Mindfulness: letting go of the past

Its an old axiom of mindfulness that our thoughts have a mind of their own; left to their own devices our thoughts will travel back and forth in time, revisiting old wounds and regrets, often in the vain hope that we can somehow change the past.

This-prison of the mind-is a steel trap that’s hard to escape from, yet we must, for living in a past made up of old regrets or wounds is a life unlived. The present is all we have: now is our time. The past is gone and does not exist.

Yet we do get stuck, Velcro’d to the past, unable to move forwards.

How do we get “past the past”?

Note this is not about jettisoning the past or trying to forget the past: that, too would be impossible. Its about a radically new way of relating to the past.

Krishnamurti had a phrase “the seeing is the doing” and in mindfulness we employ this practice to see right through to the truth of the matter, that the present moment is all we have, and to live in the stuckness of the past is not to actually live at all. The “seeing” is performed with a felt sense, where we locate the wound of the past regret in our body (past wounds are somatically stored in muscle, cells, tissue) and breathe out, let the tension go, time and again: it will.

This insight, lived with a radical acceptance and embraced in all its embodiment sets us free not of the memories of the past but of the need to get caught up in painful regret and an impossible need to change what cannot be changed.

“Be here now” as Ram Dass said.