In the moment

From Jonathan Lockwood Huie at www.DreamThisDay.com.

If you aren't in the moment, you are either looking forward to uncertainty, or back to pain and regret.

- Jim Carrey

Regrets and their cousins, resentments, are a huge cause of self-inflicted suffering. Sometimes it takes years of psychotherapy to gain freedom from regrets about what you did or did not do, and freedom from resentment over what others did or did not do. Sometimes it takes a lifetime of self-talk to remember to put the past in the past where it belongs. However, sometimes a simple symbolic act can help immeasurably to grant ourselves freedom from the past.

One of the quickest ways to move past a regret is to hold a RELEASE ceremony. Reverently build a small fire. Write each regret or resentment on a slip of paper. Hold the paper for a moment, and then feed the paper with the regret or resentment to the cleansing fire. Visualize your trouble going up in smoke. Try it, it's amazingly freeing.