You Can Learn to Remember: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life pdfdrive com

harnessing schooldays
EXERCISE TWENTY TWO

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This exercise will set you off on your own personal trip back to your most
formative years. Use class photos, old schoolbooks, trophies, and so on, to help
prompt your memories.
1. Choose a location that conjures up a variety of incidental recollections, such
as your old school itself. Find a specific starting point, such as a flagpole in the
playground, the basketball court or the principal’s office.
2. Now climb inside this mental picture. How old are you? Who are your
friends? What are you wearing? What funny or scary incidents do you
remember?
3. Radiate outward from your chosen point. Can you picture your classroom and
where you sat? Recall individual sounds, such as the school band practising, the
cheering on the football field, the squeak of the chalk on the blackboard. Can
you hear a teacher’s voice? What about smells – your locker or the cafeteria?
Go through each of the senses in turn.
4. Now think about how you felt. Which classes did you like or dislike? Were
your teachers strict or kind? Did you feel happy, anxious, bored? Carry your
composite image of your school around in your head for a while, to see what
other memories surface.
releasing the past
W
hile positive recollections enrich our lives, negative ones can nag at our
peace of mind in a way that is wasteful, and even destructive. Even though we
know that we cannot change the past by dwelling on it, we may feel fettered
somehow to our bad experiences, or our mistakes or regrets. How can we rid
ourselves of such burdens?
Intense emotional experience has the effect of fixing a memory – like a
fixative that prevents paint from being smudged. If we can learn to divest a
memory of its emotional charge, so that the emotion does not come flooding
back with recollection, then the incident that plagues us is less likely to keep
surfacing in our mind.
We need to look at upsetting memories in a practical light. Letting go of a
negative experience does not mean we have to wipe clean part of our
consciousness in a deliberate act of repression, merely that we need a change of
perspective. It helps to think of the past as an academy of practical wisdom,
based on all our experience, positive and negative. A error of judgment, no less

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than a personal achievement, belongs in the archive of this academy, as a
compass by which you have set future directions in life. It is not a matter of debit
and credit – instead, picture all the archive files bound in covers of the same
colour, chronologically.
Bear in mind also that the past is a distant landscape, an unalterable vista,
and we should no more wish to change parts of it than we should wish
Himalayan peaks to be covered with trees. We do not live in the past: its
incidents excite no emotion.