to control our circumstances. We can gain the ability to address and heal the painful experiences we lived through as children. We are the only ones who can truly heal ourselves from those negative thoughts, beliefs, expectations, behaviors, and interpretations of past experiences that often form when we are children, including trauma. Although trauma is not our fault, healing from it is our responsibility.
There are many ways to heal, and everyone’s healing journey is unique to them. Different tools and techniques help people in different ways, and it’s all about finding what works for you.
In my own thirty-year healing and personal development journey, as well as my twenty years of experience in my Life Coaching practice, I’ve found that it can be extraordinarily healing for people to “revisit” and comfort their younger selves, offering them the messages they needed at that time in order to edit their story and change it for the better. This practice, while it’s simple, does require dedicated time and attention, especially if addressing deeply painful memories.
In a nutshell, this technique involves revisiting past versions of yourself, acknowledging unmet needs and unhealed wounds, providing context, insights, comfort, validation or vital information to your past self, and thereby editing your story by giving yourself what you needed then. For example, imagine telling your younger self that yes, your life is hard, and what happened wasn’t fair or okay, but it won’t always be that way, and giving them the messages or comfort they needed to hear at the time. You’re essentially editing your past today for a better story tomorrow.
While I’ve utilized this technique for years, I recently experienced a near compulsion to share it after hearing the song “I’m Not Okay” by Jelly Roll. One day, the song came on within seconds of me starting my car to go to the office and again as soon as I got in my car to go home later that day. For the next couple of days it seemed like wherever I went, this song was playing. The lyrics, “I’m not okay, but it’s all gonna be alright,” really resonated with me. I have felt like I wasn’t okay many times in my life, and I’m definitely not alone. Even when you’re not okay, it’s all gonna be alright. I suspect this song is universal and could resonate with nearly everyone, just like this technique.
Here’s how to practice the Transcendental Edit Technique™:
Create a quiet space. Find a place where you can sit or lie down comfortably and undisturbed, and dedicate time to focusing solely on the technique.
Relax your body. Once you are in a comfortable position, take a few deep breaths, bringing awareness to each part of your body. As you inhale deeply, close your eyes and feel the weight of your body and how it's being supported in space. Simply bringing awareness to certain parts of your body will naturally help you to release, relax, and let go. Allow that relaxation to float through your entire being. We’re not looking for perfection. We are simply holding the intention to be a little bit or a lot more relaxed than we were when we started.
Visualize your younger self. Recall a specific experience where you want to revisit and make an edit, providing comfort or advice to yourself and helping you reframe the stories you were telling yourself at the time. Take your time and visualize the interaction in detail. For example, if you want to revisit the time when an adult screamed at you and told you something mean and untrue that made you feel deeply upset, recall it in your mind as vividly as possible. Remember how you felt at that moment, and try to understand what you needed to hear to make you feel better. This could be something like, “It’s okay, that person is mean and has issues of their own that they’re taking out on you. What they said wasn’t true,” or, “Don’t worry. Life won’t always be this hard for you. Things will get better, and you’ll be alright.” Whether you offer comfort, advice, or information, you’re editing your past by helping your younger self move forward with a more positive and hopeful outlook. These edits to your story can help you rewrite your story and therefore who you are today.
This technique works because the mind makes little distinction between what is happening in real time and what is being vividly recalled. An example of this is how PTSD triggers feel real to the mind and body. Similarly, positive visualizations can create “glimmers,” (the opposite of triggers- small moments that spark positive emotions such as joy, peace, and safety). When you vividly recall a positive experience, notice how you might naturally smile or feel light in your body.
When I began this process, I planned to revisit 4-5 events in my life, but I ended up addressing a couple dozen, some traumatic, others seemingly small but impactful. Experiences that wouldn’t be classified as a “big deal” from an adult’s perspective, could have really impacted you as a child and can weigh heavily years later.
Revisiting Difficult Events: Early Life Experiences
The Perceived Abandonment Incident:
One day, when I was about four years old, my parents and I were in the car ready to go somewhere when my dad told me to run upstairs and close my bedroom window. While I was closing the window, he pretended to drive away. As a four-year-old, I didn’t realize it was a joke and I began to panic and cry, feeling abandoned.
When I revisited my younger self, I told her that her fear was valid and that what was being triggered in her was fear around not feeling safe and cared for.
I explained to her that she didn’t feel a healthy connection or attachment style to her dad. She didn’t feel protected by him or even safe with him in her life, so when she thought he was leaving her, she panicked. The terror she felt over him leaving felt legitimate. What he did was supposed to be a joke, but that she was too young to understand that, and that’s okay. What she needed to know was that he was dealing with his own mental health issues that hindered him from even knowing what a healthy attachment to me looked and felt like. To be quite honest, I’m sure he didn’t know then, and still doesn’t know today, that healthy attachment is a “thing.”
His own issues hindered him from being able to give me the sense of safety and comfort I needed. His inability to do that had nothing to do with me, even though I was negatively impacted by it. I edited my story by reassuring my younger self that one day, we would build healthy, secure relationships and create a family of our own filled with love and stability. It’s okay not to be okay right now and it will all be alright.
In this technique, we don’t need the other person or people to understand, feel sorry, or even be aware of the impact of their decisions, behaviors, or how they treated us. This technique requires nothing from anyone in the physical realm. It focuses strictly on our emotional, and potentially spiritual, realm, depending on our beliefs.
Revisiting Difficult Events: Family Life Experiences
What Do Scrambled Eggs Have to Do With It?
This particular experience happened when I was in seventh or eighth grade.
While my parents were dysfunctional in many ways, they historically hadn’t been too dysfunctional about food, and food and eating were not typically an issue in our family.
However, around this time, something shifted in my dad and he started to become controlling about what I ate. One night, Mom was making breakfast for dinner with scrambled eggs and other breakfast items, which wasn’t a favorite meal of mine, despite not being a picky eater. I was never a fan of scrambled eggs, though I was fine with them, but I asked to have something else instead of eggs. For whatever reason, one of my parents put scrambled eggs on my plate and said I had to eat them.
Family meal times were already tense, with my dad often acting volatile and my mom being moody. You never knew if mealtime was going to be a jovial event or an emotional mess. Some nights you could cut the tension with a knife. I was never a fan of scrambled eggs in general, but that particular night there was just something about them. They just weren’t appealing to me and I preferred to eat nothing at all. However, my dad decided I would have to eat them no matter what. As I tried to eat them, I became nauseous, upset, and began gagging. I excused myself to go to the bathroom for a few minutes, and when I came back, I sat with the eggs and eventually made myself eat them while the rest of my family got up from the table.
Suddenly, my dad returned to the kitchen in a rage, screaming uncontrollably and accusing me of throwing away the eggs in the bathroom trash can. I was so taken aback and horrified because I had no idea what he was talking about. As his rage escalated about these eggs, I became increasingly afraid and confused because I didn’t understand how some of the eggs got in the bathroom trash. A sense of complete and total vulnerability overtook me. A couple of times, I actually questioned in my own mind if I had done it and forgotten, because nothing was making sense and everything had become very chaotic, loud, and scary. In hindsight, I realize I began to disassociate. In a rage, my dad began dragging me to the bathroom, shoving my face in the trash, and forcing me to eat the eggs out of the trash. By this time I was gagging and crying hysterically. I remember hearing loud gushes of air, seeing everything blur, and feeling everything swirl around me.
At first, my mother tried to reason with my dad, then fought with him, then sat on the sofa comforting my little brother who was terrified. Although she continued to intermittently yell at my dad to “stop,” it was obvious to me that I was on my own.
Of course, I felt bad seeing my little brother so terrified and crying hysterically, but I also felt resentment towards my mom for not helping me. This chaos went on seemingly for hours, until after dark, as my dad continued raging about the eggs and forcing me to eat them.
When I revisited this experience as an adult, I informed my younger self that my dad’s rage wasn’t really about me or the eggs- it was rooted in deeper issues.
I reminded my younger self that our parents' behavior was caused by severe emotional and mental health issues and triggered by stressful circumstances (they had lost our house and were struggling financially). The house we were living in was a run-down rental and was all they could afford. I comforted my younger self, telling her that yes, she was right, it was scary and we were alone at that time.
I also explained that ever since I started my period, Dad had been treating me differently… I could feel it in my bones. He was triggered by the fact that I was becoming a young woman, and triggered by the perceived waste of food that provoked his poverty mindset.
While eating the eggs out of the garbage was extraordinarily traumatic (I don’t eat scrambled eggs to this day and I have become a bit of a germaphobe), almost more traumatic was watching my mother on the sofa comforting my brother as she allowed my dad to rage at me for hours. Years later when I tried to talk to her about this, she insisted there was nothing she could do, that she felt bad and it was wrong, but she could not control him. I asked her why she didn’t run to the neighbors next door or call the police and she said the neighbor lady was old and couldn’t do anything and that she didn’t want people to know.
This event created a lot of fear around lack of control, reinforcing the belief that no one would protect me, that my dad could do anything he wanted to me and no one was going to help me or stop him. I reassured that little girl that while this was her reality now, it wouldn’t always be. I told her to be careful not to let this lack of control manifest in ways that would trigger unhealthy trauma responses, such as destructive anger, the need to control others, or keeping myself on guard at all times. In time, it will be safe to be vulnerable, but that time is not now. You are using your coping mechanisms like a rockstar now, but you will eventually have to let those go. For now, you’re doing what you need to do to survive, and I’m proud of you for that.
I did my best to explain to her, in a way that she could understand as an eleven year old, how the logical brain doesn’t fully develop until the age of 12. As children, we absorb and internalize experiences that aren’t our fault. I’m a firm believer that information is power, so helping her understand from that perspective would help her recognize why this was happening. Growing up poor is something that kids don’t have control over, but they suffer the consequences. By telling my younger self that there’s nothing I had done wrong, that I was suffering the consequences of my dad’s trauma and other issues, I edited my story. In editing my story, I helped my younger self to recognize why I was feeling what I was feeling and why I was doing what I was doing, in a way that made sense to her. At the time, she thought it was her fault, and to understand how it manifested in unhealthy behaviors. By going back and editing those thought patterns, I created a new, more positive story for myself.
I told her that food would become a non-issue, and that someday the family she created could basically eat whatever we wanted. For example, if we want steak we can have steak. I let her know she even became known as “the mother who overcooks”. In addition, there will be a time in our life when we’re safe. We will have the power and the ability to change our circumstances. You will be living a life that would be unrecognizable to you right now as the little girl that you are. These are going to be some really tough years. The next decade isn’t going to be much easier than the last ten years. But keep going, and life will get unbelievably good.
Revisiting Difficult Events: Educational Experiences
The Source of My Phobic Response to Math
I know from years of working with clients that many people have blocks due to educational trauma, including myself. My fifth-grade teacher, Mr. B., often humiliated me by purposely making me stand at the board in front of my classmates, knowing full well that I would struggle to solve even basic multiplication problems. This daily ritual caused me to have a nearly phobic response to math, and for many years, I thought of myself as stupid and incapable of learning. What no one knew at the time was that I was struggling because of undiagnosed learning disabilities and petit mal epilepsy, but I wouldn’t find that out until I was nineteen years old. The humiliation Mr. B. put me through was very traumatizing for my ten-year-old self.
I went back and revisited my ten-year-old self, and explained to her that his actions had nothing to do with her or her worth, but had everything to do with the fact that Mr. B. wasn’t a good person. He has done a lot of bad things to people, and it’s not your fault.
I also explained that strong emotions can be like tummy aches. When we have a tummy ache, people may not see it, but we certainly feel it. Similarly, we can’t see other people’s emotional pain, but it is real. Just as a tummy ache can make us throw up, emotional pain can cause people to lash out at others, and it can impact people who don’t deserve it and have nothing to do with it.
Information is power, and that can be true for anyone, even young children. It’s powerful to explain to children why they’re being mistreated. That it has nothing to do with them, that the adult isn’t well, and it can contribute to the resolution of the traumatic event and help them edit their story and move forward.
I reassured myself that although hard times were ahead, that you're in fifth grade and struggling, but you have already proven that you can do hard things and endure painful times. I told her she would become the first in her family to graduate from college and even earn an MBA, something no one else around her had achieved. These little insights and advice provided great comfort and provided relief to my current self, who subconsciously held onto and internalized those difficult experiences.
As I look back, I recognize that Mr. B. was likely a closeted gay man and a sexual predator (these are two very separate and unrelated things- being gay has no connection to him or anyone else being a pedophile). Several years ago, I Googled Mr. B. only to discover that he had been registered as a child sex offender. I thought to myself, that as painful as it was to endure what he put me through, I’d rather be me than him 11 out of 10 times.
Revisiting Difficult Events: Adulthood Experiences
The Shoes and the Speeding Ticket
When I was only twenty three years old and my son, Scott, was three, I was struggling to put food on the table and pay the rent. I often felt this tremendous guilt and sometimes a paralyzing fear that I was letting him down and that he would feel poor, even though he was just three.
One day, I noticed Scott’s shoes were ratty, and it triggered memories of my parents’ difficult financial situation, like losing the house and constant financial struggles, and I felt a heightened sense of vulnerability and insecurity. In turn, when Scott was with his dad, I worked a couple of jobs and felt that if I could save a few hundred dollars, I’d feel more secure; my goal was $325 because that was the cost of one month’s rent.
One particularly chaotic morning, I was rushing to get Scott to the babysitter and myself to work and got pulled over for a speeding ticket. The officer was very nice and felt bad about giving me the ticket, but said he’d rather give me the ticket than have to reach out to my family and explain that something tragic had happened to their daughter. Without even thinking about it, I responded with, “There’s no one to reach out to.” That was how alone I felt at the time. Of course, that speeding ticket decimated my savings, which was only $98, and I was now not only scared, but angry at myself.
I revisited my twenty-three-year-old self and told her that although things were hard, they wouldn’t stay that way. Over time, we’d learn the difference between being lonely and being alone. I assured her that some day, I’d feel comfort in knowing I had people to call and that I wouldn’t feel isolated and afraid forever.
Even though this experience wasn’t traumatic, it was difficult, and it stayed with me for a very long time. I went back to that experience and I allowed her to see that while many things were going wrong, that my little boy wasn’t living the life I wanted to give him, things would change. Someday I would take his little boy, my grandson, to Target and buy him four pairs of shoes for winter because it’s hard for “Daddy’s Mommy” to say no… That memory and the sense that everything had worked out came over me in Target, which felt like a full circle moment.
As I went through this process and revisited all those experiences, I could feel parts of my body soften, like a weight had been lifted, and I would get noticeably brighter or happier. Trauma is stored in the body, and revisiting and editing these experiences helped both the present version of myself and the younger version feel physically lighter. Those messages meant something to her.
Scarcity and the Fear of Not Having Enough
As a child, while we always had enough to eat, my parents struggled to provide food, and there was often nothing left over for extras. At one point we were on food stamps. My mom shopped once every week or two, and let’s say she’d buy six apples each time. I loved apples, and one day as we unpacked the groceries, I began eating a second apple. As soon as she noticed, she said, “Be careful. There won’t be any more apples for two weeks.”
She didn’t say this simply because she wasn’t going back to the store for another week or two, but because even if we wanted to, there wouldn’t be enough money to pay for more apples until the next payday and grocery trip. The scarcity mindset had been deeply ingrained in our family and those messages were passed to me at a young age.
Fast forward to when I was a young single mom and Easter was approaching. Scott was about four years old, and I didn’t have money for traditional Easter food. As I walked through the aisles of the grocery store, I spent an hour picking out all the ingredients I would need for a plentiful Easter dinner. I picked the sweet potatoes for sweet potato casserole, berries and lemons for the dessert, ham and all the other Easter ingredients. I filled up my cart with these items because I wanted so desperately to be able to provide that abundant holiday meal for my son. It felt good in my imagination to do the “shopping,” but in the end, the reality that I didn’t have the money and had to leave the cart behind only made matters worse. Turns out, leaving the full cart behind hurt more than the good feelings that came with pretending.
When I did the Transcendental Edit Technique™, I told my younger self that not only will Scott and I have more than enough one day, but he will have more siblings and they will never know what it’s like to live in scarcity. In fact, not too long ago, I heard the kids joking that, “Mom bought so many chicken thighs she probably spent our inheritance.”
This technique is so powerful because it not only helps you rewrite your story, but can help you gain awareness of why you have certain behaviors.
For example, I didn’t make the connection that I overbought and overcooked because I had lived in scarcity for so long. It wasn’t until I did this important work that I became aware that my behaviors were still affected by messages I received from adults and internalized long ago.
Even healthy options like apples were limited, which was my first experience with scarcity, and it shaped my behaviors that continued well into my life, when I could eat what I wanted and feed my family what I wanted but things that had been a luxury to my family when we were kids and unattainable as a poor single parent, was simply another thing on the grocery list. I remember making a fresh berry salad for a typical dinner one Tuesday night. The kids weren’t really that interested in it. I remember saying to them puzzled, “But it’s fresh berries” and they looked at me like, “Yeah, well?” and I understood that fresh berries were the norm for them. Fresh berries would have simply been out of reach when I was a young poor mother, and now for my current family it was just another dinner option.
That was an insightful moment for me. Recognizing that the behaviors were influenced by spending too much on food and certainly over-cooking. When I was raising the boys, things got eaten as leftovers, but now as someone who doesn’t have kids at home, I found that when I cook, I still tend to overcook. Why do I do that? Because of those scarcity experiences.
Going back and telling my younger self, “Yes this is hard, yes your feelings of being poor, not feeling empowered, and feeling out of control, are valid right now. But it’s temporary. Not only for yourself, but for your children. Your children will always have more than enough and will never sense financial burden. Instead, they will feel financially secure. There's no reason now to overshop or overcook. Now that I’m aware of it, I still may choose to make more, but I’m being intentional about it by sharing with a friend or maybe dropping some off at my son’s house because I know it’s his favorite. I don’t feel like I have to, but I can still choose to, and that’s my point of power.
Similarly, you may not be aware of or have the connection between your past experiences and why you behave certain ways. Experiences influence our behaviors, and when we go back and rewrite those experiences, our behaviors begin to naturally and organically change.
The Power of Revisiting the Past
This process of revisiting and speaking to younger versions of myself has been transformative, and I encourage you to play with this process. How you speak to yourself when you’re four is going to be different than how you speak to yourself when you’re fourteen. At four, I used a gentle voice, and at fourteen, I dropped the f-bomb.
If your younger self just needs comfort and you don’t have anything to say, you don’t have to. If something painful from your past comes up when you were a child and just needed a hug, visualize bringing them into a comforting hug or snuggle.
Each time you revisit a memory, different emotions or insights might come to the forefront. Some of the older burdens may begin to fade and fall away, which is a true signal of healing.
I used this technique last night for over an hour. When I opened my eyes and got up from the sofa, I felt like a different person than I had been just a short time ago- lighter and more at peace.
While we can’t physically go back and speak to our younger selves, we can certainly do so emotionally and spiritually, which can be just as impactful. I encourage you to try this technique whenever a painful memory comes into your awareness. Wherever you are on your healing journey, I hope this technique makes a positive difference for you. Feel free to adjust it to fit your experiences, as there’s no right or wrong way to do it. Simply allow yourself to connect with your younger self, reframe negative experiences, and feel the weight of your past dissolve.
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