How to overcome guilt from past experiences

Deep Think  ~ Pete . A

"... We spend more time judging ourselves, feeling the guilty, thinking of what everyone else will say about us,wasting time, precious time in the process  ..." I said to her and remember (Quoting Swami Vivekananda)  "Anything that makes you weak physically, intellectually and spiritually, reject it as Poison." That includes a past life that keeps on haunting you.

June looks at me perplexed; guilt written allover her face, before me is a helpless lady, suffering from guilt of her past life, a life that saw her live like a queen, moving around with the high and the mighty, spotting expensive attires, high end electronic gadgets, driven in state of the art expensive cars, spending weekends in high end resorts and beaches. The life that saw her, look down upon everyone, the life that saw other ladies want to be her, the life that is now haunting her, inflicting her with internal suffering. Guilt!

But, Pete how can I supposedly walk through the multitude of human sea that I hurt? Just how do I reverse my past life? The mistakes I made, the reckless life I led, the people I hurt, the pain I inflicted on them, the poor ladies who followed my path, believing that life is all about how expensive you look, how people regard you as the stand out among the rest? Just how do I reverse that? What hurts me more, is the thousands of innocent ladies and men living that life, that wasted life and I can't help, it pains me, it kills me more that I was in their shoes and I know what they will undergo in the future; guilt, shame, wasted life opportunities.

I look at her and say "More often, we lead a life that looks good and best to us, not knowing a time will come when all will be vanity" the beauty of your situation is simple; you have finally come to your senses, albeit late, but not too late to make a commitment to the inner you and say "I June, will lead the rest of my life, the best I can, focusing on what God created me to do and however painful my past was, that past is in the past and it will not define me"

Different societies, different upbringing, different circumstances may have led to the kind of life you led in the past. However painful the past was, however difficult its for you to forget, it should not be your portion in the current life. It may have been a painful reckless life that has left you a single mother, a single father, wasted education opportunities, infliction of diseases, jobless, loss of friends. Don't let it define what tomorrow holds for you. People will talk, rumors will spread, false stories will be told, it may be painful to even bear, but you got to look at it from the positive point of view.

You are now experienced, the shame and guilt is perfectly normal, you ought to begin, walking away from both of them, you ought to begin speaking to the inner you and saying "It happened, I can't change it, I will focus on the rest of my life to make it better, build new friendships, tell my story to the world and let them that have ears hear, but I will have saved some souls, some guilt, & shame later on in their lives"

As we walk across the streets I say to June (pointing to a group of people on the street) "You see all those people? Each and everyone of them has a past, some even tragic than yours and mine, just imagine for a second if they all felt guilty and became shameful? Will they freely walk on the streets knowing what kind of reckless life they led and what people will be saying about them? You see, we spend more time judging ourselves, feeling guilty, thinking of what everyone else will say about us,wasting time that we could have used to perfect the rest of our lives.

I believe in rising high above, moving on like a soldier, my head high above, walking majestically knowing that what was in the past, the past I had,  remains the past. People will talk, rumors will be spread, but at the end of it all, life continues, darkness sets in  and after 12 hours? there is sunrise. So we might as well spend more time on learning from the mistakes in our past life. And as they say, time is the best medicine, the healer of our painful past experiences.

Remember if you carry the weight of your past, with you everywhere you go, you will never have room for your future. And about beginning afresh? Yes, stay clear any group of friends who will potentially take you to your reckless past life. Stay clear, stay away from them, they are the devil in an angelic life that will waste you, waste your future, and let you remain hollow and useless.

"We are responsible for what we are, and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves. If what we are now has been the result of our own past actions, it certainly follows that whatever we wish to be in the future can be produced by our present actions; so we have to know how to act"

~ Swami Vivekananda