Here’s a beauty tip for you. Let go of your past.
The more ‘past’ we carry around with us, the ‘older’ we get. Age is deeply connected with the past. It is the very measurement of how much past we have. The more past we carry within ourselves the older we look and feel.
If we cannot let our past go we become it. We wear it on our face, our body and in our mindset, all of which eventually grind to a halting dysfunction as our traditional notions of ageing dictate.
Nietzsche puts it this way: “Man …braces himself against the great and ever greater pressure of what is past: it pushes him down or bends him sideways, it encumbers his steps as a dark, invisible burden.”
We carry that burden like a pack on a donkey. If we don’t process the past honestly and openly and integrate it into a wiser, more useful and more joyful present, it buries itself into our psyches, and becomes part of the furniture. Not only do we wear the pain of our past on our faces, it actually becomes part of our physical and psychic make-up.
Our natural reaction to past hurt, betrayal, or any other form of ill-treatment is to allow it to sit within us like an emotional cancer. While we continue to ruminate on past pain we cannot move forward and that pain sets up occupation in our minds and bodies.
What we don’t always realize is that unaddressed pain weaves its way around our major organs, muscles and limbs, and hijacks our immune system until slowly, gradually it erodes not only our youth, but every aspect of our overall physical and emotional well-being.
Most of us have an intuitive understanding that living in the past not only prevents us from being able to really appreciate the present, it actually prevents us from moving on beyond it.
Eckhart Tolle says the present is the only place where time and eternity intersect, making the moment of now not only the most important time there is, but it is actually the only real moment there is.
Now is the time; the only time.
