Somebody posts a ‘Do you remember when xyz’ item on Facebook and I begin to experience joy.
I go for a beer with my old (familiar and old – LOL) and we natter and we become very enthusiastic about ‘the time when….’
Good old feelings arise.

Actually most of what we remember wasn’t quite like that.
We have confabulated elements of our memories. We shrunk them down, bits fell off and we stowed them away in our unconsciousness - be there such a place. Just like a zipped down file on a computer storage device. When we pulled the memories back out again the original events weren’t like that but we got to feel something that resembled a recollection – a re COLLECTION – of feelings
They are just feelings and repeatedly running the memories will initially intensify the joy (or whatever your emotion is) and then the intensity will transform into a different set of feelings or will dissipate.

In point of fact most bad memories got bad through practice – BAD PRACTICE!
and
most good memories got good through practice – GOOD PRACTICE!
It’s all Practice, practice, practice – whatever you practice, you will get skilled at
I may be misquoting him but Richard Bandler has said

“The best thing about the past is that it is over”.

Thinking about it that way and I have to agree.
It is how we experience what’s left behind that is important and what is left behind is not the actual event but a printed memory; an imprint. That’s emotional.
There may be physical scarring or damage but the emotional stuff is running the show.
PTSD – Post-traumatic stress disorder, no matter the event is the reaction to memories, even if it (the feelings) are suppressed. There are things that can be done using eye movement to change the emotional impact. I use Integral Eye Movement Therapy and I’ve watched the inexplicable occur as I’ve used it. I was so fascinated by it that trained to become a trainer in it!
For me Bad memories tend to lose their impact and I can keep reducing the intensity by repeating a bad memory in my mind and reducing the emotional impact deliberately. That’s not denial. It’s Adjustment! Just like using knobs and dials on a control panel.
Remember, whatever you resist will persist. Its change that is required not denial.
My control panel, is my mind:

I can change the pictures that I see in my mind
Push images away, shrink them down, and increase the size of images from good memories of the same event.
Change the where I see them to different positions
Turn sounds up and down.
Change the sounds of people’s voices – their tonality, the words they use. Make them sound like Mickey Mouse
I can change the intensity of the feeling – damp it down, crank it up.
I can change the words that I use to describe the event.

There really isn’t much that I can’t do in my mind, ask any good Neuro Linguistic Practitioner.
It really is like the old gag:
      “Its mind over matter – if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter”
There is also changing the enquiry you are having about the past:
      If you don’t like the answer you get, ask a better question!

And I can move my eyes in differing patterns while I remember the event and experience it changing.

What limits our experience is how we use our mind and our body. The ‘use’ is our spirit – how we inspire ourselves.
      It’s Mind, Body, Spirit, Practice and Communication

#JustSaying

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According to Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation

“Confabulation (verb: confabulate) is a memory disturbance, defined as the production of fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, without the conscious intention to deceive.[1] Confabulation is distinguished from lying as there is no intent to deceive and the person is unaware the information is false …..

I have read a lot of posts about Gratitude, particularly in the context of attracting desires into our lives or as most would say by “The Law of Attraction”.

When I was I my early twenties, I was attacked by a drug crazed idiot who went onto kick the legs away from my then fiancé and punch my mother in the face.

I cannot feel grateful for that BUT I do appreciate what that caused.
It caused very positive changes in the people involved. It could have been the entire opposite.

What then of gratitude? Can one be truly grateful for everything? Or can one be grateful for having the opportunity to experience everything?
Probably the latter.

Is one attracting things or is one attracting the experience of those things?
After all experience is no more than memory and emotions can be felt through memory or imagination – both create memories and both create experience.

"Create your own adventure because experience is all that there is" ⒸAyPee

Curiosity

Being curious is an attitude that keeps you present, aware when possibility and opportunity arise. Once you create a rule for your life ("That's how it is") , you have fixed a stake in your timeline that has you fixed in the past. Always review and be curious

“The greatest attribute Humans have and the worst is that we have feelings. Some say we are Human Doings not Human Beings.
Actually we are Human Feelings”

~ AyPee

Life exists within Stories

"Life exists within Stories.
That's all we have left from our experiences and we use them to teach and to gain rapport.
It's the glue which holds us together in community and culture.
They aren't true.  They're just agreements "

~AyPee

Stor: ies / eys / ed ties

It's all a story!
Sometimes words just show up and I find myself playing with them.
I try to break them, reconstruct them, see what else I can do with them, look for the ambiguity in them ………… and always have fun with them …. to see where my logic takes me.

As a child, I was fortunate enough to have had parents that told me stories at bedtime and  on occasions during the day, stimulating my imagination and creating my reality. Kids just play and what they do is live out what adults would call Unreal situations in a very real way.

I decided about 11 years ago that Santa Claus is real and I am looking forward to him visiting my house again this year – this may be a problem since I haven’t been good this year but when I’m bad, I am probably at my best!  ;-D
and
I don’t think it helped, when I said a few years back: “I don’t care who you are! You are not parking that thing here!”
So what about stories?

STORIES ARE EVERYWHERE
ALL THE TIME

Newspapers carry stories. TV News present stories. Theatres play stories. The film industry makes millions from creating and selling stories. Authors.. painters …artists… gift their stories to the world.
When we communicate with each other we tell a story as soon as we can get it into the conversation, to  illustrate what we are saying. Yeah Right! We probably just can’t help ourselves; we are compelled to do it.
Social media is full of stories and most technology is there to support the creation and telling of stories.

So, what's the story?

My Life Is A Story (and so is yours)

a simple story developed by stacking stories on top of stories into storeys and the dangerous thing is when the simple story becomes a stored tie. We can get tied into a story that we constructed and then fix our reality to it, losing the flexibility of the imaginative child, that we always were and will probably always be.

Personally, I believe we are designed to forget contrary to the view of a good friend of mine, who believes we are designed to remember. That’s one entity with 2 perspectives or at least that’s my story.

The great thing about stories is that they are all made up and if your life is a story and you made it up, then you can make up what you like from NOW on.  We all do it anyway.

Take, as an example 2 old boys in the pub (actually my mate Rob and I. We are both young sexagenarians and we have known each other for 50 years) recalling the time that we went to The Alexandra Palace ‘Love In’ :

Do you remember going the the Ally Pally ‘Love-in’ in  Pat’s Austin Westminster?

We didn't, we took the train!

We can’t of done! We went to Waterloo Station first and drove up to Wood Green.

That wasn't Waterloo! That was Charing Cross and we caught the tube!

Same event, 2 different stories.
The point being,  because the detail gets forgotten, the story won’t run and each of us has plugged the gaps with our own detail so the story can run – we have Confabulated

According to Miriam Webster Free Dictionary:

“Fabricate imaginary experiences as compensation for loss of memory”

So, here's the deal:

Since all (life) stories are based on PAST events, we have to recall them and actually recreate them NOW. The detail, or lack of it, is stored in different areas of our brain and we have to pull it all together to be able to present it as fact …… which it isn’t,  since we will probably have confabulated so that the construction can be complete.

Its not what happened. It is the story of what happened - a sensual representation of events. We would have deleted, distorted and generalised our experience.

If I were to tell you my life story in full detail, it would take more than 61 years to tell. Before  I would have finished I would have died and you would be bored witless!!
So, as a matter of course, I have to delete, distort and generalise.

You can hold great store by that

"Create your own adventure because experience is all that there is" Ⓒ ~ Arthur Partridge AyPeeCo

Language

“Language is currency.
Invest it wisely. Use it thoughtfully and above everything else, ENJOY it !”~ AyPee

image teacherfiles.com