He not busy being born is dying.
— Bob Dylan
Remember
how long the days seemed when you were a kid? It took forever to get
from one part of the week to the next, and don’t even mention a month …
that was like a whole year … Why was it so different then?
Tolle and the
Now
Quite simple really, and I’ve talked about this in the past in other
articles: my May 2008 newsletter –
Where
Are You Now?, or an earlier article:
Living
in the Now: Use it to Enrich Your Life. What is
simple about the reason why our days no longer last as long as they did
when we were kids is because we
progressively
live less and less time in the present moment.
When we were kids and we were building a sand castle, all our attention
was on that activity. When we were devouring a piece of birthday cake,
all our attention
was on that activity.
Now
we are splintered into many pieces, and while we do a present-time
activity, we are also in different places of the past or future in our
mind, hence the present moment
is
robbed of its fullest potential,
we are torn into different directions, and when we have finished with
the present-time activity, we often have a difficult time remembering
much about it,
because
so little of our present self was present!
Remember
that now is all you have … your true life is not in your past, and it
is not in your future … it is only and ever now, in the present moment.
Nevertheless, although our rational mind recognizes the inherent truth
in this, it does present a number of challenges to the psyche. How can
we get ourselves into present time and s
tay there?
Stimuli in
Your Life Capture Your Power
What
stimuli in your life capture your power so that it goes to places and
times other than where you are now? Here are just a few examples:
•
Music: imagine you are driving in the car, enjoying the gorgeous day,
and a song comes on that is full of bitter-sweet nostalgia for you. It
transports you into the glory and the pain of a past relationship.
Suddenly you are no longer enjoying the gorgeous day; on the contrary,
you are re-living parts of the magnificence of that past relationship,
and then you are swept up into the pain of other pieces of it. By the
time you reach your destination, you not only no longer feel as
wonderful as you did when you began your drive, but you no longer
remember the actual drive … all because a song was played on the radio
•
Smells, perfumes, aromas: imagine you are being introduced to a
stranger at a cocktail party. Imagine you are a woman, and the stranger
is a man, and as you come in a bit closer to say hello, or as you touch
cheeks, as we do in so many countries, you get a whiff of his cologne.
It is your father’s cologne. Immediately, in some fashion, you either
associate the stranger with your father, or you go into a memory of the
past, perhaps of you sitting in your parents’ bedroom, chatting with
your father as he splashed on the cologne, and that memory takes you to
another moment with your father when he told you he was leaving your
mother and you because he had met another woman… Now the cocktail party
is tinged with that memory, the feelings it evoked, and after you get
home, you may find you scarcely remember any of the conversations you
had while you were there … all because of a cologne.
•
Movies with specific scenes: these can have a similar effect on you as
the above, and you may find that you frequently are attracted to movies
that cause you to relive the emotions of certain parts of your life
In this regard, Eckhart Tolle, author of
The Power of Now
refers to the
pain body
and Chris Griscom (
The
Healing of Emotions and
Ecstasy is a New Frequency)
refers to the
emotional
body.
Essentially
both terms refer to that part of us that likes to wallow in our pain.
What, you say? Why on earth would I want to wallow in something
painful? The answer becomes obvious. Because
it is a place you know.
Because you feel at home there. In other words, we have been there so
often before, in this place of pain, that when faced with a choice of
doing something new and unknown, or wallowing, it is much easier to
fall back to the well-trodden path and wallow. We don’t really even
think about it. We just go there, because it is familiar. And then we
feel comfort in the familiarity of the pain. Recognize this? Have you
been there? And are you tempted right now, despite what you have read
to this point, to go back to your painful thoughts? Does that just feel
so much easier? (quoted almost verbatim from my article
Entering the Now Moment By
Leaving Unawareness Behind).
In
a sense, that is what we do when we hear the song on the radio, when we
catch a tantalizing whiff of the familiar cologne, or when we see
certain scenes of some movies.
And
we go to that place of pain unconsciously because we are not aware of
ourselves. Or we may be aware enough to realize what is
going on,
but we have
not yet decided to take on our own responsibility for ourselves.
(see also
Claiming
Responsibility For the Self or
these articles about
responsibility).
Molecular
& Cellular Biology … Genes & DNA
So
now I want to really throw an unexpected thought out there at you…if,
as I have written in past articles, our thoughts do indeed influence
our body, our cells, our genes, our very DNA (see also
Create
a New Life: One Intention at a Time or Thoughts Create Molecules,
or my March 2008 newsletter:
How
Your Thoughts Change Your Body),
then it stands to reason that by continually re-visiting the past and
re-living past pain, we are negatively influencing the very cells of
our body. Read some of the work by cellular and molecular biologists
Candace Pert and Bruce Lipton, read what scientific researcher Masaru
Emoto has to say, look into the quantum research done by
endocrinologist Deepak Chopra, but whatever you do, don’t rest back on
your chair, make a puzzled face, and say
I don’t believe this nonsense.
You can’t say that until you’ve read the research.
For
those of you who still find it hard to believe that thoughts could
affect your body … here are some more common and everyday
physiological
examples:
•
Some individuals are capable of reaching orgasm simply by their thoughts
• Some individuals are able to provoke
tears simply by Imagining something and crying because of it
• Biofeedback has taught us that we can
measurably alter our heartbeat, our tension and stress
Therefore,
if we know
this to be true, it follows that we need to consider
taking cellular responsibility for ourselves.
Cellular responsibility?
Part of Your
Energy Is In Your Past
How much of you is in “your story” and
would be lost
if you let it go? So then you might have to work on a whole new you …
depending on how you think about that, it is actually quite exciting …
you would no longer be burdened
by that old, sad awful story you’ve been dragging around with you.
You do see that because of
your
story, part of your energy,
part of your power
is in your past, right? If you identify with your story, if that is how
you define yourself, then a portion of your power is there and not here.
Getting Your
Fragments Into Present Time
Getting the fragments of yourself into present time (Gary Zukav, author
of
The Seat of the Soul
calls it a
splintered
personality),
is a necessary part of the process of taking cellular responsibility
for yourself. So there’s bit of you in 1976, and another bit in 1960,
and another bunch of bits in the early 80’s and so on depending on
when, in your history, things happened to you that continue to maintain
a part or parts of you, especially emotionally, there, at that moment
in time. The anchor that holds you there is the negative emotion that
you continue to feel every time that you remember the painful event.
That means there are only a few bits of you in 2008 … until you leave
those past bits - that hold so much of your power – behind, you will
not be able to get your power back, and you will not be able to take
cellular responsibility for yourself.
Unfinished
Business
You
know that you have unfinished business with parents, with your spouse
or your partner, your kids, your siblings, your friends, your bosses,
your teachers, and so on,
if
you continue to have negative emotions of any kind when you think about
them or past events involving them.
Those negative emotions are the ones that can adversely influence your
body, your cells, and it is precisely those negative emotions that are
at the bottom of what it is you need to begin to take responsibility
for, if you want to take cellular responsibility for yourself.
Finishing up that unfinished business will automatically mean that you
will spend a much greater amount of time in the present instead of in
the past, and that you will spend far less time focusing on negative
emotions from events that took place in the past.
The
Importance of Forgiving & the Law of Attraction
Once
you can forgive, the unfinished business from the past transforms into
a mere memory that no longer carries any negative connotations to pull
your power away from the present. It is at this point that you can
begin to take cellular
responsibility for yourself, i.e. you will no longer be
harming your body in all senses of the word by keeping that negative
power in the past.
Caroline Myss (from whose work I have borrowed the term
cellular responsibility)
pointed out almost a decade ago in 1999 in
The Science of Medical Intuition,
together with Dr. Norman Shealy, that it is also at this point
that you can begin to create and
manifest.
In other words, no matter how much visualization and affirmation you
are doing, those of you who have been vicariously reading everything
you can get your hands on about the
Law of Attraction
or
The Secret,
you will not be able to create,
until
you pull your power into the present. Forgiving those who
have trespassed you is one of the biggest steps towards that goal.
Quotes about forgiving by Caroline Myss:
•
By far the strongest poison to the human spirit is the inability to
forgive oneself or another person. It disables a person's emotional
resources. The challenge is to refine our capacity to love others as
well as ourselves and to develop the power of forgiveness.
• Forgiveness is no longer an
option but a necessity for healing.
•
One of the greatest struggles of the healing process is to forgive both
yourself and others and to stop expending valuable energy on the past
hurts.
• In order to heal oneself, we
must learn how to forgive.
• Forgive and call back the
energy wasted on past events.
•
The act of forgiveness is the act of returning to present time. And
that's why when one has become a forgiving person, and has managed to
let go of the past, what they've really done is they've shifted their
relationship with time.
Some Tools
Doing
some of what follows will lead you down the road to cellular
responsibility where you will be able to begin to recover your power.
•
Become aware of yourself, your reactions to stimuli, your
need to go into the
pain body
• Decide you
will be responsible
for yourself in all senses of the word
• Make
better choices
because now you are aware and have decided to become responsible
• Look at your unfinished business
• Ask yourself if there are any good
reasons to be feeling guilty … what will
get better by
feeling guilty?
o
Rather than beating yourself up about what you did, why not learn from
it, vow to never do it again, and move
on. If not, more of your power stays there
•
If you are ashamed of something about yourself, ask yourself if you
would like to get rid of feeling like that?
o
Shame tends to involve lack of self esteem
o
Shame is often the root cause of obsessive thinking b/c it
allows
you to focus on another person as the solution to your
problems
• Does reliving the past help make
anything better?
o
Can I recognize that continuing to hurt about past events won’t solve a
problem?
• Forgive
o
Whom do you need to forgive?
o Why are you unwilling to forgive?
o Recognize that not forgiving holds
parts of you in the past
o
Understand that forgiving does not mean you condone what was done, nor
does it mean you now need to have a wonderful relationship with that
person … you may need to move on, but by forgiving, the hold that the
event had over you, will be gone.
o Forgiving also does not mean forgetting
– but it does mean, removing the charge from the memory
• Gratitude – this is a really big one:
read more in my January 2008 Newsletter:
Love
and Gratitude are on Your Road to Freedom as
well as the December 2006 Newsletter:
Gratitude,
Choice, and the “Why Did This Happen To Me?” Syndrome
• Mindfulness (see in particular
Wherever You Go, There You Are
by Jon Kabat-Zinn) - this is strongly connected to gratitude because
gratitude can be your first step in learning how to be mindful; by
being grateful for something
right
now, you automatically return to the now, and by learning
to be mindful, you will be able to
remain
in the now.
FEATURE: Elinor Stutz, The Sales Personality 
