As this is the month of my birth, I am especially reflective during April. I spend more quality time glancing back at where I have been, and I listen more deeply to where I am now being led in this next year of my incarnation. While it is my intention and more and more my experience of maintaining the majority of my attention centered in the present moment, I also find it helpful to periodically allow a perusal of where the journey of this life has taken me, and how that past is contributing to where I am now, and where I am headed next.I am fascinated by the vast amount of power that memory has regarding the overall quality of our life experiences. I admit that there are times now when memory seems to elude me in ways that is sometimes disturbing and often embarrassing. Generally speaking, however, I have an amazing recall of what often amounts to relatively inconsequential bits of information. This is in and of its self benign. It is the astounding clarity with which I can recall painful moments that tends to give me more pause. The memories of perceived loss, limitation, slights, failures, unskillfulness can seem as brick walls in the way of preceding where my guidance seems to be leading me. Painful memories literally consume precious life force, and become a lens through which we often obscure what is actually happening in and around us in present time.
We humans live a great deal of our lives caught in the trance of the past. While I do believe that insight may be gleaned from glancing backward, staring into the past and basing our present on what has been robs us of the beauty of the now, and the potential of our innate spiritual Power. We so often do not even recognize that we are doing this. If the mind is the default that you most often utilize in decision-making and even general day-to-day navigation, the past is the guidepost by which you are most often governed. The past becomes a kind of perceptual prison, limiting the number of available choices in any given moment. These perceptions become our own personal “probability factor.” We each live within a Universal matrix of Infinite, Unlimited Possibility. That Possibility, however, isn’t experientially available to all of us equally. The determining factor is consciousness, and the power of memory is a factor in the shaping of consciousness. A question that I have learned to love dancing with is “how new is this now?” This feels especially powerful as the number of my years spent adds another digit. Aging often seems to lead people in the belief in minimized choices. People often become more “set in their ways.” A common mantra is “it’s the way we’ve always done it.” Well, perhaps it is time to do it a different way. In order to do that, a different relationship to memory and to the past needs to be established.
What I have done and not done in the past cannot be changed, but the perceptual interpretation of it can be. That is how memories that limit may be transcended. Taking our memories into the heart can be extremely beneficial, and can lead to a freedom that lifts us beyond the pain of our pasts. This is of course another way of saying that forgiveness is the accessing of a Memory that is beyond time and space. This ancient Memory isn’t accessed through the surface mind, yet is ever available through the portal of the heart. If you find yourself stuck in a past perception that is preventing forward movement, allow yourself to drop down into the Sacred heart center where Light beams Its Self through every memory. That Light has always been a guiding Force, no matter how obscured it may have seemed at times.
I remember a lovely woman once approaching me after a lecture on living in the now, and releasing the power of memory in favor of living in the present. An octogenarian, she implored me with such pathos to “not deprive her of her memories. Its all I have.” I so recall that personal memory of mine with great compassion in my heart. And I also recognize that memories are never all we have. We always have the present moment, and it is so very rich, vibrant, vital, and full. As many wonderful memories as I have of the past, they pale in comparison to a fully experienced and heartfully embraced now. And in the fullness of the now, the painful memories, that can seem so very determined, are transmuted by the Light of Presence.
If there are memories that are still invading your sense of peace, court them in the spaciousness of the heart. Allow the Light of presence to shine in and through them, embracing an expanded sense of what they mean or meant. Memories that limit are memories that are in need of forgiveness. The past and the future truly are a continuous, ever-flowing now. As James Thurber once stated,” look not back in regret, or forward in fear, but around in wonder.” The ancient Memory is everywhere present. Allow It to lead you in an experience of truly being new in the now.
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