A YOGI CHA BLOG

SLIDING DOORS MOMENTS

How many sliding door moments have you had?

I have 3 major ones in my life.

When I think about it, there has been even more in my life and sometimes I wonder what my life would have looked like if I jumped that train that time.

Writing is my creative outlet for processing emotions. When we seem to have forgotten a time in our life or a place where we were, even people we used to know, it can be due to unprocessed feelings.

Let me explain that one: have you come to think of a moment in the past that just feels detached from you? As if you had forgotten it and it’s almost impossible to bring it back in your mind?

You have, for sure, other moments that are very much the opposite. Things you remember so clearly that you can retell the smells, what people were wearing, how it made you feel etc. That is something you have truly integrated. But those other moments, even if they seem eventless today, if you feel disconnected from them then maybe you haven’t processed them. And when we come to really think about it, there are quite a few of those.

You don’t have to process them, you can leave them right where they are and just go on. You will be fine, I promise. However, the unconscious part of you cannot get rid of something that does exist and it will bring it back over and over until you make it conscious. What does that look like in your daily life? It looks like things we repeat again and again until we actually become aware of why we do it and then we can stop.

Maybe you can relate to that a little bit more?

What has any of this to do with my beginning phrase about sliding doors?

The expression comes from the film Sliding Doors with Gwyneth Paltrow in 1998 where we experience two different films depending on if she catches the train or not in the beginning.

A sliding door moment is one where you stood in front of two options that would take your life in two very different directions and you made a choice.

Now, of course you are the sum of all this. You are were you are today because of the choices you made in those moments. It means, whatever your perception of the world was at that time has formed who you are today. Because you made your move depending on that perception.

All of the events that followed, the people you met and the emotions you experienced have left a trace on you today. You are even different from yesterday due to what you ate for dinner last night.

What we seem to miss sometimes is that there is a part of us left at the train station. The reason you made the choice, you know it. But the reason you didn’t do the opposite might actually be different to it. There are a lot of emotions linked to it and we tend to crystallise those emotions (usually negative so linked to fear) and then we never process them. Which is why we find it hard to make the memory feel alive.

The idea came upon me as I watched the comedian Jerry Seinfeld talk about “Bizarro”, the opposite or “mirror image” of Superman. In a world where everything is the contrary to what you know, who would you be?

Can you go back to the sliding doors moments in your life and sit with them. Remember them, feel them in detail and let your mind go into what would have happened if you took the other train?