The subtle art of not giving a second thought

Long ago, two monks were walking through the forest one morning when they came across a distressed young woman.

Tearfully, she asked them for help crossing the river, which had swollen from recent rains, so she could get home safely.

Although they had both taken strict vows to not communicate with the outside world, the first monk happily agreed, carrying the young woman across on his back.

She thanked him and left, and the two monks continued their journey for many hours in silence.

Finally, when night fell, they set up camp. But before they went to sleep, the second monk could not contain his emotions any more.

"How could you!" he burst out.

"We have taken strict vows of chastity! We vowed to never communicate with outsiders! But you carried that woman on your back!" he railed against his friend.

The first monk looked at his red face and simply said:

"My friend, I carried her for only a few minutes. You, however, have carried her all day!"

We human beings are always looking for patterns in our experience. It's how we make sense of the world. "This is like that," we notice, and then we proceed to treat 'that' as if it was actually 'this'. This system works pretty well for most things and has been a driver of our evolutionary success as a species. It helps us to decide more easily what course of action to take in the face of new situations and experiences.

Why is it sometimes so hard to let go of the past, even when you try?

But in individual cases you can sometimes get a problematic mismatch between 'this' and 'that' - as if a sort of 'system error' occurs in your mental software. This typically happens when strong emotions are involved. You will be most sharply aware of, and will most vividly remember, things about which you have strong feelings. And those patterns will therefore influence your choices more strongly than others.

So if certain troubling or sad events or situations in your life history were also highly emotional for you, they can loom rather large in your mind and make you hyper-sensitive to similar seeming patterns in the present. You make a link between things in the past and things that feel similar in the present - even if they are not really similar at all. As if you are 'tarring everything with the same brush'.

For example, someone who was previously in a very unhappy relationship may find themselves inexplicably getting feelings of fear or anger like those they used to have in the old relationship, even if their current relationship is good. They make a faulty link between the old and the new situation based on a learned pattern of relationship ('it sucks') which can then cause unexpected difficulties in the current relationship.

To let go of the past, you need to change how you feel about it

Of course, you can't 'unhappen' what happened in your past. So are you doomed to live with such faulty links and their undesirable consequences for ever? Are you stuck with going over and over what happened and wishing it was otherwise?

No, because, although you cannot rewrite history, you can change how you feel about it. And you can do this by taking the emotional charge out of the memories. This involves making an emotional shift inside yourself and finding a healthier, more positive perspective on those past events.

And the easiest and most effective way to make such a change is by using hypnosis - a wonderful tool for comfortably modifying apparently 'locked in' behaviors and attitudes, one which evolution has given you alongside your 'pattern match' system. It's what you might call the 'system tools' for dealing with the 'system errors'.

Action Points 

• Think less and less frequently about sad or painful past events
• Spend more time focusing on your present and future life
• Feel more detached and at ease when old memories do come to mind
• Sense a great boost of energy and enthusiasm for life
• Enjoy yourself more