Do you think there is something from your past that needs to be healed?
I used to believe that the past required healing. But when you think about it, how could that be?
The past is over. It’s nonexistent today. How could something that doesn’t exist need anything?
The past only comes up today in your thinking about it. It’s there, I’m not denying that. I’m sure you have current thinking about the past, just like I do.
But if the past doesn’t exist outside of your thinking, what’s to heal? That’s kind of like saying the Easter Bunny needs to be healed. It’s like waking up from a nightmare that your house is on fire and still moving the family outside.
The past is an illusion, just like nightmares and the Easter Bunny. Illusions don’t need to be healed; they only need to be seen as illusions.
No matter what happened in your past, I’d bet you experience moments when it bothers you and moments when it doesn’t.
No matter how horrible the past was it hasn’t haunted every single second of your life since, has it? Haven’t you still had fleeting moments of happiness? Haven’t you been distracted enough that the past was a non-issue?
How do you explain those moments? I’ll tell you how I explain them: those were moments when you weren’t entertaining thoughts about the past, so the past was not a reality for you.
Your thinking is the sole vehicle for keeping the past alive today. It’s your only time machine. So at best, your thinking about the past might be healed.
How do you heal your thinking about the past? In my experience, you can’t control your thinking. You can’t consistently force yourself to think particular thoughts any more than you can stop some thoughts from showing up.
But you can understand that thought is fleeting. You can understand that the past is only an issue when you’re mentally recreating it and you can allow those recreations to float away when they do show up.
They float away easily when you don’t anchor them in place with your focus and judgment of them.
They will appear from time to time. That’s true for every human on the planet. Rather than stressing over their presence, see them as the illusion they are.
When you wake up, the nightmare is over. The same is true of the past.