I WANT TO BE FREE FROM MY PAST. IS THIS POSSIBLE AND IF YES HOW?
Today people of all walks of life are becoming more and more aware of the impact their past has on their Here and Now. The question how to free oneself from the shadows and burdens of one’s past is the beginning of an opening for a profound possibility:
The possibility of putting our past to rest, once and for all.
The past has nothing to do with the present moment. In principle a human being should be free to call on the past when wanted or needed and otherwise the past should be dormant like a laptop in hibernation.
But we all know by our own experience that this is unfortunately not the case. Our past seems to have its own life and spills into our Here and Now, unasked and often at the most undesired moments.
We are having a magical moment with another, and whoop, a memory fragment of our past with an ex or with our mother or father squeezes itself into space between us and the other.
As if that alone wouldn’t be enough irritation, no, the memory fragments carry emotions that we are now forced to feel (again). Of course one reacts to this intrusion with attempts of trying to kick this unwanted visitor out of the precious space of the Here and Now, but as we all know, these past memories seem to have their own very stubborn life.
Instead of being fully present and available for the life right in front of us, our minds are hijacked by memories and habitual thought patterns that stick to our awareness lick super glue. Consequentially we interact externally with the tasks of everyday life, and at the same time being internally occupied with managing the undesirable images and emotions of our past.
Stress, exhaustion, irritation, regression, and on the long run burn-out, depression, anxiety and all the other psychological and emotional distortions are in our space and demanding our attention. There is little room for joy, play and creation.
Our strategies to keep the past out of the present moment are usually denial, resistance, suppression, reframing, hoping it will go away by itself, etc.
And even if we succeeded once pushing back the past into the past, guess what? Exactly, it doesn’t take long until this package comes back or another past fragment intrudes our Here and Now.
And the more we get busy dealing with all of that the more we lose the present moment.
Philosophers of all cultures and ages have pointed out that we live in the past although our bodies are always in the present.
The way out of this default human way of being is to “complete the past”.
When you look closely at the past content that enters the present moment, you see that something of this memory is “incomplete”, meaning mentally or emotionally it is not complete.
If we analyze such a past fragment, we can see that at the time when this past happened, we did not totally and authentically deal with what happened. Therefore we left this past moment incomplete, and so its memory is stored as “incomplete” and can’t “die” or go to rest; it remains charged, that is to say alive, and anything in our today’s Here and Now that is similar can trigger this past piece to come back into the present moment asking for completion.
What is truly complete has no life energy anymore and therefore only lives in the data base of your mind as pure memory, available upon a conscious act of calling on it.
In contradiction to the popular belief that one could let go of the past, I stipulate that it is not possible. You don’t hold on to the past, the past holds on to you! And it will until it has been completed.
A great part of THE JOURNEY, my work and legacy, is designed to help people to complete their past, their future and to learn to keep the present moment complete.
Then living in the Here and Now will be undisturbed and being effortlessly present will be a default condition of being a human being.
Imagine how it would feel to just be, dance, work and live consistently in the Here and Now? How creative you would be? How available you would be? How life would feel like for you?
With love, ❤Marc