John Bradshaw, the prolific self-help author and fixture on PBS passed away recently.

Bradshaw’s powerful personal struggle helped lead the way toward resolution for millions of people – he sold 12 million books.

His work focused on the inner child – the starting point for lifelong unhappiness and dysfunction that comes from emotional and physical abuse in childhood.

Bradshaw, himself a recovering alcoholic said “everything I write about I struggle with myself”.

What Bradshaw preaches is: “to get you to come to peace with the past and finish it”.

Here is how I deal with it:

• Live in the present but don’t just arrive there, be fully present with life and those around you.

• Visit the past for reference the way you might do for a file on your computer.  After you get what you want, return to the present.

• Think about the future only for planning purposes.  Then back to the present not back to the future.

• Be mindful that the unused portion of life – that we still expect is ahead of us – is a blank canvas where we have the ability to create anything we want.

Nothing is more empowering than the constant thought that there are more journeys ahead.

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