As I am writing this, I feel so relieved, relaxed, light as a feather, as if I was carrying around something ghastly on my shoulders all this time. Unlike the movie Shutter, it wasn’t a spirit that was haunting me, it was memories, the really bad ones; regrets, traumas, misunderstandings, all of which I stubbornly held on to as they were taking away my sanity and my soul. Surprisingly and ironically it was another memory which helped me ditch all of them. A book, gifted to me by someone special on my birthday two years ago.
But having said all of this, is it really that easy to let go of the past? How do you feel condemned, how do you get over the failures, the trauma, the mistreatment? How can you forgive someone? Ensure that your future actions won’t be affected by the seeds sown in the past? This ought to be one of the toughest situations you will have to face in life. Added to whatever troubles that come with it; ego, stubbornness, lack of confidence can aggravate it even further and make your life much harder. Now am actually talking in a huge bandwidth, for someone like me who has never experienced any physical violence or extreme emotional trauma, I will never be able to comprehend what goes through who has actually gone through all that, but with whatever I have personally experienced, read and heard, its all about self realization and finding the peace within oneself.

Now comes the next question, how do you find that inner peace? Now I am not Master Shifu so I don’t have an expertise on the topic, I like to tell you what I feel about it. Let’s compare our brain to a computer hard disk. Deleting files in a hard disk does not mean they are sent to oblivion, rather they are overwritten. It’s the same with our brain, you can’t forget the bad ones, you need good ones to overwrite them. Makes sense? Let me give you an example , relationships. Imagine you had a big fight with your sibling or your partner, they weren’t there you needed them, or they forgot something important, something which really hurt you. Now you can either go on replaying the whole thing on your mind 24x7, ignore them, scheme to make their life miserable, or put it all in the backseat for some time and go out to make some new memories. Go on a journey together, trek somewhere, or talk it out over a drink, you will realize how better your life was with them, and how much you will lose if you hang on to the conflict you had. Once you realize it, you will be hit with a resurgence of positivity, the urge to forget whatever has happened. The power to forgive will come to you naturally, and finally, you will find the inner peace within you.
Inner peace is about loving yourself, understanding what’s good for you and what is not. In a way, it’s about doing everything that will bring joy and happiness to you. This might be seen as selfish, but what it really is to make you selfless, because more often than you know doing the right thing regardless of the imminent consequences will always turn out to be the best for everyone. We just don’t realize at the time. How do you think we get wiser as we age? you can’t absorb wisdom through your skin, you just screw up a gazillion times, get battered around so much that, you will start seeing the real nature of things.
