external experience with a change in how you’re feeling internally, and it
brands you emotionally.
You go home and repeatedly review this experience in your mind. Every
time you do, you remind yourself of the accusing, intimidating look on your
employer’s face, how he yelled at you, what he said, and even how he
smelled. Then you once again feel fearful and angry; you produce the same
chemistry in your brain and body as if the performance review is still
happening. Because your body believes it is experiencing the same event
again and again, you are conditioning it to live in the past.
Let’s reason this a bit further. Think of your body as the unconscious
mind, or as an objective servant that takes orders from your consciousness.
It is so objective that it doesn’t know the difference between the emotions
that are created from experiences in your external world and those you
fabricate in your internal world by thought alone. To the body, they are the
same.
What if this cycle of thinking and feeling that you were betrayed
continues for years on end? If you keep dwelling on that experience with
your boss or reliving those familiar feelings, day in and day out, you
continually signal your body with chemical feelings that it associates with
the past. This chemical continuity fools the body into believing that it is still
reexperiencing the past, so the body keeps reliving the same emotional
experience. When your memorized thoughts and feelings consistently force
your body to “be in” the past, we could say that the body becomes the
memory of the past.
If those memorized feelings of betrayal have been driving your thoughts
for years, then your body has been living in the past 24 hours a day, 7 days
a week, 52 weeks a year. In time, your body is anchored in the past.
You know that when you repeatedly re-create the same emotions until
you cannot think any greater than how you feel, your feelings are now the
means of your thinking. And since your feelings are a record of previous
experiences, you’re thinking in the past. And by quantum law, you create
more of the past.
Bottom line: Most of us live in the past and resist living in a new future.
Why? The body is so habituated to memorizing the chemical records of our
past experiences that it grows attached to these emotions. In a very real
sense, we become addicted to those familiar feelings. So when we want to
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