My favourite quotation from dr. Richard Bandler, the co-creator of NLP is: "The best thing about the past is that it is over".
Richard thinks that psychology and psycho-analysis obsess too much over the past events. The saying that 'a person's past is a good indicator of the future' may be valid if we deal with a limited person who relies on the same patterns all the time, but it isn't for sure the case of my readers or of the people who develop personally.
If people were obsessed with the successes they had in the past, it would be a good thing, but they repeat over and over again the bad feelings they had, or the voices telling them bad things, or the films of the actions that made them feel bad, hoping to get rid of those feelings. Re-living the past does not make room for the future, I am afraid, or has a bad influence on the future.
The best thing you can do about the past is to leave it behind, and to do that, I learnt from dr. Bandler some very efficient techniques:
1. when you deal with a bad feeling you have got, if you close your eyes, you will notice that it rotates inside you. If you spin it faster, it will make you feel even worse. What you can do, is spin the feeling in the opposite direction, and you will notice that it weakens. You could continue by remembering a time when you felt really good, and if you don't, imagine one. Take the feeling of well-being and rotate it faster and faster until it fills you with joy.
2. if the bad feelings are produced by a voice repeating bad things to you, make sure that you make it speak like Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse while it tells you the bad things. It will certainly make you laugh and change your perspective and feelings.
3. if the past is coming back to you by means of huge 3D motion pictures, first, you need to gradually shrink the film until it is the size of a coin, blink it black and white several times and turn it off by means of a big button from an old TV set (the kind our grandparents had).
Using these techniques, I was able to stay out of conflicts, delete from my memory such sad events as the funerals and was able to remember those people as they were during their life and also helped me during the bad times when I was sick.
In conclusion, learn the lessons of the past, but quickly move to the present moment and imagine big successful films about you in the future.
P.S. You can learn these techniques and many more in Richard Bandler's and Paul McKenna's seminar Get the Life You Want
I do not believe there is one human being who hadn't asked themselves this question... I surely had... And I realised that I am generally following my mission, that of educator, and this probably because I listened to my internal voice from an early age and I followed it. And if I had to pay the price here and there, I paid it willingly, because it was my choice.
I consider that this is something parents should take into consideration, since some of them force the children to follow the path they had designed, and no matter how good the financial situation of these children may become, if it was not their choice, they won't probably be happy, especially in a cultural environment where having the right to choose is worshiped.
Happiness is a state of consciousness given by the balance between your interior world and the outside one. It does not really matter how much money you make, what is your social label if you do not have this balance. And the vocation comes from the depths of each person's being.
I do believe that each of us has many gifts to the world we live in, world which, in return, will give a ''reward'' for those, and this reward means so much more than money. These gifts are always with us, all our life, if we have not discovered them is because we have not stopped for a moment and we have not got inside us in order to find them. They have also been called talent, vocation, calling and there are some scientists who claim that they are our subjective choices and that people can do anything. I also think that, yet I also think that there is also much more profound in our choices, too.
In my posts, I did not take the spiritual approach, not because I may not be spiritual, but because I am more interested in the scientific aspects of what happens. Even for the miracles which happened in my life I looked for the explanations and laws which led to those, because I do know that the Universe, whose manifestation we represent, respects its Laws. If we have not discovered them all, this does not mean that there are chaotic things in the Universe, even craziness has its own patterns.
Yet, behind the patterns, in the case of humans and in the case of everything that exists, there is something deeper, and the best book to explain it is, undoubtedly, The Power of Now of Eckhart Tolle which will help you to feel that Energy and Life. I do not call that God, not to interfere with people's beliefs, yet it is the creative genius of the Universe which exists in us, people, and we can become aware of if we go behind the patterns.
It is a great chance we get to be alive because we are given the task to bring our creative contribution to this world. We are not asked to follow the given tracks, we were given something extra: THE CHOICE. But with this, we felt the feeling of separation, by putting labels on people, things and deeds and we forgot that All is a Whole and all we do against one part is reflected In the Whole, which includes each of us, also.
What is our role? We are a unique manifestation of the Universe, one of the perspectives, an important piece in an immense puzzle and our role is to increase and improve this puzzle by making sure we match as well. Our mission is ours to choose, we know and we feel what is our role, and if we stop and deeply breathe for a second, if we allow ourselves to feel, we will always be guided on the right flow. The Universe never leaves his children unattended, we only need to learn to be present and "read" the signs. The choice, is always ours. That is why we were given self-consciousness.
If you liked the article, you might also be interested in the chapter YOUR CREATIVITY AND CONTRIBUTION TO THIS WORLD from the book HAPPINESS GUIDE FOR BEGINNERS
