Practice
Peace
“Every
day brings a choice: to practice stress or to practice peace.”
Joan
Borysenko
In her
book, Journey to the Heart, Melody Beattie reports this story: “’I don’t
know what’s going on,’ a woman told me, ‘but lately memories of the past have
been coursing through me like a river. I see scenes from my life, then the
feelings appear—old pains, old hurts, old wounds. Nothing is triggering this
that I can tell. It’s just happening spontaneously.’” (p.324-325) Most of
us, if we have lived long enough, have had this experience. We will be going
along, feeling pretty good about our life, and then our history starts appearing in
our heads or in our dreams; remnants of old experiences and old hurts pry into our thoughts and
cause us to feel sad all over again. Don’t be alarmed. It’s a sign that we are
in a place, and state of mind, that we can handle these memories now and
perhaps heal them.
Sometimes,
past sadness comes to help us think through an experience while keeping some
distance from it. It may be that we need to make amends, or that we need to
forgive or be forgiven. What it does not mean is that we need to torture
ourselves for making a mistake. It could be that the person most in need of
forgiveness is we ourselves. Will Rogers once said, “Good judgement comes from
experience, and most of that comes from bad judgement.” He was right. We
make mistakes. We do stupid stuff along the way, and so does everyone else. No
one benefits from punishing oneself or blaming others; nothing is solved, nothing
is healed. These memories are coming to consciousness in the present moment so
that we can love them away—not hate them away.
We have
a choice every day we wake up to this life to choose stress or to choose peace.
When we open our hearts wide enough—to ourselves and to others—we are more
likely to feel peace. We do not live in the past, and we do not live in the
future. We live right now, and our choice right now is what matters. Choose
forgiveness and peace. It will make all the difference to your day.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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