The Woman at the River - Second part

(first part here)
.

     Have you met people whose gloomy auras are contagious? They are habitually depressed and perpetually complaining about anything. I called them casts of "Back to the Future."  The famous poem Desiderata advised us to avoid this kind of people; "...they are vexatious to the spirit."  When you are with them, you become angry and depressed too. They zapped your energy.

     The phrases "be happy", "forget the past", or "don't get depressed" are cliche. They are too general. In order to battle our second monk, we need to understand how 'regrets', 'depression', and "emotional pain" work. Don't worry, I'll try to make this short, simple and applicable right away.

     First, we need to remember that our mind is like a huge hard drive where every bit of information is recorded. When I say 'every bit of information' I mean everything that happened to us since our conception in the womb of our parents. We may 'forget' how they look like or what really happened, but our emotional memory does not forget the feeling of being rejected. What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.  ~Cynthia Ozick 

     Second; those feelings of rejections are triggered, re-played when a seeming event happens. Can you remember a time when you met a person for the first time, but you seem angry or displeased right away? You have this feeling of 'I don't like him', or 'he is not my type', or 'I don't trust this person'. It's the feeling that's in play here. The reason is that we had bad experiences in the past involving some people whose aura had similarities with that person you just met. You may have forgotten the face of that person who brought you pain and fear, or the event surrounding it, but your emotional memory remembers that pain and the gloom in it. Our emotional memory will bring it to the processor and output in our emotions and eventually in our actions.  And so, those old feelings would make us feel angry and un-trusting. This is one of the reasons why women would suddenly change mood without any reason.

     Can we do something about it? Fortunately, yes, and that will bring us to the third point.  Emotional memory is good, but oftentimes it prevents us from seeing what's in front of us. So what should we do? Amy Bjork in her book "Staying OK", spoke about 'truth serum' or 'reality serum'.  According to this book, we need to be connected to the present in order to silence our crying child inside and our nagging second monk. That's why when we pacify a child we should not just say to the child, 'all right, dear, stop crying already...' instead we direct his attention to toys or invite him to observe something around or talk to him something that he's been interested to. We may say, 'wow, I like your shoes, who bought it?" That kind of question should force him to think and engage in the reality, hence, stop playing the emotional recording from playing.

     In our case as adults, if our child with-in start to cry or our nagging second monk attempt to engage us, we need to do something to reconnect us with reality. Inject a truth serum right away. A reality serum should bring us out of it. So what are reality serums? Here some concrete effective reality serums:

1.  Ask for the time: "What time is it?", "what day is today?"
2.  Look around you and start reading some posters or identify colors and designs.
3.  Get out of your room and go somewhere else, buy yourself a cone of ice cream.
4.  Talk to a positive friend, avoid unhappy people.
5.  Read inspirational quotes, watch inspiring clips.
6.  Take your mp3 player and listen to your favorite audio book.
7.  Take a bath, groom well, feel beautiful or handsome.
8.  And lastly, the most powerful advice is 'pray'.  He is the God of memory, of healing. He is the God of time.

Now, you have good reasons to create good and beautiful memories with your loved ones ;)

Share and inspire

Share

picture credit:

morguefile.com

http://mrg.bz/xJ9gxw