Many moons ago, I wrote a list of 12 Prin­ci­ples that were the basis of my under­stand­ing, both of my life and of my coun­selling prac­tice. I’ve been think­ing about pulling them together into a small book that I could give to new clients.

11. One of the tough­est “sells,” both in ther­apy and in life, is this: there is no need, nor is there any way, to resolve the issues of the past. There is not a hope in hell that water, once under the bridge, can be pushed back upstream and fil­tered until clean. There is let­ting it go, or let­ting it own you.

Those who are dead are not dead
They’re just liv­ing in my head
And since I fell for that spell
I am liv­ing there as well
Oh…
Time is so short and I’m sure
There must be some­thing more
Cold­play Viva La Vida “42”

Haunted by images of you…

I thought the lyrics quite appro­pri­ate to this point’s theme. The first para­graph is a per­fect descrip­tion of how most peo­ple live their lives—not only in their heads, but in there, “play­ing with (caught under the spell of) things and peo­ple ‘dead and gone’.”

It seems to me that each moment is born, lives,
and dies in an instant.

This is how it is for all of us, and for everything.

I was watch­ing a stick of incense today, notic­ing the stream of smoke aris­ing, and how each sec­ond of the burn­ing was dif­fer­ent, both in terms of the smoke, and in the infin­i­tes­i­mal short­en­ing of the stick itself.

The seems to be the per­fect metaphor for our lives, which pass by sim­i­larly. One moment blurs into the next, and you are a year, a decade, a quar­ter, or half cen­tury older.

We do not notice time’s pass­ing as it’s pass­ing, but more like the incense stick, notice when it’s spent, used up, burnt out.

We miss the smoke rising—the moment-by-moment expe­ri­enc­ing of life—because we are mostly up in our heads, play­ing with ghosts— regret­ting things we did, rela­tion­ships and peo­ple that left, died, moved on. We play with the ghost of “Christ­mas future”—our imag­in­ings about what is going to hap­pen.

We make up sto­ries involv­ing oth­ers, assign the parts, write the dia­logue, and then, with great pomp and cer­e­mony, enter into the drama we have cre­ated, there to play out alter­nate sce­nar­ios to what really happened.

I firmly believe that such a life is a mon­u­men­tal waste of time, as is hop­ing that “there must be some­thing more.”

This frag­ment of the above lyric is often the idea or desire that brings clients to counselling.

It’s sort of a half-eye-open look at the “stream­ing by” of one’s life that causes the “there must be more to life than what I am expe­ri­enc­ing” reac­tion. The odd piece is that there is more to it—it’s called moment-by-moment expe­ri­enc­ing.

In other words, the cure, such as it is, is right there, in front of your nose. The cure is let­ting the past be the past, and deal­ing with the future when it actu­ally arrives, thus free­ing one­self to be alive, in this moment.

The past is the past

You can’t un-ring a bell, they say. Nor can you push the river of time (or any other river, unless you’re in Chicago…) upstream. While it may seem only to be seman­tics, you can­not mend the past. You can only deal with the present moment. Mak­ing amends, for exam­ple, does not change the past sit­u­a­tion one iota—it changes the rela­tion­ship between you and “what­ever” in the here-and-now.

Most peo­ple do not “make amends” in the real world—they do it up in their heads, in the form of “If only I had said such and such, things would have turned out dif­fer­ent.” Or, “If only I hadn’t mar­ried him, I’d be happy.” Or, “If only my par­ents had treated me dif­fer­ently, then I wouldn’t be this way.” Of course. If things had been dif­fer­ent, things would be dif­fer­ent. How­ever, you did say such and such, you did marry him, and your par­ents did treat you as they treated you.”

Noth­ing can change your past expe­ri­ence,
which led to your present reality.

The only way out of the pat­tern of sec­ond guess­ing the past and dream­ing about the future is to let go of cling­ing to either. This is done by, first of all, watch­ing the games you play in your head, with­out join­ing in. Get­ting caught “in the head spell” is a sure recipe for feel­ing like crap while stay­ing deeply stuck.

Instead, we begin to explore the process, instead of the con­tent. We start to notice how we are “camp­ing out” in our heads, play­ing “remem­ber when!” games. As we notice, we can gen­tly but firmly let go of the drama, open our eyes to the present moment, and see what’s really happening.

This also serves the pur­pose of actu­ally pro­vid­ing our­selves with a life—precisely the one we have, which has been rush­ing by unno­ticed. We live in this moment, and life seems to be end­less. And inter­est­ing, because we are expe­ri­enc­ing one thing and one thing, and then another thing, with­out attach­ing to any of it.

With­out try­ing to keep dead moments alive.

You can live your life as a ghost, rarely immers­ing your­self it, and only judg­ing it as it passes quickly by. Or, you can let the stream roll, let peo­ple, places, and things be how they are for as long as they are present, and then let them go, with­out attachment.

You can. It’s a chal­lenge to beat our­selves at our own games, but you can.

Excel­lent ther­apy, ele­gant body­work, and med­i­ta­tion are the tools for this explo­ration. More about this next week, as we con­clude this series.