{"id":5696,"date":"2018-01-24T01:00:33","date_gmt":"2018-01-24T06:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/?p=5696"},"modified":"2018-01-22T11:58:40","modified_gmt":"2018-01-22T16:58:40","slug":"shed-healing-light-pain-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/2018\/01\/shed-healing-light-pain-past.html","title":{"rendered":"Shed Healing Light on Pain from the Past"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Sometimes we can feel discouraged because our past efforts have never prevailed over what challenges us, so why try now? Or perhaps we are disheartened because one of our main hopes for happiness suddenly proves itself to be hopeless. Maybe we get downcast in the day because our body, or our mind, is no longer capable of doing what it once could in younger years, and all we see on the horizon are more limitations.<\/p>\n<p>The point is &#8212; when it comes to these dispiriting states &#8212; it makes no difference what they say is the cause of their punishing presence within us. The truth is that these dark states find the cause they need to inhabit us right from within the content of our own past experience! What does this mean?<\/p>\n<p>Negative states, all dark energies that enervate us, only succeed at draining us because they are capable of making us see &#8212; drawn up from the storehouse of our own mental and emotional memories &#8212; those psychically loaded images that validate their existence. In other words: The only power these dark states hold over us is that they get us to identify with feeling ourselves as being powerless. And when such strong feelings of futility are accompanied by what is seen (in our own mind\u2019s eye) as being valid &#8212; because we are given over to unconsciously recall the considerations that make them so &#8212; then boom! The trap is sprung and into the darkness we go!<\/p>\n<p>The reason discouraging states hold us captive is because they have managed to convince us that all there is, is the limited darkness of their reality. And this reality &#8212; regardless of how we protest its presence &#8212; impresses itself upon us until this unconscious conspiracy is almost complete. No doubt we would be headed for a kind of black hole in our own consciousness were it not for one thing: Discouragement only has the last word with us as long as we give our consent to what it would have us believe is true about ourselves.<\/p>\n<p>Our willingness to bring that dark, discouraged state into our awareness of it, instead of allowing it to define what we are aware of, changes our very relationship with life. Now the path before us, only a moment before impossibly dark and shut off to us, opens up to us because we have opened ourselves to God\u2019s endless resources. No walls exist because the nature now active within us cannot be walled in by negative (life-stealing) thoughts and feelings. We can no longer be dominated because we have chosen the light of Truth as our advocate.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Question:<\/strong> Are you saying that any dark state is a lie and that by simply seeing it (throwing light upon it) that it will lose its power over us?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Answer:<\/strong> I\u2019m saying that the state of captivity that comes over us because we are identified with dark states is an unnecessary condition, i.e., therefore not real, and therefore it may be seen as being a lie because the truth about it dispels it. We must not seek ways to be more powerful than what we feel overpowers us. It is our identification with these states that must be seen and dropped.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sometimes we can feel discouraged because our past efforts have never prevailed over what challenges us, so why try now? Or perhaps we are disheartened because one of our main hopes for happiness suddenly proves itself to be hopeless. Maybe we get downcast in the day because our body, or our mind, is no longer&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":232,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,130],"tags":[181,2383,118,2970,288,2971,46,1259,152,582],"class_list":["post-5696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-letting-go","category-pain-2","tag-attachment","tag-clinging-to-the-past","tag-discouragement","tag-dispiriting-states","tag-identification","tag-light-of-awareness","tag-negative-states-2","tag-painful-memories","tag-regret","tag-tormenting-thoughts"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Shed Healing Light on Pain from the Past - Letting Go with Guy Finley<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/2018\/01\/shed-healing-light-pain-past.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Shed Healing Light on Pain from the Past - Letting Go with Guy Finley\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Sometimes we can feel discouraged because our past efforts have never prevailed over what challenges us, so why try now? 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His ideas cut straight to the heart of our most important personal and social issues - relationships, success, addiction, stress, peace, happiness, freedom - and lead the way to a higher life. Finley is the Founder and Director of Life of Learning Foundation, a nonprofit Center for Spiritual Discovery. He is the acclaimed author of \"The Secret of Letting Go\" and more than 45 other books and audio programs that have sold over two million copies in 26 languages worldwide. His work is widely endorsed by doctors, business professionals, celebrities, and religious leaders of all denominations. Through Life of Learning Foundation, Guy has presented over 5,000 unique self-realization seminars to thousands of grateful students throughout North America and Europe over the past 20 years and has been a guest on over 700 television and radio shows, including national appearances on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and NPR. The Foundation's popular Key Lesson e-mails featuring inspirational quotes by Guy are read each week by a hundred thousand subscribers in 142 countries. Guy speaks four times each week on inner-life principles at Life of Learning Foundation's home in Merlin, Oregon. These meetings are ongoing and open to the public. For more information about Life of Learning Foundation, Guy Finley, and their life-changing messages, visit guyfinley.org. \"Guy Finley is...one of the leading experts at the forefront of human potential.\" -Nightingale Conant \"Guy Finley has helped millions live fuller, more peaceable lives.\" -Barnes and Noble","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.guyfinley.org","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/Guy-Finley-260924340633\/","https:\/\/x.com\/guy_finley"],"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/author\/gfinley"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/232"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5696"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5698,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5696\/revisions\/5698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}