I think your right. The place to start to move forwarded may be with forgiveness and doing so perhaps refrain your story

Forgiveness is an Art – especially when it comes to forgiving ourselves, which is always entangled with our ability to forgive others.  We forgive others as we forgive ourselves.

Very much recommend the book ‘The Art of Forgiving’ by Lewis B. Smedes

Also Clarissa Pinkola Estes tells a story ‘the Crescent Moon Bear’ which is about forgiveness and can be found in her book, ‘Women Who Run with the Wolves’ Or in audio CD “Theater of the Imagination”.  (Yes, the book intended target is women but men can learn a great deal from it as well. Especially when one embraces symbolic language and doing so realize that the symbolic words masculine and feminine are not about gender. The symbols are informed by gender but do not represent a gender)

According to Clarissa there are Four Stages to Forgiveness:

to forgo – move forward, don’t let what happened stop you from living your truth

to forbear – to abstain from punishing – holding yourself and others accountable but as punishment.

to forget –  and in do not dwell – We don’t forget what happened to us instead we do not dwell

to forgive – finding a place of being able to say yes to the experience As It Was without attachment.

To clarify when I mentioned the practice.  I was talking about something that we work on in the moment and not only when we set time aside and meditate. Mediation is where we practice the practice while practice is an intention we set in each moment we experience.

When you become aware of your consciousness becoming fixated on the past, memory, fear, wall…. you pull it back, create space, breathe and see it for what it is, the past that does not need to have any influence on the present.

“We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality”. -Seneca

Memory is a trickster. As you mentioned what you remember is hazy. Yet you are judging your past from the perspective on what you have learned years latter. Your 12-year-old self didn’t know what you know now so judging her by what you know now is unskillful. We all feel regret for some past action or other, but all the regret in the world isn’t going to change the past. The best we can do is that when we learn better we do better.

Its clear you have learned something about yourself from the experience and realise that such actions are not who you are or want to be… so I don’t see the point on remaining fixated on the memory.

I can certainly relate you your experience. I have a good job and work with good people but at the start of each day I feel empty and it’s an act of will to get started. In my case I think the nagging something I feel comes from the thought/intuition that I’m not doing the work I ought to be doing… That there is something I’m missing… probably relational. Only I don’t know what it is that I can do about it.

You said “I just feel as though I’m mum, wife and teacher but I’m not feeling the joy and wonder that I use to feel.”

I’ve been reading ‘The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself’ by Michael A. Singer.  Michael suggest contemplating on the question ‘who am I’. As you do so he takes you down that road to discover you are not what you do, and more then that you are not your thoughts, mind, body, feelings, memories or experiences… The Self, capital S, is the ‘I’ that is conscious.  You are not Mum, teacher, wife but the I that observes the experience of mum, teacher, wife… you are not your thoughts but the I that observes thoughts…

At first, I thought that what Michael was suggesting was at best semantics, however, I started the practice of reminding myself that ‘I am not the experience – I am the I that is observing the experience’. What I am finding is that doing so has allowed me to create some space to detach from the experience and the anxiety I was feeling.  It’s a subtle change of perspective which I trust will eventually lead me to observing what lies behind that nagging something that I’m missing – not observing

The words we use have power. Most people associate the word diet with restriction and privation.  If we do so the mind will likely fixate on what we are depriving ourselves and the desired goal of being healthy is over whelmed.   Not only are we more likely to binge we insure that we feel quality and deserve to be punished…. Feeding negative self talk that we aren’t good enough and deceive to be unhappy and unhealthy.   Defeated before you even got started

Instead of a diet as restrictions chose a diet of abundance the abundance of becoming.

My own experience awakening to my diet was that over 65% was grain based. Even though I lost weight by exercising and keeping the amount of food down to the needed calories after a few weeks I would just binge. I felt so hungry and craved more and more salt and sugar/grains.  It seems today’s processed grains will provide short bursts of energy and feelings of fullness for an hour or two but act like sugar in the body, triggering the body to store (weight gain) resulting in inflammation and blood-sugar imbalances.

Talking to a naturopath and nationalist he noted that my diet (as in what I was eating not what I wasn’t eating as restricting) wasn’t balanced. That I needed more fats and protein and less dairy and grain. He suggested that I avoid grains and dairy. Not as a restriction but to avoid.

After two weeks of avoiding grains and adding butter back into my diet I found I wasn’t hungry between meals and lost 8 pounds.  I used to crave, really crave, chips and pizza and when I binged that was my go to. I can say that after three months of avoiding grains and -30 pounds I don’t crave anymore. I sometimes think about buying chips and such again but it’s a muscle memory physiological thing more then a craving.

I was at a work function the other week and pretty much everything they served all the junk foods. I partook. After just a few moments I notice that my body wasn’t feeling so great and that I didn’t really enjoy those foods anymore. I didn’t feel deprived but instead grateful that my body new what it needed and didn’t need and that I could hear it.

You might like ‘The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself’ by Michael A. Singer

“There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind – you are the one who hears it.”

“Only you can take inner freedom away from yourself, or give it to yourself. Nobody else can.”

“Eventually you will see that the real cause of problem is not life itself. It’s the commotion the mind makes about life that really causes the problems.”

“Imagine if you used relationships to get to know other people, rather than to satisfy what is blocked inside of you. If you’re not trying to make people fit into your preconceived notions of what you like and dislike, you will find that relationships are not really that difficult. If you’re not so busy judging and resisting people based upon what is blocked inside of you, you will find that they are much easier to get along with—and so are you. Letting go of yourself is the simplest way to get closer to others.”

“How would you feel if someone outside really started talking to you the way your inner voice does? How would you relate to a person who opened their mouth to say everything your mental voice says? After a very short period of time, you would tell them to leave and never come back. But when your inner friend continuously speaks up, you don’t ever tell it to leave. No matter how much trouble it causes, you listen.”

“To attain true inner freedom, you must be able to objectively watch your problems instead of being lost in them… Once you’ve made the commitment to free yourself of the scared person inside, you will notice that there is a clear decision point at which your growth takes place.”

If things get really hard you might want to talk to a professional.  Its great to be able to vent to a friend however having someone you can talk who’s perspective isn’t wrap up in how they perceive us to be/need us to be can be a great help

We need our fiends stay within the boundaries of who we think they are just as they need us to stay within the boundaries of who they think we are…. so it can get messy if we are always using them to vent to.

You are experiencing what most of us have experienced at some point in our teenage years and a lot of it is influenced by chemical changes of puberty. As well this is the time we start taking ownership between what we were taught and what we think.  I suspect you started to notice that what you learned about how the world should be is not the way the world is and in this light that peoples actions don’t always follow what they say. (Including our own)  It’s a very confusing time so I don’t think your losing your find. Far from it as the way you were able to write about your experience was very articulate.

Try not to be to hard on yourself. Its important to feel what your feeling however try not to add judgments about how you feel as that tends to intensify them.  Feeling bad about feeling bad is a horrible place to get stuck in.