You could be bitter and not even know it. You think it’s just work stress, people hate you or think it’s just this world that sucks! Today let me show you How to Overcome Bitterness…
I remember this other lady…
She said “Moffat, Daddy broke my heart before any boy ever had a chance to. He was never there – he never called, he never checked up on me – Dad never cared.”
And then there was this one who said…
“Moffat, that lady I call my mum is not my real mum. My real mum – through me away in the woods the day I was born.”
In workplace settings I’ve dealt with people who say
“Moffat, after working flat out and giving my best for years they gave the promotion to the person that I trained! Can you imagine?”
All these people have one thing in common – they are angry! They are bitter. They want to fight back – sadly they can’t fight back – so they fight everybody!!
Have you ever met people who just want to fight? Fight everybody?
They are just angry with everyone, and about anything – whether big or small…
Life has got heartbreaking moments – and like I write in my book How I Kissed Heartbreak Goodbye,
“The worst thing about a heartbreak is not the pain it makes you feel; it’s the person it tries to make you become.”
– Moffat Machingura | How I Kissed Heartbreak Goodbye
Today I just want to help you not to be so broken that you break others.
Sometimes you just have to look at your life and see that you are living so much in your past that your present is being left unlived.
Life is not about changing the past, it’s about creating the future.
– Moffat Machingura
No matter how dark your past is, you can create a future that is so bright that – it becomes clear you don’t need a bright past to make a bright future.
The bitterness you feel for your past has the power to destroy the passion your heart has for the future.
You cannot keep the bitterness of the past and have the beauty of the future at the same time.
Your heart can be so full of yesterday’s pain that you fail to receive today’s the joy.
1
“Hate and love are similar in that, the people you hate occupy your mind as much as the people you love.”
– Moffat Machingura
Everyday you are growing, but most importantly you must know who you are growing into. You don’t grow into the person you want to be, you grow into the person who occupies your mind the most!
If you are always thinking of the people who loved you, you muscles relax and happy hormones start being secreted into your blood stream. Suddenly you find yourself being as sweet as those people used to act towards you.
But if you occupy your mind with all the people who broke your heart, rejected you and betrayed you. Look in the mirror and I bet you you won’t like what you see.
Ask the people around you and they will tell you you are not a nice person to be around either.
Everyday we are all transforming into the people we always think about. So hating the people in your past breaks you in more ways than you can imagine.
I’m not saying forget the past, I’m saying commit to yourself that you were born for a better purpose than avenging the people in your past.
2
“The worst thing about hate is that, it often turns us into the very people that we hate.”
– Moffat Machingura | How I Kissed Heartbreak Goodbye
By learning to hate back we learn to be haters. You cannot be better if you are bitter. What you do in bitterness won’t be different from what was done to you by those who embittered you.
Buy your father a birthday present, even if you know he was never in your life. I know they were too bad to deserve it, but the fact that they were bad parents doesn’t mean you should be a bad child.
People make choices. They chose to be the worst parents any child could have – but the story doesn’t end there. You are also making choices. To do to them what they did to you, you will first have to be who they are.
By choosing to avenge what they did, you are also choosing to be who they have been. Don’t give your abusers power to turn you into who they are.
3
“Even if you are only angry with one person, your anger will hurt many people.”
– Moffat Machingura | Cinderella Taught me Lessons
Alain De Botton put it perfectly right, bitterness is that anger that you forgot where it came from. It’s possible to be angry with your father so much that you treat your husband badly, or to be so angry at life that you actually mistreat yourself.
In real life, Joyce Meyer had to forgive her father for sexually abusing her throughout her childhood. It was hard but it set her free from the past. Forgiveness doesn’t mean you didn’t treat me bad, it means I withhold my right to treat you as badly as you treated me.
The day you forgive, a miracle happens in you – you just start to see the world through the eyes of passion rather than of your pain.
4
“At that moment when you think you should hate, that’s the perfect moment when love is most needed.”
– Moffat Machingura | Cinderella Taught me Lessons
Today is your opportunity to love people, don’t let the past steal that opportunity from you.
As I write in my book Cinderella Taught me Lessons
“The past that never dies continues to kill the present.”
– Moffat Machingura | Cinderella Taught me Lessons
I go further to say…
“The past dies when we accept that it is past.
Actually, the past dies twice, it first dies to itself the very second it happens, then it slowly dies to us as we learn to accept that it is already dead.
The past that we feel like we are still holding onto today is not real at all – it’s only a memory.
Your past is the source of your memories, your future is the source of your imaginations; if you follow your brightest imaginations you will create the future, but if you remain bound to your memories you will continue to suffer the past.”
5
The storm that you go through in life goes through into you.
– Moffat Machingura | Cinderella Taught me Lessons
That is why you snap so harshly at your partner that he/she wonders if you still want you two to be together, the same could be the reason why your children secretly wonder if you are their real parent or you picked them from the streets.
Maybe this is the reason you bark at everyone including your customers, your employees or your boss. A storm got into you, and it’s making you storm on everyone else.
You now carry an atmosphere that even the people who love you just can’t stand. It’s not the storm that you went through that is destroying your life, it’s the storm that went through into you as you went through that storm.
You are like a man following up after a hurricane with a heavy hammer in his hand, smashing all the windows and furniture that the hurricane spared. You are destroying what the storm couldn’t destroy – in other words you are strengthening the storm long after it’s gone.
Yesterday the storm took what it took, but today you could be suffering because of the storm that you took. Do yourself a favour – stop helping the storm.
Where Do You Go From Here…
“You can’t change the past but you can change what it makes you do.”
– Moffat Machingura | Cinderella Taught me Lessons
Don’t go bad when things go bad.
Going through the pain of rejection should show you that rejection is too painful a thing to give away – from today onwards only live to give love and to give acceptance.
Let the pain of that heartbreak remind you that a heartbreak is too painful a thing to give away – if there was a time you understood the necessity of true commitment and faithfulness it should be through that storm.
Let your worst days of life remind you how necessary it is to create the best days in the lives of others.
If you learn this then you will grow through whatsoever you go through.
Start to let go and you will start to grow.
“Most of the problems in this world were created by people who were trying to solve theirs.”
– Moffat Machingura | Cinderella Taught me Lessons
So don’t take your past’s pain personal, it has nothing to do with you. They treated you wrongly but there is nothing wrong with you. Don’t define yourself by other people’s choices. Define yourself by your choices.
Sometimes we are tempted to think, they treated us wrongly because there was something wrong about us. But the danger of taking your past personal is that, you end up believing you deserve what happened in your past.
If you believe you deserve pain, then pain will always be a part of your life because you would have deprived yourself of the energy to make your past different from your future.
So as you step into the future, life is going to take you to new places and you will meet new people. You will dance to new songs, learn a new language and no-matter what challenges you met in your past – life will give you instances in which they will slip off your mind for a while.
But sometimes yes your mind you will take you the past. Go there for lessons only, not to resurrect the past.
I desire that you dwell in the land of your dreams more often than in the land of your memories – because your present life is always growing into the reflection of where so ever your mind stays most often.
Let me conclude with an in Excerpt from my book that is the basis of this blog post – again its Cinderella Taught me Lessons
“Never forget every place that you once you lived, because a part of you still lives there, and a part of that place still lives in you.
So as you forgive the people in your past, remember to also forgive the places where you met those people.
Forgive your partner for cheating on you, but also forgive the place called marriage where it all happened. Forgive the business friend who betrayed you, but also forgive business.
That way you will continue to believe in marriage even though you have lost in love or marriage, and you will remain a business person despite your business failures.
Forgive people and Forgive places. If we can’t forgive places, our un-forgiveness shrinks our world. We start staying away from all places that broke our hearts – even if they were good places.
Forgive family, forgive love, and forgive home. Forgive school, forgive church. Forgive the places where your met some people. Forgive till you can visit those places again, because some of those places like love, marriage, church and business still have a chance to give you better people.”
– Moffat Machingura | Cinderella Taught me Lessons