My sister reminded me of an experience she had many years ago. An old message, founded in old wounds, continued to haunt her, clouding her thinking and keeping her stuck in old ways that no longer served her. While she knew it was time to move on, that toxic story continued to stealthily land on her shoulder and whisper its poisonous message.

How to be done with it once and for all?

Dig a hole.

She found a place that required work to get there, dug a deep hole, buried it, and left it behind. If she ever wanted to retrieve that story, she’d have to go to the effort of returning to that hard-to-get-to place and dig it up again. When the story tried to show up again, as stories like that are wont to do, she remembered that it was buried in a deep, deep hole far, far away.

End of story.