Healing Your Past With Meditation
“Oh man, if only I’d done that instead…”
“Geez, why did I put my tighty-whiteys in with that red t-shirt?”
“Man, I wish I could go back and NOT tell her what I saw last night…”
From time to time we all make some iffy decisions that end up hurting ourselves or the people we care about. Unfortunately, though it’s impossible to go back in time and undo or change those bad decisions we made.
Using meditation, however, we can examine the way we feel about the “bad” decisions we made in the past so that they will stop tormenting us here in the present.
The purpose of meditation in healing past pain and anguish is not to change how you feel so much as lead you to acceptance of what is.
So before you take your first cleansing breath, it’s important to realize… What happened is what is, right now. You can’t change that.
In our refusal to accept our past mistakes and unpleasant experiences, we’re often left carrying a lot of unnecessary emotional baggage.
Be it a broken heart, hurt feelings,or bad memories of friends or loved ones that have lied, cheated, or betrayed us. There may have been events in your life that have caused you immense pain,or you may torment yourself over opportunities you missed out on…
Carrying this pain and anguish with us through our daily lives, we are wearied, and unable to live our lives to their fullest extent because several times in a given day or week our consciousness becomes absorbed in the coulda, shoulda, woulda’s … Our ego looking for possible loopholes and exploits that can deny that this pain happened to us.
So how does meditation help? Meditation is simply
stepping outside of our thoughts, and becoming aware of the present moment. You don’t have to be a buddhist monk or dedicate more than a few minutes a day to the act of meditation to begin to alleviate the suffering caused by past pain.
Commit to make the time
to learn how to heal your past. It will enable you to be happy in the
present.
Healing Meditation Exercise
The only thing you need for this exercise is a happy memory that you can use whenever you wish to heal yourself with this quick and simple meditation. This can be a pleasant childhood memory of playing with your friends at the neighborhood park, a trip to the beach, or simply curled up on the couch with someone you love feeling content and at peace. The only requirement for this memory is that your heart feels a little lighter when you think of it 
Hopefully, after you’ve read this article, if you take anything away from it, I pray you take awareness with you. Throughout your day, as the negative, painful and quite often obsessive thoughts of your painful past experiences resurface, become aware that you have these thoughts and feelings. That is the first step of this exercise.
At first you may even find it helpful to say to yourself in your head or under your breath “Okay, my mind is focusing on a painful experience.” This will shift gears in your consciousness and bring your awareness to what is happening inside that troubled mind of yours.
When this occurs, if necessary excuse yourself, and find a comfortable, quiet place where you won’t be disturbed for at least a few minutes.
Once alone, return your attention to these thoughts that are dredging up the past, and observe how it makes you feel. There is no need to identify or label the emotions that are welling up inside you. Simply spend a moment experiencing the feelings.
On a scale of 1 to 10, make a note of the intensity of the discomfort this memory or thought is causing you.
Now take a few slow, steady deep breaths. Focus on the sensation as you fill yourself from your abdomen up to the top of your chest with life-giving oxygen.
If you’re having a hard time shutting out the thoughts and focusing only on your breath, I’d like to share a trick with you that I learned from Eckhart Tolle’s “Power of Now”… You can sometimes stop your thoughts dead in there tracks and create a moment of pure empty space in your mind where you can focus entirely on your breath by simply asking yourself “I wonder what my next thought will be…?”
When you’re experiencing intense emotions and spiralling thought-patterns, this seems to throw a wrench in the gears of your Ego’s plans. 9 times out of 10 this is usually enough to give me that precious space I need to stop the obsessive thoughts and focus solely on my breathing.
Now, close your eyes for a moment, and take another cleansing breath. Slow in… Hold for a few seconds… During this 2-4 second space of holding your breath, switch gears and visualize your “happy memory” and try to feel that joy, and peace you experienced when this memory was created.
Breathing out, allow yourself a small smile and say to yourself “I created that.” You did, you know. You CHOSE to be in that moment, and you chose to accept what was happening and because of your acceptance, you experience peace… perhaps even a little joy.
Smile and allow the space at the end of your out-breath to return to your painful/obsessive thoughts that are troubling you, but keep that smile on your face!
Now, as the emotions that come with that painful memory rush back to you immediately switch gears back to your happy memory and on your next out-breath “I created that.”
What is the intensity of the pain/discomfort you are now feeling? A little better? Did it just go from an 8 to a 5. Good. Keep going. 
In my experience, this simple little exercise is good especially in cases where you’re feeling anxiety because of a past experience that didn’t turn out particularly favorably and is causing you feelings of regret or guilt that you find particularly distracting from the tasks at hand.
This is a bit of a mindhack as well as a conscious meditation to come to accept the choices you’ve made and remove some of the negative emotional charge that the thought may have.
Spending a few moments in this simple and easy-to-do healing meditation whenever you catch your negative thought patterns trying to “take the wheel” will help you heal yourself from these past experiences as you remove more and more of the emotional charge the memories and thoughts carry each time you do this exercise.
I wouldn’t recommend tackling larger issues with this, such as childhood trauma, abuse, etc, but it is good for obsessive thoughts, self-guilt-trips, and to some degree it’s helped ease the grief over a failed relationship.
Give it a try and let me know what you think.
For more information on how your consciousness can “have its way with you” when it comes to obsessive thought patterns and painful past memories, and what to do about it two books that really helped me were “The Secret of Letting Go” by Guy Finley and Eckhart Tolle’s books “The Power of Now”, and “A New Earth.”
Technorati Tags: meditation, healing, self-help
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