Day 84
Affirmation:
I reside in the present moment.
I am grateful for past experiences and how they help me make healthy choices now.
I choose my responses to life consciously.
I choose my responses to life based primarily on what is here and now.
I do not miss out on the present because of the past.
I live new experiences as uniquely their own.
Even if we don’t live in the past, the past lives in us. Once we experience something we can’t un-experience it. Every thought ever thought, every feeling ever felt, every experience ever had will remain inside us as emotional markers that are stored in memory and as subconscious impression. Every new experience causes the brain to scan its repository for related or similar experiences from which to assess the current, influencing our responses and contributing to our *here and now* moments. The system is designed to protect us from danger and help with other aspects of survival, but the brain and subconscious can’t take into account the variables that are part of each new experience. Only our conscious minds can do that. And because we are usually responding to the present from our subconscious, we often make the present pay the price for the past. Countless relationships have been abandoned because the subconscious mind related them somehow to a previous painful situation. Innumerable opportunities have been passed up because the subconscious found an impression in its cache that sent a warning.
The past can be a good thing, giving us the tools we need to interpret our present experiences. It teaches us that dogs bite, fire burns and that too much alcohol makes us sick, but it can also be a mechanism that holds us back from being *here and now* in new experiences. Only by being conscious and aware of learned and subconscious responses can we consciously choose to respond to new experiences deliberately, fairly and without defensiveness, seeing them for what they actually are, not only what our previous experiences want to tell us they might be .
365 Days of Inspiration 