Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It*: Allowing Personal Power

For the longest time, information about our personal POWER being in the present moment confused me.  I didn't understand why I wasn't supposed to savor good memories in the past and why I shouldn't get excited about future events...it didn't make any sense to me.

The book by Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, says “See if you can catch yourself complaining, in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather. To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.”

So my first thought was, "that is harsh, Sir."  Victims don't make themselves, and come on, we all complain!  We are human beings and none of us is perfect.  No one wants to be a victim and no one wants to live a life of pain.  We all need empathy.  It's impossible for most victims of abuse to move forward without help.  Most of us need assistance to "walk through" and release emotional pain.  So I respectfully (and somewhat angrily) disagreed with him.

What I have come to realize isn't that we have to repress everything and pretend everything is perfect. The choice is the perspective of knowing we can choose to heal our past negative memories so they don't affect future events.  So, the power in the present moment is about accessing our potential power by removing the attachments of the past and future.

Here is an example:  if your house was burned down as a child, you are probably not going to enjoy bonfires as much as the next guy.  Your filter (or lens) is that "fire is painful, hurtful and bad".  After a few years go by, you might pretend to enjoy a bonfire but probably not completely.  Logically, without your personal emotional trauma, we know that fire is necessary to live.  Another perspective would be to realize that fire is life-sustaining.  We have the ability to release the fear of fire so it goes back to a neutral state, without resisting and reacting.

Therapy, meditation, hypnosis and energy work all allow us to reduce emotional pain.  Knowing that victims are not at fault is key, while victims MUST reduce emotional pain to move forward.  It is never about trying to forget it because it's in the past; it's about doing the emotional healing to PROCESS trauma which allows someone to move forward.

Have a great day!!

xo
Conni

*Yes, I know the phrase is from Mission Impossible :)