You can not let go of the past.
Today people of all walks of life are becoming more and more aware of the impact on their Here and Now their past has. 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 to let go of the past.
One’s past lives in one’s memory.
It has nothing to do with the present moment. Technically 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 whoops a memory fragment of our past with an ex or with our mother or father squeezes itself into space between me and the other. As if that alone already wouldn’t be enough irritation, no, the memory fragment carries 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 this Here and Now, but as we all know, these past memories seem to have their own stubborn agenda. Now the mess is really annoying. Instead of being fully present and available to the other, one is externally present and internally busy with managing the undesirable images and emotions of one’s past.
Denial, resistance and suppression.
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 this time pushing the past back 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.
We live in the past.
There are only very few people who have this intrusion happing once in a while. The majority of people are consistently living in a fog of the past polluting day and night the precious Here and Now. Philosophers of all ages have pointed out that in fact we live in the past although our bodies are always in the present.
“Complete the past”.
The way out of this human default condition of being is to “complete the past”. Because if you look close at the past content that enters the present moment, you see that something of this memory is “incomplete”, meaning mentally or emotionally not complete. If we analyse such a past fragment, one can see that at the time when this past happened, we did not totally and authentically dealt with what happened. Therefore we left this past moment incomplete and so its memory also is stored “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 believe 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 is completed. A great part of the Journey that Creative Consciousness offers, 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 free and undisturbed will be a default condition of being.
Imagine how it would feel to just be, dance, work and live consistently in the Here and Now? How creative you would be? And how available you would be? How would life feel like for you?