Any system that gets overloaded tends to slow down. An overloaded vehicle struggles to climb up an incline, a good runner loses steam and speed with weights tied to his legs. We may not realise it, but we too load our emotional system with two things that we carry with us most of the time disturbing the free flow of dynamic energy through us – burden of the past and weight of the future.

It is impossible to look back and not find either mistakes we have made, missed opportunities, things not playing out in our favour, or not having stepped up when needed. We feel we are alone in this feeling, but everyone lives with shades of this burden. We cannot undo our past, but we can step back and undo the blocks it may be causing.

When we decide that we will learn from the past but not live in it, that whenever the past creates an inner turmoil we will watch it come and go like a passing storm but not enter it, that we will learn to see the hidden blessing in why some things happened the way they did, we would have lifted the burden of our past.

But it is not just the past, but the weight of the future that we silently carry as well. We often experience anxiety and worry about how things will play out. We cannot control the future, but we can control our inner fears of what our mind starts believing may happen.

When we remind ourselves that the future is carved out in the present and that our current action, like a ball thrown against a wall, comes back to us with the reaction, we move from fear of what may happen, to focus on what is happening right now, removing the invisible weight of anxiety of the future.

Our dynamism has one and only one place to express itself – here and now. The vital life flow in us has no business living in the graveyard of the past and the womb of the future. But we can only live our fullest and express our best when we drop the burden of the past and the weight of the future.

(Picture – Butterfly Farm, Penang)