( 723 words)

Keyword: New Outlooks

Takeaway:

• OP maximized
• Dress rehearsals for the new you

The OP provides an alternative to the preprogrammed memories of feeling that most of us live with. Living in the past and calling it the present is not actually being here and now.

The OP is here and now. The memories of past feelings are, well, only memories.

The OP tells you that a memory of a feeling is nothing more than a memory of a feeling. The OP is the voice of personal transformation, enlightenment and salvation.

I call the OP the Inner Guide, something we each have in us. Some folks call it insight. They refer to it as catching yourself at what you are thinking or catching yourself at what you are feeling.  Cultivating an awareness of your OP will empower you to live free of the past and into the future.

How do you maximize the voice of your OP? How do you get to where you call out a thought or feeling and talk back to it? There are five methods that together help you experience the benefits and the liberation of managing your memories. These include remembering, journaling, practicing, blessing and breath work.

1. Remembering: We remember stories; we remember feelings. Attempting their management comes with a caveat. Your memories are all about your survival. As part of its survival-drive they stow away the ones you don’t want to remember into to the subconscious. While this service protects you it also gets turned into a mechanism of controlling you. If you start messing with your memories of feelings, the memories will resist you and pull out those wounded feelings it keeps so handily in deep storage. The memories are masters of distraction. One of their best tools of distraction goes like this:

• If you want to have anything to do with those feelings from long ago, your memories will have you believe the worst outcome possible.
• If you want to change yourself, you will have to re-experience your most painful memories down to the last throwing-up, crying-jag and screaming-hurt in you.

The above methods are total bs on the part of your memories of feelings. When your life is based on a certain memory or a bunch of them, their recovery will be well-guarded, you can be sure, but neither of these propositions have to be your truth.  Wherever you are, you have come a long way to get to this point in your life. Managing memories requires an understanding that all this drama is not real feelings but just a memory of them. For all the weight we might give them, they can be biochemically and neurologically explained.  

2. Journaling: Journal-keeping has an awesome history for personal growth and I say this from experience. Journaling puts memories into words and makes a memory a subject that helps in choosing what to do with them.
3. Practice: Catch yourself remembering a feeling or thought. Maybe you asked yourself “What am I thinking about?” How did it happen? Then remember what your remember and appreciate yourself for getting that memo from your Objective Perspective.
4. Blessing: Bless your memories. When you bless them, you objectify them again and gain some distance from them in user-friendly ways. Bless the feelings of memories so you get the upper hand on them. Bless your OP! Bless yourself with how you really want to feel.
5. Breath work. Some call it meditation. It is the single most beneficial approach to managing yourself available. In meditation, new real estate in the brain becomes available for development.

I have meditated in many different forms. The forms have a feature in common that involves observing your breath as it comes in and as it goes out.

Today’s Blessing: May your objectivity give you the feelings about life you want to feel.

Daily Action: Name an activity, a person or an item that give you a good feeling about yourself. Now spend some time remembering, writing and/or meditating on the feeling itself, free of the object itself. Focus on sensing the feeling.

Conversation Kick-around: How challenging is sensing the way you want to feel? In what ways does sensing the way you want to feel and not living life from a memory redefine you?