Here’s a story to start the New Year:

A master and his student were walking by a river. They came upon a beautiful young woman who needed to cross over.

The master picked her up, carried her across the river, and put her down on dry ground.

Then the master and student walked on.

As they walked, the student grew more and more agitated. Finally he burst out, “How could you touch and carry that woman on your shoulders?! That’s against everything we believe!”

The Master said, “I left her by the river. Why are you still carrying her?”

We’ve all got that student inside of us.

There’s a part of the mind that harbors memories of incompleteness from the past.

We carry this incompleteness as body tensions, emotional distress, and self-limiting thoughts. Have you noticed?

A part of the mind loves to stew and fret over memories, reliving insults and injuries infusing them with new life! Argghh. But there’s more to you than this carrying-on mind.

There’s also a part of you that is the master.

The master-in-you offers a way of being that meets the world free of beliefs and emotional distress.

This master-in-you awareness fully and authentically meets the present moment—engaging with life on its terms.

The master-in-you allows life to point the way.

It’s the student that believes he/she knows better than life and thus clings to out-moded belief, seeking safety in rules, trying to control and manipulate situations.

The master-in-you sees where you carry patterns of incompleteness – in your body, emotions, thoughts, and behaviors.

The master-in-you sees all this carrying-on without judgment. The master sees with warmth, humor, and love.

Adopt the master’s view for a moment.

And take a look into your mind, emotions, thoughts, and body. Look with all the warm, humorous, and loving eyes of the master.

• What memories are you carrying that could cause you to suffer and struggle in this New Year?
• How do you carry them in your body, emotions, thoughts, behaviors?

What would it mean to put them down—to stop carrying them?

What does it mean to put memories down?

It doesn’t mean forgetting events. If it rained on your parade in fourth grade . . . it rained.

Letting go doesn’t mean blacking out or suppressing your awareness of the past.

Letting go means releasing your commitment to sustaining emotional incompleteness.

There’s a part of you—the student, carrying-on mind – that sustains its identity through perpetuating emotional incompleteness.

But there’s another part of you—the master—that prefers to live free of emotional incompleteness.

Releasing memory from the overlays of emotional justification and the entanglements of personal identification, allows the past to be complete.

By letting the past be complete—without the addition of emotion or identification—experience is completed.

What is left when memory is purified of emotion and identification?

Wisdom.

Not ideas, rules, resolutions, or goals. Rather a clarity about your life and a way to embody and fulfill that clarity in the nitty-gritty of your situation.

The master isn’t following rules. The master is following the Call.

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Editor: Bryonie Wise