memories

Other Perspectives #58

Scott McPhersonLeave a comment

Far from your memory being separate from you, it more or less is you. You collect data on the world as you grow up and other people inform how you interpret that data. And the details surrounding that subtle act of translation is what makes up your identity. So if you were happy and you chose to think of a sad event, then it was not the event that made you sad it was your current sad thoughts about that past event. You could just as easily shift back to the current happy event and think about that, and then you would feel happy instead. So your memory is not some separate creature that roams through your brain like it has a mind of its own. It’s your mind and you’re doing the wandering by choice. Sure, go through a period of mourning the death of a relationship. But only do that as long as it feels good to do it. Once it starts to feel bad that’s the signal that you’re supposed to shift your thinking. That’s why it feels bad. So don’t spend much life living in past sadness wondering what if? People can drag that thinking out for decades. It’s terrible. Meanwhile life slips by. There’s no need. Sure it’s harsh sometimes. Accept that and move on. Not one of us has the market cornered on suffering. A decent percentage of the people we meet every day are going through huge challenges, be it serious medical treatments, a child or parent with serious disabilities, learning a new language, a violent spouse, the threat of unfair deportation, they’re in line to lose their job, or they have an addiction. Everyone has struggles. So life will already give us enough hills to climb. We don’t have to make it even harder for ourselves by adding in unnecessary barriers, like choosing to recall a past relationship rather than enjoy today by doing whatever feels right for the you you are today. Do not live in the past. For every moment you are doing it you are letting your present slip by. And the present is the only time you have available in which you can act. So live now. Appreciate what’s working, accept what isn’t and march on. But don’t use your ability to think to go retrieve painful memories. That’s simply a misuse of your consciousness. It’s innocent and easily fixable, but it can only be done by you. So please do choose yourself a beautiful day. Thanks! 😉

peace. s

Note: Everyone who posts or shares a quote does so with the very best of intentions. That said, I have created the series of Other Perspectives blog posts in an effort to prevent some of these ideas from entering into people’s consciousness unchallenged. These quotes range from silly to dangerous and—while I intend no offense to their creators—I do use these rebuttals to help define and delineate the larger message I’m attempting to convey in my own work. I do hope you find them helpful in your pursuit of both psychological and spiritual health.

Leaving the Past Behind

Scott McPherson1 Comment

We all know them. You might be one of them. A lot of people are. People who have either experienced difficulty most of their lives, or they faced one big event that included very high levels of betrayal or pain or fear. I’m talking about the people who aren’t happy today because of something in their past, be it as sharp as a violent parent, or as diffused as a marriage lost to “drifting apart.”

613 Relax and Succeed - When your past calls don't answerThe good news is that we are under no obligation to re-live those painful, scary or sad events. We call them big and therefore we claim to ourselves that they are somehow especially compelling; that you have to think them.

When I say stop you’ll say I can’t help it. But that’s hilarious because you don’t need to help it as though it takes some kind of effort. You need to take effort away by stopping yourself from assembling the narratives in the first place. You can’t make a narrative go away by replacing it with a second narrative that tries to justify the first. Remember, you put work into these narratives. I’m saying be peaceful instead. It’s much easier.

The only reason you believe you have to think certain things is because you do think those things a lot, and your brain gets good at anything you ask it to do a lot. So it’s like like the biggest valley in your head, caused by the largest amount of flowing water. That’s the route most of your thinking travels. If your attention is skipping across your brain it’s more likely to settle in the widest, deepest valley, which is created by the greatest amount of thought. But that doesn’t make it inevitable. Hardly. They’re still your thoughts. Who else would be thinking them?

613 Relax and Succeed - NowThis isn’t like you being chased through your own consciousness by some past event. It’s more like you going into your consciousness, way down into the basement where you keep all the painful stuff, and then you dig through years and layers of different thoughts—any of which you could choose to think—and instead you grab these same sheets of paper you often do, and you re-read them again, all the time complaining about how bad the story is that’s written on them.

I remind you that life remains filled with other filing cabinets also filled with other thoughts and, even more importantly, our actions in this moment are creating brand new pages in the story of our lives. If you’re choosing to think back and select a painful event, how is that the fault of the world or the people who were involved in the thought? Why does something that happened ten years ago need to be thought of today?

Time exists only in your head. You are always alive now. You are never alive any other time other than the moment you are in. But you can take that current moment and you can think about when you lived. You can take your aliveness and you can invest it in remembering and therefore in re-living past events, but why would you do that when those events are painful? You only do it because you think you must head to those deep valleys in your brain. But your brain changes as you use it. The less time and energy you spend on recreating the past in your imagination, the more time and energy you have to move your life forward today.

613 Relax and Succeed - Do you want to be happyStop worrying about days gone by. The real question is: if you had just been someone else, and you just died and got reincarnated into your who you are right now, you wouldn’t care what your body had done 10 years ago. You would assess its capabilities in the now and you would use those to move yourself forward.

There’s no reason you can’t do that yourself right now. Just do not invest energy going to collect and replay old memories of unpleasant events. That is not the fault of the people in those stories nor is it proof that there’s anything wrong with you. But the pain you’re feeling today is 100% your responsibility because no one chooses what you think about other than you. That’s why the thoughts are painful. They’re telling you not to think them.

Forget about worrying about the future or regretting the past. Be alive today. Because it’s what you choose to do today that will create where you get to start from tomorrow. Your past is over. It’s your future that’s open to change. Start living like you know that’s true.

Have yourself an awesome day.

peace. s

Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organisations locally and around the world.

Other Perspectives #12

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360 Relax and Succeed Rebuttal - Dear past stop tapping me

Note: Everyone who posts or shares a quote does so with the very best of intentions. That said, I have created the series of Other Perspectives blog posts in an effort to prevent some of these ideas from entering into people’s consciousness unchallenged. These quotes range from silly to dangerous and—while I intend no offense to their creators—I do use these rebuttals to help define and delineate the larger message I’m attempting to convey in my own work. I do hope you find them helpful in your pursuit of both psychological and spiritual health.

Other Perspectives #6

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Houston street am

Note: Everyone who posts or shares a quote does so with the very best of intentions. That said, I have created the series of Other Perspectives blog posts in an effort to prevent some of these ideas from entering into people’s consciousness unchallenged. These quotes range from silly to dangerous and—while I intend no offense to their creators—I do use these rebuttals to help define and delineate the larger message I’m attempting to convey in my own work. I do hope you find them helpful in your pursuit of both psychological and spiritual health.

Memories

Scott McPherson2 Comments

212 Relax and Succeed - Nothing prevents happinessYour memory is like a location. It is back in time. It is the recollection of events in the past. To remember is to do something. It’s a verb. You are remembering. So it might be now, but you can use now to recall then. Of course your state of mind now will certainly impact your recollection of then, so memory is never trustworthy. But the important thing to remember is that remembering is an activity. It is something you do.

Let us say you have experienced the searing pain of a broken romance. You loved the person and you even believe they loved you—but it just wouldn’t seem to work on a daily domestic level and it breaks your heart. At night you say the breakup has given you insomnia, but what you really mean is that at night you are recalling your romance rather than remembering what it’s like to sleep. One leads to the chemistry for sleep, and the other to anxious chemistry that would be more inclined to keep you awake.

212-relax-and-succeed-you-cant-start-the-next-chapterIf a person is heavily cross-wired into your brain’s central idea of relationship happiness, then it makes sense that you’ll immediately compare everyone to them, but because of your lovelorn perspective your comparisons will be focused on finding reasons to reject each suitor because a part of you doesn’t want the new person, it wants the old person.

Of course if you’re looking for reasons not to like someone you’ll find them. This means the broken-hearted often have difficulty recognising motivated suitors. They don’t pay enough attention to them because they assume they’re a bad fit. And they only do that because the suitor can’t possibly match the person they think about all the time in lovelorn patterns—and those thoughts therefore falsely associate love and happiness with only that one person when that’s not actually true.

Trying to forget someone won’t work either though. Thinking, okay I won’t think about that person IS in fact a form of thinking about that person. All you have is acceptance. They’re gone for whatever reason so there’s no point in thinking about it. Those thoughts will only blind us to the present moment in which we actually live. Happiness is not dependent on who you’re with. It is dependent on what you place in your consciousness—hence the importance of using memory wisely.

You do not need to return to happier times. You’ll have those again when you do the same things you did back then—you created that fun. You were open to it. Your idea of where joy came from wasn’t so limited and conditional. So you don’t need to change anything but your perspective. But you can’t start looking for what’s great about today if all of your time is invested in either wanting the past to return, or in remembering it as though people only have one route to happiness.

Do not live in the past. Do not talk about it, re-live it or re-imagine it. Your memory is good for finding your way to the store or the beach, but it’s not useful when it comes to creating happiness in the present moment.

Forget then. Be Now. Happiness is created here.

peace. s

Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organisations locally and around the world.

The Light of Your Consciousness

Scott McPhersonLeave a comment

80 Relax and Succeed - You are not the mistakesImagine that the universe is a neighbourhood and that “you” are a house within that neighbourhood. Because you’re not yet enlightened the windows of your house are all boarded up so it’s completely dark inside. Your Consciousness is like a flashlight. You can take the flashlight to any part of the house, but it has a relatively narrow beam so it can always only light up a small part of your house. What your flashlight lands on—what is illuminated within you—is the experience of your life.

What neighbourhood your house is in is irrelevant to you because you are inside your own house. People may call on the phone to tell you about it, but the exterior of your house is largely irrelevant to you because you dwell on the inside. What matters to you is what you shine the light of your consciousness on.

Understand that this is a metaphor for your entire day. All day long you are not a person walking around in an exterior world, you are actually an imagined person moving around in an interior world. So you have a self-image (your ego) that picks up your flashlight (your consciousness) and points it (your thinking) at whatever evidence it can find to supports its own existence.

80 Relax and Succeed - Life is too shortIt’s always self-reinforcing by comparing itself to what it sees. So if you do something “wrong” at work and get scolded for it, you’ll quickly take the flashlight of your consciousness down to your basement where you’ll open boxes and go through old report cards, or sports photos, or whatever will remind you to keep seeing yourself as a failure. Are you starting to see how you operate? Are you starting to get a sense that your life takes place via your consciousness?

Where do you go with your flashlight? Do you open boxes of photos of yourself when you were slimmer and then talk about how you impossibly want to look young again? Do you head into the office to shine your light on the filing cabinet and review the file on your bitter divorce? Or do you go to your old room to read your old diary where you used to write the insults your mother hurled at you when she was drunk?

These are all choices. You could take your flashlight anywhere in the house. You just keep taking it to the same places because you think those few spots define you. You keeping hoping that one day you’ll go to that drawer and the sad diary won’t be there. But that’s misunderstanding how you come to have a good life. You can’t keep going back hoping those places within you won’t be there. If they happened they will always be there. But they are only in your experience in any current Now because you have chosen to go back there with the flashlight of your consciousness.

80a Relax and Succeed - Bad memores do not openMeanwhile, while you’re staring at sad things wishing there was no light on them, other people are wandering through your house with their flashlights and they’re finding out about all kinds of cool and interesting things about you. Do you see it is only you that cherry-picks all the failures and supposed short-comings? Only your egos enemies would be motivated to go through your house to do that. So why are you doing it? Your friends ignore that stuff in favour of the things they like about your house. You could do that too. Just start acting more like your friends and less like your enemies.

So how do you get healthy? Stop wandering through yourself. Stop navel-gazing. Stop looking for what’s wrong. Stop wondering about you. Open the door to your house. Take your flashlight into someone else’s home. Ask some questions. Connect with someone. Make a friend. Attract a new lover. Maybe find someone whose house you like so much that you’d actually sign the deed. Because your house is valid and worthwhile and much more interesting than you realize, but if you only rattle around inside of it you’ll limit your experiences far too much.

Forget going through old boxes. Open the doors to your mind. Find other houses you like and spend time in them. And while you’re there, remember to shine your light on what you like about them. That will lead you to enjoy your time with them even more. It really is that simple.

peace. s

Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organizations locally and around the world.