When we are in the middle of a crisis we do the best we can to get through it, but when it comes back as a thought created memory, it can begin to feel like a recurring nightmare from which there seems to be no escape. But what if there was an escape from the past and its traumas?
One morning many years ago on my way to work in a nearby town, I was running up a rising slip road towards the railway station in my home-town, when I suddenly felt tears running down my face before I even realised what was happening; less than a moment before I had smelt a woman’s perfume, without even noticing the person wearing it! It was a perfume my mother had worn when I was a child and she had committed suicide when I was just 8 years old. Without a chance of preventing this thought created feeling arising in my mind I felt the emotion of a loss that I could not prevent, revisit me from out of the past.
What is fascinating about these events that come out of the blue, and most people can recall a story like this of their own, is that that they are memory based illusions. I am not suggesting that the event didn’t take place, just that it is no longer happening in our present, yet our feelings are brought to the surface and feel real all the same.
So what happens when we go through difficult times, and traumas? Why do they stick so well and why do they keep coming back to haunt us when we least expect it? In the moment of a crisis our senses become heightened, this is the most natural thing in the world, and we take a memory based imprint of everything around us at that moment. Everything we see, hear, smell, taste and touch, just in case this information is useful to us at a later date as a portent to protect us, to maybe even help us prevent a similar thing happening again in the future.
Unfortunately, most of the time the circumstances that surround us at a time of crisis are simply coincidental reference points of sound, smell, taste and touch, and not as we might have imagined them having something to do with the event itself. In fact they have absolutely nothing to do with what has happened, these thought created illusions just get innocently tied or anchored to the circumstances. Thus if similar circumstance occur, or we sense something that was present at the time of a difficulty, it may come rushing back to greet us again, unwelcomed.
Sydney Banks called this: ‘an illusion carried through time’ and this illusion is made seemingly real in the moment we experience it. The good news is that getting past all this does not require working through it, or being re-exposed to the pain over and over again, but by truly understanding that it is all created out of and from the power of Thought. When we can see this fact, we are instantly set free from the past trauma. It is not that those memories wont ever come back into our mind again, but that when they do, they start to lose the power they previously had over us. Like any other thought that may pass through our mind at any given moment of the day or night; we begin to more fully appreciate that thoughts are neutral, harmless and passing like clouds across the sky; they are a temporary phenomenon from which we are set free.
