Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mark Grove's podcast.

Excited to be back in your ear, and I hope that this finds you well wherever you are on this crazy planet of ours.

I've been really thinking a lot recently about how the things that shape us.

We don't really realize that they're shaping us till we experience the byproduct of the

behavior we've adopted or the belief that gets in the way of intimacy or connection

or the way that we communicate, that creates

some form of rock bottom experience, or we make a choice that alters or creates, you know,

alters the direction of our life and gets us to a place, a dead end of some sorts, which,

you know, we often experience regret about that decision or that thing, not realizing that if we sit in the regret, we are holding ourselves hostage to the inability to create new memories with the new integrated wisdom that the dead end or the rock bottom creates.

And so we often spend our lives thinking about the times we should have done this or taken a left where we took

a ride, but we only know that's the right turn because we took, quote unquote, the wrong one.

And that's why I don't, you know, ultimately there are no wrong choices. There are just choices

that teach us. And that can be challenging to integrate and also challenging to learn about

things before you hit any rock also challenging to learn about things before you hit

any rock bottom but learn about perspectives and shifts and that let's say for example your

childhood affects how you relate today right and then if you dig into your childhood and

the experiences you had or what your religion taught you, you start to experience

the dissonance of how you've abandoned yourself. So you start to feel back into all the moments

from that day of the trauma or the experience or the lesson that you learned either explicitly

like they told you or implicitly by observing or, yeah, by what you saw or what

you heard. So what happens is that we look back at all these moments and we feel this pain

from it, this regret, not realizing that it is in this moment today that we can shift. And I was

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