How can we overcome our past conditionings?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
but we are not prisoners of our past that means if this is the past this is the present this is the future we can’t choose our past but we can choose our memories that means if we look behind our past there may be many bad things that happened but there will also be some good things that’s how where we are where we are so we can choose our memories that means sometimes again it’s the mind the uncontrolled mind may go to the past and look at all the bad things that are there and make us resentful make us feel victimized but then through it all if we consciously look back at the past we can see that ok this thing went wrong this thing went wrong but somehow things worked out like here something could happen here something could happen so one of the best ways to deal with negative past is to actually cultivate aggressive gratitude what that means is normally there is some good things happen and we feel thankful and we feel grateful but aggressive gratitude means we ok bye so we we consciously go out and look for things to be grateful for so just like aggression means if somebody goes from their own home territory to somewhere else so like there is a there are some situations for which we feel grateful naturally just like our home territory but aggressive gratitude means we go out and look ok look so that’s why I said we can’t choose our past but we can choose our memories so if you find out ok in our past also there are some things which are good we focus on those memories we develop those memories then even in the past we can we can actually have pleasant not unpleasant memories that’s the first thing and second thing is that again the mind’s tendency to magnify as you will see that we may have had bad past but there are others who may have had far worse past this world at one level we could say distress is democratic so distress comes to everyone some people it comes in in very visibly terrible forms some people it may be somewhat invisible or subtle ways it’s still there so actually some people may have very wealthy parents but their parents are too busy for them so they live lonely childhood now from the external perspective it appears that they were so nice childhood they had but they live lonely so the tendency of the mind is to make oneself into a martyr oh so many things went wrong with me so many things went wrong with me exactly naturally so what happens so no what happens is that if through spiritual practice we habituate our mind to think of something more positive then whenever the mind is idle you know it doesn’t have anything to think about it will instead of going back to the negative past we can direct it towards the positive so for example when we do meditation like I was talking about mantra meditation one of the advantages of the mantra is that if we habituate ourselves to repeating the mantra to meditating on the mantra then as soon as the mind is idle instead of harping over the past it will go towards the mantra and when we meditate on the mantra we start feeling peaceful peaceful so that way we need to find some other home for the mind presently the home for the mind is whatever distressful situation we had gone through in the past the mind just goes there and thinks about it but if we can find something else it can be some positive habit meditation is a very powerful habit but some other anything which we can make the default thinking of our mind we find something which we like to do within that we get ourselves habituated to something positive so once the mind has some positive default to go back to then it will not go back to the negative default now that’s habit that’s habit so if we keep doing it with respect to meditation now if we do it daily if we do it daily and gradually it’s like the inclination of the flower changes when we say something has become the default that means the inclination has changed over there earlier the inclination was like this now the inclination has become like this so by doing something so if we find there is something good which we know this is beneficial and we also feel that this is something which I like then we make it a conscious intentional effort to do it regularly and just by doing it regularly it becomes a default setting just like in a computer even a browser if we keep visiting a site repeatedly then as soon as you type say if you are going to a particular website it starts with F as soon as you first things whatever as soon as you type F if you are going repeatedly to that site then as soon as you type F immediately that site will come exactly nice talking with you thank you