Identifying & Letting Go Of Shame, Regret, Recrimination…

We tend to relive our negative feelings about past experiences—particularly those from childhood—and forget about all the good we've done. This hurts us needlessly. It also leads to harsh self-judgment, guilt, and regret, negatively affecting our behaviour. The mindful way forward is to bring these subconscious fictions into full consciousness, where we see precisely how we hang on to them, and how to let them go.

Transcript

Hello everybody and welcome back to Mindfulness Live.

This week,

These two weeks,

We are talking about emotional baggage and we've talked about many aspects but I want to take an overview today and I've come up with a nice definition or a nice way of thinking about it,

This thing which is not very nice,

Emotional baggage,

It's the feelings you have about your past and the things that have happened to you which drag you down,

Which keep coming into the front of your mind,

Which keep filtering your experiences and keep judging you.

There's a judgment in it for sure,

Whether it comes from you or it comes from other people,

Their voices still in your head,

That's the sort of stuff which we infest in it,

We actually believe it,

That's when it becomes baggage.

And so the process of unloading the baggage is to stop believing it,

To recognize it for what it is,

It's a story,

It's a fiction,

It's an interpretation,

It's also something that happened many years ago sometimes,

And yet still I find myself dragged down by it,

So we're looking for those things and we're looking to see how we hang on to them,

How we choose them,

How we believe in them,

So that we can start letting go and stop doing that.

So make yourselves comfortable,

Take a nice breath,

And let go.

And with your attention in your chest,

You feel the breath from the inside,

And in a way it's very familiar,

And in a way it's rather unique.

Each breath is unique and yet they all seem the same,

Except when you look closely.

So with your attention right here and now,

You ask yourself,

What is this breath like?

How does that feel?

And where is my attention right now?

Is it in the breath?

Is it in the body at all?

Am I distracted or am I here?

It's always a good question,

Where am I?

Where is my attention?

And how am I doing?

What thoughts pass through my mind?

So the breath comes and goes,

And your attention moves,

Because the moment is moving,

The breath is moving,

Everything is moving,

Everything is changing,

And your task is to simply know that as it happens,

Being here and now and focused.

Feel the breath deep in your chest,

And feel it down in your abdomen,

And feel it up in your throat,

Your attention moving around and always relating to the breath,

Understanding this moment just as it is,

As you perceive it,

And feeling the pressure of the breath coming and going,

The friction,

The movement,

The temperature of the air as it enters and leaves your body,

And the mood,

The mood that you find as you breathe and watch and feel,

And as you know,

I'm breathing,

The breath comes,

The breath goes,

And unfocused,

I'm aware,

Present.

So now taking three more breaths,

Open your eyes.

So baggage is the recollection of emotional hurts in our past that are unresolved,

That in many cases we take very personally,

And you know when we're children,

All sorts of bad things happen in life,

In our family,

And we often take responsibility for it,

We think it's our fault,

So it's in those moments of great weakness we adopt that guilt,

That shame,

That embarrassment,

And it becomes a part of our self-image,

A part of our story,

And it's very disruptive,

Mostly because it's so repetitive,

It may be something very small,

Just being embarrassed because you didn't know the name of something,

And the people around the table laugh at you and say oh you didn't know that,

Okay that's happened to all of us,

But sometimes it happens just at the wrong moment when you're particularly vulnerable,

And you really absorb that,

And you don't forget it,

And that memory comes back to haunt you,

Not just the next day or the next week,

Sometimes years and years later,

And if it doesn't necessarily register on a conscious level,

You don't really know that you're reliving that thought,

You just know that you feel bad,

And you want it to go away,

You're sort of pushing it away,

And of course it doesn't go,

Because you don't see really how you're holding on to it,

This is always the key,

You can't let go of what you don't see yourself hanging on to,

You got to know which fingers to let go,

You know,

That subconscious threshold is exactly where mindfulness works,

We're constantly trying to bring stuff up into our conscious mind so that we're fully aware of it,

Or more aware of it in any case,

And when you feel a shame or an embarrassment or regret,

Then that's a perfect opportunity to say okay wait,

Well stop,

Take a breath,

How familiar is this,

And perhaps you know where it came from,

Or perhaps you don't,

Perhaps it's just a feeling,

But often that feeling does come with a memory,

Or with a sense of somebody else being involved,

Us being involved,

I remember myself in social situations very often with the result that I end up feeling distrust for people,

Okay,

That was one of my things growing up,

I learned to take care of myself,

To not trust other people,

To withdraw,

That's one pattern,

It's not the only pattern that you can get stuck in in relationships,

But that's a very common one,

When you feel that others can't be trusted,

And most importantly what that grows into is a sense that you can't trust yourself,

Because although I'm trying to blame the others and say,

You know,

Damn them,

At the same time somehow I feel,

Oh god,

Maybe it was my fault,

And maybe that's why it keeps coming back,

That's baggage,

And it's tortuous,

It just tortures you,

Again it's not it,

You torture yourself,

Again and again with this stuff,

And it will keep going on,

It won't stop until you actually take charge of it,

And taking charge means bringing it up so that it's conscious,

So you see yourself doing it,

And then say okay,

Okay,

I'm doing this to myself,

It happens in these situations,

Or sometimes it happens when I'm not doing anything in particular at all,

I notice that those old feelings of regret and anger and recrimination and resentment and things,

They come back when I'm doing the most innocuous things,

Like chopping vegetables,

Or you know,

Washing the car,

Something like that,

Somehow my mind will just sort of be free to go and dwell on those awful things,

And just keep reminding me,

Keep strengthening the pattern in my mind,

So that's actually a good place and good time for it to happen,

Because I can continue doing what I'm doing,

Cleaning the car or chopping the vegetables,

And at the same time actually work on myself,

Actually understand,

Oh all right,

I see that.

The key is to not push it away,

To welcome it in,

And welcoming pain is,

It's counterintuitive,

Right,

But that's what we're doing,

We're welcoming that pain because,

Oh hey,

This is an opportunity,

It's like welcoming a bad-tempered miserable person into your house,

Because it's an opportunity for you to practice patience,

You know,

You might actually get better at being patient because of this person,

So it's the same,

You allow those thoughts into your conscious mind so that you can see how they affect you,

Just seeing how they affect you builds your motivation to say,

No,

I'm not going to let that happen anymore,

I'm going to pay more attention,

And so you bring more attention to it,

And as you do that you start to see the absurdity of it,

And that's not quite enough,

Just seeing that this is ridiculous,

How can I blame myself for the fact that my father crashed his car one day,

Okay,

Well I found a way to blame myself because I spoke to him before he went away,

And maybe I influenced him,

Or maybe I made him sad,

And that's why he had the crash,

So following those patterns is,

It's very interesting because it makes no sense to me at all,

There's no logic in my accepting blame for that,

And yet I still see that blame,

I still see this disconnect between what I know and understand,

And how I actually feel,

And that reminds us that feelings are not logical,

They're not reasonable,

And they don't have to be,

And they never are in fact,

And trying to excuse ourselves out of them,

Or trying to rationalize ourselves out of them doesn't work,

So we sit with that feeling,

We feel how much it hurts,

We allow it to enter us consciously,

And in that consciousness slowly arises this sort of mindful immune system,

Where you realize deeply in yourself what you're doing,

And gradually the letting go starts to happen.

It's not complicated,

But it does require a lot of trust,

Self-trust,

And in many cases the trigger is a lack of self-trust,

So it can be very very stubborn,

This is very tricky stuff to get rid of,

Shame,

Embarrassment,

Regret,

Recrimination,

Resentment,

These are just old hurts which keep running,

Keep running,

Keep running,

Which means that we never really felt that we had the power,

From the very beginning we were powerless in this situation,

And that powerlessness just keeps getting replayed,

And I identify with it,

Becomes part of who I am,

It brings me down,

And the more I see this,

The more I see the massive effect that those minor little events in the past are now having on me,

That triggers the strong desire to do something about it,

To recognize it,

And I know what to do,

I have a tool for this,

Which is mindfulness,

I become conscious,

I allow it into my mind,

I don't resist it,

And in this way I start to put it in a new light,

And it's got nothing to do with reasoning or logic,

It's got to do with feeling the pain and letting it go,

It's an intuitive thing,

It's not easy,

Especially those deep hurts from childhood,

You know,

In my case I learned not just to distrust one person,

But to distrust everyone,

And that's not unusual,

I know a lot of people who are like that too,

It happens,

And when we can't trust anyone,

Then well how do we even trust ourselves,

We pretend to,

Because well I have to trust myself,

I can't depend on anyone else,

But it's a very unsteady sort of trust,

A trust which really does help me is one in which I can interact freely with other people and get the sort of responses that make me feel validated,

Make me feel alive,

Make me feel like oh I am a good person,

I am a competent person,

I do have mindfulness skills,

And I can let go of this,

But I can't do it by myself,

I do need support,

I do,

And so that's a tricky sort of step you have to overcome sometimes,

And that's the price of,

You know,

Childhood trauma,

It's much harder than adult trauma in many ways,

Because you believe it,

You get sucked into it,

It's not just an event,

It's a whole mindset,

And it can take you over,

It affects all your relationships,

So it's worth the effort to understand that baggage,

Accept it,

And relive it consciously,

Stop pushing it away,

Understand how you're hanging on,

And then allowing the letting go to her.

It sounds very logical,

Doesn't it?

It all sounds very reasonable,

But it does work,

And if you don't believe me,

Try it.

You don't have to believe anything I say,

But I hope you'll try it,

Because a lot of this stuff is very useful.

Okay,

Make yourselves comfortable.

Take a nice deep breath,

And let go.

Now when you take a breath,

By now it's something very familiar to you,

And the place that you come to inside yourself,

You can visualize it as a room,

Or a place,

A mountaintop,

Or anything which makes you feel that it's yours.

This is your place.

My place feels like,

I don't know,

The sort of a monk's cell,

I suppose,

In a very old stone building,

And it's a small room with a chair,

And a table,

And a bed,

That's all,

But it can be anywhere.

So when you take that breath,

And you come into yourself,

You're in your place,

And this is your private place,

Your peaceful place.

It's a place where you can think without being overwhelmed,

Without having to satisfy anyone,

Without having to obey any rules at all in fact.

You can think and feel whatever you want,

Whatever it is.

And in this place you know that who you are is very hard to grasp.

There's all these memories replaying themselves.

There's this body right here and now,

There are the thoughts,

There are the feelings,

And all you know really is that you are a process,

And that process sometimes is joyful,

Sometimes sad,

Sometimes confused,

Sometimes clear,

Sometimes weighed down by baggage,

And your job is to see the baggage,

To describe it to yourself even.

Well I'm still angry with my brother for what he said to me 45 years ago,

Or my teachers,

The way they treated me,

The way they treated me,

My friends at school,

The way they rejected me,

Not all the time,

Only once,

But I don't remember all the times they accepted me,

I only remember the times they rejected me.

So let me think a little more deeply.

Yes,

There were good times too,

There were times when they were friendly,

There were times when I saw and believed that they cared,

Same goes for my brother,

My parents,

My teachers.

I noticed that I focus on the negative more easily,

More naturally,

More naturally,

And that's me,

Oh that's my choice,

So maybe I can start to choose otherwise.

So when I remember how somebody hurt me,

And how that made me feel that I can't trust anybody,

Then I remember somebody I can trust,

Somebody I have trusted,

A trust that has paid off,

Leading to friendships,

You care,

Love,

And I understand that I choose to relive my baggage,

And that if I do that consciously then I can begin to not choose that,

To choose something else.

So I stay with the breath,

Stay in the moment,

And stay in my place,

In my room,

In this private,

Intimate,

Familiar place where I can be me without embarrassment or shame,

Where I can relive those moments which I have allowed to define me,

And by reliving them,

See them newly and let them go,

See alternative ways of thinking,

Of being,

Of being,

And recognize that my story is mine to tell,

I can change it,

It's an invention anyway,

So you can reinvent yourself,

But not by force,

By acceptance,

By clarity,

By mindfulness.

And now taking three more breaths,

Open your eyes.