You can’t start a new chapter in your life if you keep re-reading the last one.
Contents
When a stage of our life ends, it may be easier to cling to it for fear of letting go of what we know and venturing into what will be.
It is not possible to live in the present regretting the past and consider the moments that belong to him as the best lived: it is a trap that inevitably leads to emotional suffering and that prevents us from seeing the beautiful things of the present and all that life has in store for us.
Getting rid of the past in 5 moves – Goodbye old wounds!
We all have old wounds that we carry with us like ballast … until we break the boxes and get rid of them, right? There are more or less heavy ballasts, some unimaginable and painful.
I could give you an example of some of my injuries that have ruined my life in time, but certainly, they will never be as annoying as those carried by people who are victims of sexual abuse, violence, death of loved ones, etc …
Despite this, I would group all these wounds into a single container: the ballast container of the past, do you agree? What has passed is past and we cannot allow what has been to ruin the present time … have I been unclear? Let’s try again: The past is an illusion, better?
If with your head you continue to live in a time that is no longer the only result you will get, it will be called guilt or resentment. Often people find it easier to be a result of the past than one of the causes of the future.
We happen to find people who can’t wait to tell us about their misfortunes, how life has unfairly punished them … and they do this because they feel profound pleasure in being pitied and thus attracting attention to themselves. It is as if by telling of their old wounds they can gain power over others, rising and standing out from the crowd.
I didn’t say it’s not good to bring out what we have inside. We would miss it! It would be abnormal not to. If we live a bad experience, if we face a bad period, it is certainly a good thing to confront and open up to someone. Even just the fact of talking about what happened helps us to clarify within us … but one thing is to talk about it, one thing is to abuse what happened to sew on oneself the dress of the victim who does not intend to react.
Free yourself from the past in the simplest way: by ceasing to believe that what happened other times is destined to repeat itself. [Susanna Schimperna]
Because you see, to distinguish yourself from all the others, there are two ways: there are those who want to distinguish themselves by doing something special, which brings value to others, and there are those who go in the opposite direction …
Do you say I went there heavy? Patience … If I have offended you in some way, I’m sorry, leave the blog of Being Happy and look for the blog Being Sad, maybe you find it. Otherwise, read on 🙂
Joking aside, I’m sorry for everyone’s suffering, this is obvious, but over time I have understood one thing: suffering allows us to understand ourselves, and ALWAYS transforms us into our best version (as long as we allow it to ). So rather than cursing an event because it made us suffer, let us try to understand the good that it wants to teach us. And trust me, the lesson is always there and the more difficult the moment you will have to face, the more important and precious the lesson you will have to learn.
When we talk about our pains, our sufferings, what has happened to us badly, we are creating an atmosphere of pity around our person. And then you will hear people whispering poor, what bad things they have experienced, etc … What use can all this bring us?
The only effect that we will achieve by doing so will be that our creativity, our enthusiasm, our drive to change, will remain frozen in a time where nothing changes and everything stagnates, where everything is tied to bad memory by absorbing negative energy. In a short time, you will lose your ability to create life as you want and you will be at the mercy of events like a deflated boat amid the waves of a tsunami. And in the end, in addition to feeling unfortunate, you will feel unworthy of receiving all the beautiful things that life will be able to offer you and thankful for all that it has already given you.
STAYING RELATED TO THE PAST RUINS HEALTH
By continuing to release the negative energy of the so-called unfortunate events that have affected us, we will only strengthen our bond with them, therefore we preclude the possibility of freeing ourselves from a past that does not exist and heading towards a better future full of all those things we deserve.
Put simply, if you’re not careful your biography could turn into your biology.
If you want to make your dreams come true, as well as eliminate the 4 limiting beliefs that we often make ours, you should let go of everything that does not exist in the here and now.
But how does it not exist?!? I feel pain for what happened! What happened, happened. It is not happening now. Your thinking is happening now, not the event. So, change the thought related to your past with one related to something more useful, for example, dedicate it to a project you want to carry out.
I remind you that the mind and body are in close connection with each other and if you generate thoughts that as a physiological product offer negative emotions, your body will get sick. On the contrary, if your mind generates purposeful thoughts that foresee a future in which the body must necessarily be healthy, you will enjoy all the well-being necessary for this internal image to materialize in reality.
Do not you believe it? Observe the people around you, but also observe yourself. Our biography emerges in our person. Thoughts, therefore emotions, pay the toll to the body. What coin do you want them to use?
RELEASE THE MOORING AND GO AGAIN
RELEASE THE MOORING AND GO AGAINAnd to clean up the past you don’t need pills, confessions, or magic rites. I am not saying to eliminate what has been and forget about it, it is clear. But if it is true that our life goes in the direction of the thoughts that we run over, continue to think (and suffer) about something that happened ten years ago, where will it take you?
And to do this deep cleaning you need only one thing: love for yourself. Do you love yourself? Are you able to forgive and forgive yourself for what has been? Nobody is perfect and we all make mistakes … but we are all perfectible. And if you had never burned yourself with fire you would run a danger … But you certainly don’t want to continue to suffer for the time you got burned, right?!?
Forgiving is an act of deep cleansing. Attract love and return it. Knowing how to forgive makes us happy. To forgive oneself is to love oneself and the message that releases forgiveness is this: I am worthy of love and I intend to return this love to others too.
Feeling worthy to receive is the first step to be able to return to live in the flow of abundance that permeates life on this planet.
5 STEPS TO RE-START LET GOING THE PAST
- Do what you love. Always take the time to dedicate yourself to what makes your heart beat faster. And in the moments that you are forced to do something you don’t like, always try to find the positive aspects of that situation. Complaining does not lead to anything. Knowing how to appreciate increases your inner strength.
- Avoid being pessimistic and negative. Check your thoughts before they become words and annihilate everything negative that appears in your mind at birth. Voluntarily end this unnecessary and deleterious process. Every thought, every word, every action, will come back to you under physical experience. Calibrate what you think.
- Dedicated to reading or watching books/videos that can inspire you, that can give you the motivation needed to face the challenges of life. The term inspiration derives from the Latin in-spiro (breath inside), which means that when you are inspired, the spirit is in you. And by the spirit, I mean that strange entity that has the most disparate names, such as God, Tao, Love, Divine Matrix, foo, etc …
- Surround yourself with all the beautiful things you want / can. Don’t feel guilty about it. You are here to enjoy as much as possible what life offers you, therefore, according to your needs, according to your possibilities, do not deprive yourself of anything. But above all, don’t feel guilty. Appreciating and knowing how to enjoy the beauty that exists is equivalent to love. And love only generates other love. When you appreciate you cannot feel unworthy if anything lucky. So you will find yourself automatically thanking life for everything it has given you and will continue to give you.
- Be kind, first of all towards yourself and then towards others. To be kind you never lose. Who does not grasp your kindness, well, worse for him, right?!? Practicing kindness brings significant benefits.
Getting rid of the past does not mean reaching out to a future that does not yet exist. This could cause us concern. What matters is knowing how to enjoy the present time to build the best of tomorrow. And if you want a better tomorrow, the only soil you will have to sow is just what is in the here & now. Sow well and let everything run its course. Everything grows …
Think of the times we fell, peeling a knee or hurting ourselves in another way;
What we have done?
We probably disinfected the wound and gave her time to heal.
Yet we don’t do the same thing with emotional wounds.
Yet we don’t do the same thing with emotional wounds.Clinging to a past that no longer belongs to us means preventing a wound from healing and healing naturally, by continuing to reopen it and hurting us more and more.
But the way to heal is there.
It consists in freeing oneself from the chains that bind and imprison us, without denying or feeling resentment and hatred for what has been.
We owe what we are today to our past which, like every event in our life, has done its job very well: to teach us a good lesson.
Ignoring this lesson will not prevent us from escaping it, because we do nothing but allow negative experiences lived to dominate and guide our present.
To live free we must learn the lesson, be grateful to her for letting us know each other more and for allowing us to act and behave differently.
Let’s try to imagine our past as a hot air balloon: let’s look at it as it rises in the sky, first heavier, then more and more lightly.
And as it moves away from our site, let’s smile at it. We learned so much from her, she showed us how fragile but immensely strong we can be.
Let’s smile at her because now we can finally start a new chapter in our life.
So if something doesn’t make us happy, let it go.
If something doesn’t make us shine, if it doesn’t make us grow, if it doesn’t make us better, let it go.
If it has nothing to do with what we are and what we want to become, let it go.
Letting go is the right key.
It can be frightening, but it will be much less painful than the pain of clinging to something that has been but is no longer.
Facing life with a smile, looking to the future with enthusiasm, taking only the best from the negative experiences that happen to us, completely changes the way we feel great compared to the world and the people around us.
“There are so many unhappy people who nevertheless do not take the initiative to change their situation because it is conditioned by security, conformism, traditionalism, all things that seem to ensure peace of mind, but in reality for the adventurous soul of there is nothing more devastating than a certain future for a man.
The joy of living derives from meeting new experiences, and therefore there is no greater joy than having a constantly changing horizon, of being in a new and different sun every day.
We just have to find the courage to turn against the usual lifestyle and throw ourselves into an unconventional existence. ” cit. Film Into The Wild
There is for us all the possibility of a great change in life, which is more or less equivalent to a second chance to be born.
Before any change asks yourself these simple questions:
1) why am I here?
2) Is it worth staying?
There is for us all the possibility of a great change in life, which is more or less equivalent to a second chance to be born.
There is no passion in living small and planning a life less than what you might have.
Have you ever made some small social mistake, only to have seen it in your head over and over again? Maybe you said something embarrassing … Maybe your voice sounded a little strange …
Maybe someone refused you, avoided talking to you.
And from that moment your mind started to torture you.
You can’t let go of that moment, you keep mulling over the past, you obsessively dwell on that mistake … so much that you can’t stop thinking about those embarrassing moments you’ve lived.
You are thinking about what you could or should have done differently from what you did. And you keep mulling it over and over and over and over again. It’s like watching the most uncomfortable and embarrassing movie in the world repeatedly, 1000 times a day …
And the worst part is: YOU are the protagonist of this terrible film!
Do you want to know how to say goodbye forever to your shyness?
Thanks to Progressive Sociality you will be able to eliminate anxiety, fear, and blockages in front of others by way of a gradual path that never makes you fail (as perhaps happened in the past)
Mulling hurts. And I know something …
It is a bad way of life. True?
If you have read this far, you are probably one of the people who carry old and bulky mental baggage: they carry past wounds, failures, shameful embarrassments, and small mistakes.
People who can not in any way not to think about the past, indeed they continue to mull over errors and thoughts so much as to ruin the present. And that paradoxically … when they don’t think about the past they start to daydream what a life would be like without this cumbersome excess of thought
And this gigantic baggage in your mind makes you feel depressed and weakens your self-esteem, prevents you from expressing yourself authentically when you are with other people.
Mulling hurts. Thinking about the past and the embarrassing moments you have experienced … concentrating on the mistakes you have made … it turns you off and leaves you helpless with the fear that you may be ashamed or embarrassed again.
That’s why in this article I will show you how to stop these negative memories from dominating your head, how to escape the torture of your mind that repeats the same thing over and over again.
Just brooding!
To get rid of your mental baggage (or at least bring smaller baggage with you!) You have to start from the root of your behavior.
The first step to succeeding is to first understand the problem. Why are you doing it? What is the meaning of brooding?
Do you continue to mull over the past? Here because!
Before you understand how you can no longer mull over what has gone through and your mistakes, you must understand WHY you keep seeing these moments in your head.
Many of us believe we can completely control our minds. Are you also convinced that you can control everything you think and how you feel? Big mistakes…
I tell you some great news, which perhaps will amaze you: your mind is NOT a modern, efficient, and “common sense” invention. Instead, it was designed for millions of years of evolution to help you do two primary things: survive and reproduce.
That’s right … Your mind exists to improve your chances of surviving or having children so you can pass on your genes to future generations.
Do you understand why this is important?
Many negative emotions such as fear, anxiety, anger, and jealousy come from these two great unconscious drives: survival and reproduction.
Let’s take some examples.
- When you feel scared, for example when a big dog suddenly barks at you, that fear is meant to help you fight the predator or run away to safety. This is called survival.
- When you feel jealous of your partner because he spends a lot of time with someone else, this jealousy is meant to help you improve your chances of reproduction.
- When you feel anxious to walk alone in a dark and deserted street, that anxiety is designed to help you stay alert and face strange dangers in a new environment.
- So as you can see it’s easy to see why an emotion like fear is related to survival.
It is a little more difficult to understand why the habit of your mind to review embarrassing moments or to mull over the past is linked to survival. But I assure you that this too is.
The key is social reputation.
When humans lived in the tribes of the African savannah, the most effective strategy to survive was to avoid being driven out of the tribe a caveman would not have survived alone in that harsh desert.
This meant maintaining a good social reputation (nowadays the tribe includes all the people you know: family, friends, colleagues, classmates, etc.) and the most effective strategy for mating was to have a high social status in the tribe.
This allowed a caveman to attract the best companions for survival and reproduction … and it still works the same way today!
Have you ever noticed, for example, that the most popular guys in your school are more likely to have girlfriends? And that rock stars and celebrities are always considered the sexiest people?
This is how it works. Who knows how to talk to others has a charm superior to others,
It is precisely for this reason that your mind was designed to be obsessed with your social reputation. So when you say or do something that could damage your reputation or social status, your mind goes crazy …
And it does it every time you say something that accidentally offends someone, especially someone important to you.
It also does this when you create an awkward silence that “ruins your chances of success” with the girl or boy you like.
And it does it even when you feel very uncomfortable sitting alone while eating and you are caught by the fear of those who might see you alone and judge you.
In all these situations, your mind believes that it has damaged your social reputation or social status in some way, and prompts you to mull over the past.
So he repeats the situation to you over and over again about that kind of cinema inside your forehead because he doesn’t want you to repeat the same mistake. He wants you to become better at preserving and improving your social status.
The Paradox that does not stop you brooding
The irony of this though is that the MORE you will be obsessed with past thoughts and you will continue to mull over mistakes and the LESS sure and LESS socially able you will be in future social situations.
Thinking and brooding continually affect your self-esteem and confidence in your abilities.
Now that you understand better the real cause of your problem … how can you solve it? How can you not brood?
Many people try to force themselves to suppress or “reject” the memory. This approach doesn’t work in 99% of cases, I’ve tried it for years, but my mind kept going back to those embarrassing memories.
It is not the way that will certainly help you stop brooding!
Here is what works, follow me!
Just brooding! Escape your thinking mind completely
A few weeks ago I was listening to an interview with a great writer whom I admire.
Someone asked him, “How can I overcome a sentimental breakup? I continue to be obsessed with my ex-girlfriend.”
And the writer’s advice was profound. He said, “The best thing I know is getting out of the house and working out. Go running or go to the gym. You need to get out of your mind and get into your body.”
The last part is the most important: Get out of your mind and get into your body. This is fantastic advice.
I believe exercise is a good TEMPORARY way to “get out of your mind.” It quickly puts you in touch with your physical body. When you are running or lifting weights with a lot of concentration and intensity, you are out of your mind, away from your thoughts, from all your mental problems, worries, and stress. This is the main reason why some people love fitness or sport so much.
The only problem is that you can’t practice physical activity all the time.
So a better solution is to also use other techniques that you can do anywhere and anytime that will “get you out of your mind”, to help you stop mulling over the past.
The good news is that we don’t have to invent anything new because all this is already the basis of many therapy and meditation techniques. Here are a few.
Gestalt therapy
Gestalt therapyThis is a truly unique form of therapy. Here because:
” Most therapies encourage intellectualization: talking about the irrationality of the patient’s beliefs, talking about behavior, changing what the therapist believes the patient should do, and so on.
More than any other therapy, Gestalt therapy instead emphasizes that everything that exists is here and now, and that experience is more reliable than interpretation. The patient is taught the difference between talking about what happened five minutes ago (or last night or 20 years ago) and experiencing what is now. “-Gary Yontef, Ph.D.-
In short, Gestalt therapy consists of giving less attention to your symbolic thought: your mental interpretations and your explanations for the past go into the background while more attention is given to what is perceived or felt in this precise moment.
Attention focuses on what is being done, though, and felt right now rather than what it was, could be, could be, or should be.
For this reason, the patient is taught the futility of brooding over the past.
Here is another example of a technique to stop thinking about the past.
Vipassana meditation
About a year ago, I went to a 10-day silent meditation retreat, which taught me the technique of Vipassana meditation.
For 10 days, I couldn’t speak to anyone or look anyone in the eye.
No communication allowed. No cellphone or computer allowed. No books allowed.
Only hours and hours of meditation practice every day. Day after day, from 6:00 in the morning until evening, with breaks to eat light vegetarian food.
So I have a little experience with this technique.
Vipassana meditation has nothing to do with belief in Buddha or some god, it is just a technique for observing yourself.
On that 10-day retreat, I started watching my breath, watching it come in, out, hour after hour.
Then they taught us to carefully observe our bodies from head to toe.
This means “scanning” attention throughout the body and noticing what feelings you feel everywhere. Very simple but very effective techniques in putting you in contact with your body as a living and breathing organism, instead of living in the abstract world of your mind which includes your reputation / social identity. Only in this way did I avoid thinking and brooding.
To be clear what I am explaining to you, you have to put this technique into practice, only in this way will you be able to truly understand why it is so powerful and why it has survived thousands of years, but above all because it helps you not to think about the past.
Both Gestalt Therapy and Vipassana Meditation are two different methods of entering the present moment, and this is another of the things you can do to stop brooding about the past.
How not to brood? Live the present moment, here and now.
The best thing you can do to stop obsessing over brooding over past mistakes or embarrassing moments is to redirect your focus/attention. Where and how do you redirect it?
Take a moment to notice something going on in the physical world here and now.
For example, you now feel your fingers on the computer keyboard. Pay attention to that feeling that radiates on your hands for a few seconds.
Or you can pay attention to your breathing going in and out. You don’t need to breathe suddenly differently, but right now become aware of how you breathe normally.
Or if you are walking somewhere, pay attention to your movements. Can you make all the movements of your arms or legs conscious instead of automatic?
Or you can redirect your attention to the sensations on the bottom of your feet.
What can you try? This is a good technique that you can use in any social situation. You can also do this while talking to people to stop thinking about the past and mulling negative thoughts.
By redirecting attention in one of these simple ways, you get more in touch with your physical existence, you become aware of what you are perceiving and feeling right now.
Redirecting your concentration on emotions and physical sensations brings you to the present moment, instead of remembering the past uncontrollably, prevents your mind from thinking about the past.
The past is past, you cannot change something that has already happened. You can only check your mood right now and instead of being constantly terrified of memories that make you feel bad or even make you feel ashamed of yourself, you can redirect your concentration in the physical world and reality.
Think about it and ask yourself this simple question: would your embarrassing mistake count in five years? So why should it matter so much now? Just mull over the past, live now!
“If a person’s social identity is compromised, he always has his body to resort to. In reality, this is the basis for all psychotherapeutic changes. Often, under heavy stress, an individual saves his sanity by learning to fall back on his body, relying on it […] and interrupting the interference of his mind – fears, obsessions, and phobias. “
