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All the
Baggage and the Old Wounds
When your father walked out on you, your siblings, and
your mother, your life changed drastically. Now, decades later, it still lives
on in your mind, as you remember how difficult things were, and how - about 15
months after he left - you caught a glimpse of him one day on the street in the
company of another woman, much younger and less stressed-looking than your
mother, who had a baby in her arms. Your father had just hugged her and kissed
the baby, and you felt such agony. You also felt rage. And you remember it to
this day. How could you forget how he affected all your lives?
When you found your high school love - the first girl
you ever went to bed with - making out with your best buddy - you were both on
the basketball team - something shrivelled up inside of you and died. With that
one act she took away your self-esteem. It took you years to work your way out
of that. And your best buddy. After a shoving match with him after having found
the two of them there, you never spoke to him again. And you never found a
friend again with whom you shared the way you used to with him - before you
realized what a traitor he was. Even when you ran into that first girl friend again
recently, now that you're both in your forties and you saw how she had gained
weight and lost her youthful sparkle and attraction, you felt no sense of
satisfaction, only pain in the memory of what happened that devastating day.
When your wife left you, taking with her not only the
kids, but also the silver and the antiques, you felt impotent with rage. When
she furthermore got sole custody because that’s how the system works, you were
beside yourself. And of course she also got alimony and child support. Whenever
you think about that, you can still feel your blood boil.
Common Thread
Have you noticed the common thread that runs through each of these vignettes? You remember what happened with a great deal of emotion, almost as though you were reliving the painful incident.
What's new about that, you may ask. Of course I
relive the painful moment. How else could I react? Do you expect me to forget
it?
Not exactly. Although there is an element of
forgetting it involved in what I am about to write.
Hanging
on to the Old Memories - Hanging on For Dear Life
What I'd like you to think about is this: by
remembering, by bringing it back into your mind over and over again - even
though you only do it once a week or once a month - you maintain the
freshness of the pain. Reliving a painful situation in your mind is
tantamount to reliving it in reality ... have you not noticed how the tears can
flow again and again, or the red-hot anger can flare over and over ... even
though decades have passed?
Of course, you say, of
course the tears flow or the anger flares. After all, what happened was very
painful...
Your
Thoughts Attract
Let's switch to another topic for a moment: you've
read about The Law of Attraction, the power of intention, heard about
the movie or book The Secret, etc. Maybe you've even read some of the
multitude of books about the subject. If so, you know the insistence of all
these authors on one central philosophy: what you think about becomes your
reality ... thoughts become things ... as a man thinketh, so shall he be ...
and of course, all of these authors are encouraging you to imagine in your
head, to visualize, or create scenarios in your head to the point where you can
literally feel yourself inside of them, and feel the emotion or excitement that
would be part of your life if your "scenario" were already a reality.
They are basically stating that by so doing, that "scenario" you are
so vividly imagining will eventually become a part of your life. That is the
power of the law of attraction.
Here’s a verbatim excerpt from a previous article of
mine:
The
Importance of Forgiving & the Law of Attraction
Once you can forgive, the unfinished business from the
past transforms into a mere memory that no longer carries any negative
connotations to pull your power away from the present. It is at this point that
you can begin to take cellular responsibility for yourself, i.e. you
will no longer be harming your body in all senses of the word by keeping that
negative power in the past.
Caroline Myss (from whose work I have borrowed the
term cellular responsibility) pointed out almost a decade ago in 1999 in
The Science of Medical Intuition, together with Dr. Norman Shealy, that
it is also at this point that you can begin to create and manifest. In
other words, no matter how much visualization and affirmation you are doing,
those of you who have been vicariously reading everything you can get your
hands on about the Law of Attraction or The Secret, you will not
be able to create, until you pull your power into the present. Forgiving
those who have trespassed you is one of the biggest steps towards that goal.
Quotes about forgiving by Caroline Myss:
- By far the strongest poison to the human spirit is the inability to
forgive oneself or another person. It disables a person's emotional
resources. The challenge is to refine our capacity to love others as well
as ourselves and to develop the power of forgiveness.
- Forgiveness is no longer an option but a necessity for healing.
- One of the greatest struggles of the healing process is to forgive
both yourself and others and to stop expending valuable energy on the past
hurts.
- In order to heal oneself, we must learn how to forgive.
- Forgive and call back the energy wasted on past events.
- The act of forgiveness is the act of returning to present time. And that's why when one has become a forgiving person, and has managed to let go of the past, what they've really done is they've shifted their relationship with time.
Choosing
Your Thoughts – Choosing Your Feelings
Now let's back track to our original subject. You
reliving and remembering painful or traumatic experiences from the past to the
point of physical manifestations such as tears of bursts of anger. Is that
not the same as what I've just discussed in the previous paragraph, but in a
negative version? You keep thinking about - visualizing - imagining - that
event from the past to the point of making it a reality in your present life in
the sense of how it affects you. In other words, it affects you as much as it
might if it were actually happening now. So you have made it into a part of
your current reality.
Is that what you want? Is that how you want to live
your life?
Nothing stops you from hanging on to your anger or
your pain, but only the decision to make new choices stops you from continuing
on this desperate treadmill of pain. Making a new choice would be to say to
yourself that for your sake, for your peace of mind, you will forgive
whoever it was that treated you so badly, so that you can live a good life
now. So that you no longer have to continue to relive the pain.
That is all it takes: a choice of dealing with the
past differently. You decide, you choose, and
your life changes. It is literally as simple as that. So when you get the old
thoughts that lead you to the pain you literally say to them no, not today,
thanks, I've got better stuff to do than to let you bother me again. Instead of
you I'm going to think about what I want to accomplish, or I'm going to shift
my energy or I’m going to focus on what is good in my life (even if it’s
only the fresh, clean air where you live, or the lush vegetation, or the
vibrant city about you, or the great libraries, or the football you can watch
on TV). And by focusing on what is good in my life, I can begin to let go of
the pain, I can begin to forgive, because from the place of feeling better, by
re-focusing, I can understand that I don’t want to be in the place of pain, in
the place where I hang on to all that hurt in the past. I know that the only
reason it hurts now is because I am not letting go of it. So I choose to let
go, to forgive, and to move on.
Do it for yourself, and not only you will benefit, but
all those whose lives you touch.
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