For most of my adult life, I’ve spent much of my waking days reminiscing over good times. This has gotten to the point over the last few years that I often wish I could relive the best moments of my life on an endless loop. If I could only pick one year to relive in that way, it would be 2018, my best year ever. On my worst days when I feel the most depressed, I become convinced that my best days are all behind me, and that my future either has nothing for me to look forward to or will be a pale imitation of my past.
This negative programming has become even more deeply etched within me since my dog Sawyer’s death. Losing him after the unexpected ending of a bad job a few months earlier and the many issues that have arisen in the two years since he died have made it much harder for me to imagine great times ahead. While I’ve healed a lot of the pain around losing him, there is still much work to be done, and life without him still hurts. Sawyer got me through a lot of hard times and was always there for me even when nobody else was, so his absence makes the hard times even harder. I miss his quiet, supportive presence and the gentle comfort he brought me when I needed it the most.
I recently got an idea about how to heal by reflecting fondly on the good times. When I look back on my best days, I usually do so with a huge sense of sadness that they’re gone and aren’t coming back. One day, I decided to focus on enjoying them without dwelling on the painful stuff that happened before and after. I found it to be a wonderfully relaxing experience that made me feel happier and lighter afterward. That’s one of the powerful lessons in Letting Go by David Hawkins: avoiding resisting the positive emotions. Sometimes it’s difficult for me to allow myself to feel happy, peaceful, joyful, and the like, so taking time to welcome those feelings as they arise is wonderful.
I’ve also worked more on releasing fear, especially fear connected to wonderful past occasions that took a huge negative downturn after the other shoe dropped. That happened throughout my upbringing. It usually took the form of me having fun while minding my own business until an adult snapped at me, yelled at me, or even hit me because I wasn’t doing something they wanted me to do or had done something they disliked. Although the violence has long gone away, others have still repeatedly snapped at, yelled at, and punished me in other ways over the past decade, which has programmed me to expect it whenever things go well for more than a little while. This is especially an issue with anyone who has power over me in a large system, whether it’s an employment situation or something that encompasses all of society. Additional ways that I’ve been hurt by things going badly (car trouble, unexpected financial issues, health problems, and other painful experiences that have happened many times this year already) prevent me from ever enjoying the good times for long as I’m always wondering how long they’ll last before the bad times return once again. I hope that continuing to heal past pain will allow me to fully enjoy the good stuff that is here now and whatever other good comes my way later without expecting it to end right away.
My life has contained long stretches in which I felt bad during the hard times and didn’t really enjoy much of the good times due to fear that they’d soon end. On some rare occasions, I’d feel bad during the hard times and fully enjoy the good times without fear of them ending. The highest level, which I haven’t permanently made my home but have stayed there briefly a couple of times, consisted of me feeling at peace regardless of what was happening around me. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to stay permanently at that highest level. If the furthest I ever reach is the level of feeling bad when bad things happen and good when good things happen, and I can stay at that level consistently without falling back down to feeling bad almost all the time, I’ll take it. Since I’ve repeatedly surprised myself by doing things I once thought couldn’t be done, I won’t set a limit on how far I can go. Instead, I’ll keep doing what’s worked wonders for me and see how far it takes me.