Life

Do you know anyone who has fully left the past behind him or her? Few of us achieve that freedom. For all of us, at some level, the past is not really the past. Even when painful circumstances occurred weeks, months, or years ago, at a deep emotional level we still hold on to them.

We attempt to bury them, but they still affect our lives. The energy we use in regrets and resentments burns at an unconscious level, so we don’t realize why we are nagged by feelings of negativity or unhappiness. Yet, unless we somehow release that negative energy, the past affects our present-day experience and shapes our future.

We cannot hold onto negative energy from the past in the form of grudges, resentments, and fears, and at the same time move toward highest potential. Why? Because negative feelings block the flow of positive energy into our lives.

The best way to release the past is to forgive..forgive ourselves and those people and situations that hurt us. Just as our bodies heal physical bruises, our inner self wants to heal emotional injuries. We heal by releasing those injuries. We release by forgiving.

To forgive, we face the matter and own it. We acknowledge that the negative energy we’ve been carrying around no longer serves us. We choose to leave the situation behind and in doing so, we forgive.

Forgiveness is a gift to ourselves. It release us from the past, fills our lives with positive emotions and frees us to shape abundant, successful tomorrows.

But sometimes there are no closure….

We all have difficulties letting ourselves go, be it a small confrontation with our peer, our friends, wife, parents or in office with boss. We keep looping it in our mind either blaming ourself or finding fault in other person till we justify it. For some it takes days or even weeks to forget and move on, for others it takes much lesser time.

Why we do it?

I think one of the reasons we do it is to understand what happened and rectify or avoid the same mistake in future. We all have a sense of learning which is ingrained to make us better in everything we do, so we try to analyze and improve from it.

But we oversimplify it, sometimes it’s not as simple as it looks, maybe the other person is not in good mood, maybe you yourself are in bad grudge about sometime else with someone. With all these in background and the present environment even the most calm person might have that altercation.

Can we let it go?

As a closure, we either expect apology from others or some kind of punishment to be exerted on the other person or to us. But why so? Everyone makes mistake, we ourselves make so many mistakes and ignore it. Can’t we pardon him/her or for that matter ourself ? Just imagine if you can pardon the other person and yourself without doing lots of mumbo-jumbo in your mind. How fast you can recover from it and feel better again. Moreover it helps you remain calm and in much happier state always!

So let’s let go

So let it go and forgive him/her and self, and say it out loud “Sometimes there are no closure so no worries 🙂 “

Have you ever wondered why we pay so much attention to negative thoughts or emotions compared to postive once. Even if we have some positive thoughts or things happening still negative thoughts becomes highest priority for us. And we immediately start fretting on the negatives, why it’s happening to me? But we never try to retain postives to the same level or duration, Why?

If we look down the history we might get some answers, here are few to ponder:

At the core we are still much evolved animals..

Yes, we as social animals have a inherent sense of risks and dangers which is far more advanced than any other senses in our body and mind, reason being survival. If a deer does not constantly keep thinking and avoiding risks, it might not survive. Survival is core function for any life. And eventhough our current distress have nothing to do with survival risk, our mind and body makes that as highest priority and keeps brooding over it.

Easiest way to ignore or get out of it, is to recall another primitive function Being social, talk to someone who can empathize with you. This gives feeling of bonding and negativeness goes away. The best example is when there is lot of distress in office, we become lot more social with peers and creates a deeper bond. Think about it, your best office buddies are from places which have maximum stress.

We are ambitious and to some extend greedy…

We all want more and hence even if anything positive happens, like promotion or increments etc, we tend to move on much faster to next milestones. Also being social we keep comparing ourselves with others how they are doing and whether we are at par or not..

Both of these combined leads to lot of brooding over negative thoughts and emotions. And, knowing why we do, what we do, while being negative might help us recover out of it much faster, so lets try it out…

All of us at one point feel distressed or angry, it can be with ourselves or because of peers, bosses or spouse. We all go thru it whether we are successful or unsuccessful, rich/poor or of any age (Yes even kids today have much higher distress or stress levels). The best way to handle stress is how soon we can come out of it and be sane again:

So how we can come out of the bad emotional state?

The best and fastest way to come out of it is “Writing it down”. Here are few quick steps that can be followed:

• Set a timer for 20 minutes to write it down
• Using either a notebook or computer, write about emotional experiences which are causing the issue, also explore emotional experiences from the past week, month, or year.
• Let’s not worry about making it perfect or readable: go where the mind takes us.
• Also while writing let us not look for any solutions just write it down: What happened, how, when & steps etc.
• At the end, we don’t have to save the document; the point is that those thoughts are now out of our mind and on the page.

In life we will always be facing problems, it’s up to us to decide what kind of problems we want to tackle:

Daily mundane problems or Bigger life defining problems…

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished…

Have you ever seen plants or trees try to grow faster than others, Or animals do things faster than their nature! Yet they accomplish everything that they are made for…

Why we humans want to bend things to move or do it faster, grow faster, learn faster? Is it because of comparison with others. Or we will be able to accomplish more if we move faster?

Lets learn from nature, accomplish things with time and enjoy accomplishing it!

We keep hearing this phrase:- “Believe in yourself” and you can do anything….

This comes back in different phases of life, whether its office, job or school/college. We all know that we should have self-believe and confidence. But the real question is can we learn it? Yes I think it can be thru lot of practice, preparation & hardwork.

As the saying goes “Hardwork is 99% and luck is just 1%”. It’s because if we work hard and do our preparation well, self-belief will automatically come. Yes may be not in first time, it might take couple of tries, not because we have not worked hard, but because we have not pushed our hardwork in right direction.

For example if someone have to give presentation to an audience and have completely memorized the presentation. But still cannot deliver, than hardwork should be to go and give mock presentations infront of as many as people – friends/family/peers possible before the final presentation, thats the right direction of hardwork. Whereas someone may have difficulty in memorizing the presentation but can deliver what he memorizes. Than he/she has to go and learn how to memorize a presentation.

Different people have different problems, hardwork has to be applied where we think we will fail.

And that will give us confidence. So with right preparation and hardwork we can achieve self-believe. Lets go and create Believe in yourself!

What is the stupidest mistake you have done in life? If you have not done any stupid mistake yet and have no memory of it, you are not actually living…

Imagine the thrill of suddenly bunking a class with friends, and going to a movie in hostal after hours and getting caught. These are some of the memories that you cherish forever whether you are billionare or a normal average person.

If you look back you will find the period which we remember most are the once which have some fun, or mistakes or some adventure not the period which is dull, monotonous but with good money. Visualize what you remember more now your college/school days or your job hours, even though you have much more money in job.

Fun and mistakes generally go hand in hand, so friends go and do some mistakes let it go…for once and live it up….