Personal Development Ideas

Personal growth: The counter-energy of carrying the past October 4, 2017

One of the ways we can obscure our true selves and thereby block our advance to  more complete self-actualization is through our tendency to burden our thought processes with the weight of the past.

If we are not careful, over time, we can add so many individual internalized concerns to “the voice in our heads” that it seems as if we are making our self-improvement journey while wearing 25-pound shoes on our feet.

This tendency of not living in the Now, in the present,  can negate our efforts to reach our personal development potential.

In his book, A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle tells an illustrative story:

Two Zen monks were walking in the country and came across a young girl who could not cross a road covered in deep mud, for fear of ruining her silk kimono.

One monk picked the girl up and carried her to the other side, and the monks walked on in silence.

Finally, after five hours, the other monk could not restrain himself: “Why did you carry that girl across the road? We monks are not supposed to do things like that.” The other monk replied, “I put the girl down hours ago. Are you still carrying her?”

Tolle suggests we should try to imagine what life would be like for someone like that irritated monk, who cannot seem to “let go internally of situations, accumulating more and more ‘stuff’ inside…”

“Stuff” such as grievances, regrets, hostility, and guilt.

The lingering “stuff” inside eventually becomes our dominant intellectual and emotional “story,” a story that can take over our perception of ourselves, and become a negatively limiting identity, Tolle believes.

In A New Earth Tolle seeks to advise us how to extricate ourselves from this trap.

— Dennis  Mellersh