The Past Isn’t The Future
Rediscovering the Present Moment
Life offers us guaranteed suffering and a chance to find freedom from it.
With life’s opportunities for positive experiences comes the inevitable hardships we must all face. These hardships cannot be avoided, stopped, or ignored.
We all have different ways of dealing with these difficulties. Many times, this means developing an unhealthy relationship with suffering. We try to place barriers between ourselves and the pain that memory (the past) and speculation (the future) bring.
We begin to live under the assumption that our past negative experiences dictate our future. We move through life trying to suppress the insuppressible and escape the inescapable. We become highly suspicious of the future based on our blind faith in the past.
Every negative coping mechanism is a temporary fix for a more chronic problem, a bandaid placed on the chest of someone with a failing heart.
Living in fear is the result of dwelling on our past and worrying about our future, two acts that pull us away from the here and now. When we feel overwhelmed by afflictive emotions, we can get so caught up in our thoughts that we try to run away from our…
