For getting a brand new day is truly more important than holding on to yesterday.
I had just finished watching an episode of Healing Matrix hosted by Dr. Sue Morter. I admit I have not been following the show on Gaia, but instead I’ve found a few episodes that had been posted on YouTube by the Gregg Braden Official channel. Rather, they found me. It’s always interesting to notice which notifications or videos I feel drawn to regarding the timeframe in which it happens.
This title, ‘forgetting yesterday’ came to me this morning as I was getting my son ready for his first official school day. I had been preparing my mind for my first day of being entirely alone again. It had been months since I’d had time alone like this, because everyone in our household was working on a rotary schedule since the first lockdown of 2020. I had been craving this alone time. I knew I had to sit down and write something today but honestly, the idea of writer’s block had me anxious. Instead of walking around worried about the 4 and a half hours I’d be having to myself, I stayed mindful, missioning to have my son at school on time. My mind, on the other hand, kept whispering to me: “forgetting yesterday”. I allowed it to serve as a mantra or chant, to help me return to the present, focused on today; forgetting yesterday.
Then, as I was finishing up my chores; cleaning the work/play room in order to have enough space for my laptop, I decided to approach with a fresh pot of coffee. I had just finished talking to my sister over the phone when I fired up the gas stove, and the last thing I remembered seeing on the screen was a YouTube notification of Gregg Braden. The video was titled ‘Total Body Memory Recall – The Courage to Awaken from Past Memories’. Intrigued, I opened the notification thinking that it must be about some kind of ‘past life’ stuff. I sure do like the stranger topics emerging lately, but this was not as esoteric as I had expected.
In the video, Dr. Morter talks with a physical therapist called Jonathan Tripodi, founder of the Body Memory Recall approach. I don’t want to spoil too much of the video content for those who enjoy seeking out new information, but I will share the main message of the video to broaden our understanding of the concept of body memory and how it can both benefit and disrupt us in our experience of life. Body memory is a scientifically proven phenomenon that has only recently been receiving the attention it deserves. The fact is that our mind is not the only ‘place’ in which we store memory and neither are our muscles. I’m sure most people have heard of the concept of muscle memory for the purposes of training, body-building and enhancing our physical skills, but the body’s capacity to store and retrieve memory is much vaster than this.
In actuality, our entire body contains the memories of every experience that we have encountered, perhaps not only in this life. We know that our cells are conscious individuals, each specified for an intended purpose, but they are also individual in their intelligence and ability to record and recall the data from every past experience. This information is not only held by each cell, but also copied and transferred to every newly created cell. In case this idea seems bizarre, it is well-known that the body continually loses old, damaged and dead cells, while creating and releasing new ones. In order for the cells to function in unison with the already existing body and mind, they must be programmed to contain similar information than the other cells that make up the body. This programming (memory) is recorded and coded into the very DNA of each cell.
This is the basic structure of body memory, and could even explain why we might soon find that we also possess access to the memories of our ancestors, as they pass along their genes including their own body memory through reproduction. Well, now look at me, contemplating seemingly mystic possibilities prematurely. Let’s leave the speculation to the doctors and scientists studying these fields in-depth, and return to the purpose of our own body memory with information already discovered and understood by them.
When we experience a traumatic event it is beneficial to our survival thereof to store and suppress conscious awareness of the event itself. There had been numerous accounts of adults finding out (remembering) things they had experienced as children only years afterwards, giving rise to the pain that they had buried in their subconscious minds. This allows them to not only re-experience the event, but to properly process, accept and release the emotions attached to it. This had been done through various methods like hypnosis, meditation or past-life regressions and now includes the Body Memory Recall (BMR) approach. Basically, when using the BMR technique your only objective is to allow your awareness to fully penetrate the body.
Often we are focused solely on our thoughts, goals and tasks. We might believe somehow that it would be selfish to focus on ourselves or the body we inhabit, yet when we do find ourselves focusing our attention towards the body it is in light of the pain, disease or discomfort we feel, or whatever physical attributes we’d like to change. All of this only allows us to suppress the emotional storage units found within the body. The pain or discomfort is a signal trying to tell us about something we may need to release, it isn’t always pointing towards something we need to change about ourselves but rather something we simply need to remember. It is the pursuit of attempting to forget that only has us holding the memories in place, within the very cells that make up our body. Remembering instead, will release the emotions and memories of the past.
Forgetting yesterday is only for getting yesterday.
