The Misuse of Personal Power . . .

Your physical power is limited to the now. If you want to move the chair you're sitting on, for instance, you can only do it in the present. You cannot move the chair in either the past or the future. You can wish you had moved the chair yesterday or last week, or you can think about moving it sometime in the future, but neither your wishes nor your thoughts are of any consequence.

You have no power to change your past physically. However, you do have the power in the present moment to change your thoughts, feelings, and attitudes about bygone events. After all, it is your mind, your emotions, and your attitude, and in any single present moment no one has power over them except you--unless you give that power to other people or to past events by the way you choose to think about them.

In effect, you can choose either to react or respond to your past. Reacting to your past is the process of allowing your thoughts to trigger and stir up the same negative emotions about past events you didn't like when you experienced them the first time. Responding to your past is the process of accepting where you are in the present as an okay place to be, then dealing with your past as nothing more than a stream of already lived events that have no direct power over your present other than what you give it. Mentally accept where you are and move on from there.

All too often, when you dredge up unpleasant memories, you trigger the negative emotions of guilt or self-criticism characterized by self-flagellating thoughts of what should have or ought to have been. Or you center the blame on people, events, or bad luck and end up experiencing the negative emotions of anger, hate, self-pity, jealously, revenge, and resentment. Yet you have changed nothing. You have punished no one--except yourself. All you have done is render yourself ineffective and emotionally out of balance, leaving yourself powerless. Which is the easiest way to run a hundred yards: pulling a wagon loaded with two hundred pounds of bricks, or remaining totally unimpeded of anything dragging along behind you?

Retrieved June 15, 2010, from "Your Present Has Power" by Lora Morrow