Coming out of our past

When we say people are working from their past, it does not mean that they live in the past. It means that they are still reacting to situations that have happened in the past. They carry that energy from the past into the present and future.

Eg. A person has failed in a particular exam once in his life, the person will carry this fear of failing not only for other exams but also for any situation where pass or fail matters. It could be getting a contract, or a client but if he fails to do it, for whatever the reason, even reasons beyond his control he would still resurrect the fail of the exam in his past and the feelings associated with it, and feel that he is a failure in life.

The trick is to realize that we carry so much of our past with us and every subsequent situation we react as if it was the first one. As the man in the eg. we immediately open our baggage pull out our feeling of failure and wallow in it. As if it is the only emotion we can feel and no other.

This feeling exponentially increases if there is someone in his life who also points, or criticizes him for the failure. It could be a passing comment from his boss, or colleague. He just failed to get one client/contract, which can happen to anyone, but since he is reacting from his past failure feeling, it feels like he has failed hugely. It is his perspective and his feelings.

These erroneous perspectives can very easily be righted by rewriting the episode of him failing the exam when he was a child and change the way he looks at it, as a one off situation. Then the feeling of failure also releases its death hold on his psyche and he starts feeling a success.

It is just the change of our perspective that makes even a failed person a success in life. 

The Fear of Impending Death

We all have seen the Earthquake, and the resulting Tsunami, that hit Japan. This brought forward our own fear of impending death by many notches. We all know that death is a eventuality, from the day we are born, we are going to die some day. We visualize that someday very far into the future. We do not visualize it in the immediate future, as today or tomorrow, or now.

We all live our lives according to the plans we make for our future. Every job interviewer asks the question, ‘Where do you see yourself at the end of 5 years?’, or 10 yrs. But they or we never foresee a future with both neither the company existing, nor we, all being washed out by the Tsunami. This brings out our worst unpreparedness of leaving this world. We think we have so much to do, to accomplish, but death is a eventuality. We cease to exist beyond it.

We fear our death, because we are not prepared to leave yet. We think we have so much to do, so much more to plan, and so many people to meet and say goodbye to. Suppose we had only one hour before our deaths, that is what the Japanese people were given warning of, a tsunami coming, and they had to leave their houses and go to higher ground. What can you take with you? What could they (the Japanese) take with them apart from the things that they could easily carry with them? They saw their houses, their hard earned assets getting washed out right in front of their eyes, and they could do nothing.

That is how death is, it comes and claims your life, and no amount of insurance or planning can stop its claim. We have to submit to this eventuality. The Tsunami showed us that we have to be prepared for deaths claim any time. Are we ready?

Have we said our good byes, have we wished our folks well, have we done what we have come here to do? Have we lived our lives? Have we told all those people whom we love, that we actually love them? Have we? Are we ready, to leave every possession we have and move on, to the next world?

Slave to Bad Memories

We all want to be free to do what we want to do.  We all have a villain in our lives who prevents us from doing what we want to do. But is this villain the real reason for not doing things, or is he a convenient ‘blame source’.

Many a times we move out of the place where our villains stay, sometimes we even move to another country. Other times these villains, are people who are dead relatives, i.e. they are no longer with us now. Still it is surprising how we don’t get down to doing the things that we really want, and we always hanker about how we had a bad past, and how this villain prevented us from doing those things we wanted.

But what is stopping you now. What is it that holds us back, is it that we are our own villains, is it our own lethargy, procrastination, fear of un-known, habit or the voices of the villain in our heads, that stops us. Most will pick the voices of the villain in our heads option, because it is still easy to blame the voice in our heads, than to take responsibility for our lives.

We are so conditioned to blame others, so that we are not the bad guys, we are the perfect ones. We do the best, and the others do the worst. We are confident that what we are is our best selves, and that should not change.

Let us look at it from a different perspective, suppose those villains in our lives were our conscious speaking, suppose they were the ones who prodded us to do more than we were willing to do. Suppose these people saw how we truly were and wanted us to be better, they saw the better potential in ourselves and that’s why, they prodded us in the first place.

Now they are the good, people because we see them in a different light, a different perspective and find that they were there in our lives because they wanted us to do what we wanted to do, but with conviction. We did not have that conviction, so we did not stand up to them (villains in our lives), and tell them that we really wanted to do this, and nothing else. Once the conviction is there in us no one can stop us.

Some of us move to another place and do what we want to do, and find success, but a portion of us hankers for the approval of the villain, because we know that if that person approves, then we have even the opposition voting for us. But is it possible for the opposition to vote for us. The oppositions job is to oppose so that you do a better job, and don’t settle for a compromise.

Let’s all think about the villains in our lives and their roles.

Pain the topic of conversation

Pain be it physical or emotional, comes right after the weather and sports. The topic is beaten to death, because we are resurrecting it from the death. The pain was there, is no longer there, but the memory lingers on. We really bring it back to life when we talk of the pain that we had suffered in the past. We breathe life into the pain by talking about it and going through every detail of it. We acquire a macabre sense of the dead pain.

We add dimensions to the pain, that were not there when it really happened. For eg. A lady goes through a divorce, and she has taken the way out, what-ever be the reason,  her husband was unfaithful, or was abusive, or was addicted, or etc. She is well rid of the man, she should be happy. Her life is her own now, and she is in a better place mentally, but no, she has to carry the pain of the divorce with her everywhere she goes. She has to feel the victim, to draw attention to her plight, so she tells her divorce tale, as she is the tragic heroine of the story. She has to keep the pain alive by repeated narrations, or she will lose the sympathy and her part as the heroine. This attention is what she did not get in marriage, now in divorce she gets it.

But what, if she stops playing the tragic heroine and starts afresh as if the divorce had not taken place, forgives the husband his wrong doing and moves on, what then. She reclaims her power to be who she really is, and lives a happier life, more content that there is no husband who abuses, or unfaithful, or addicted. This new her can chart a new course for her life to go to. A new direction, and a new dimension to reveal of self. A brand new you that is coming out of the cocoon  and turning to a butterfly. Could this not replace the old pattern, the old conversation, the old living, we can still have conversational material but with a new zest and vigor, wouldn’t this be infinitely better than the pain resurrection.

Like attracts like, they say, so what do we attract when we talk so much of pain? What is it, that we are attracting? Lets deliberate on this, and what if we choose to talk on our new found freedom, our new pain free self. What is it that we would attract? More freedom, more pain relief, more self.