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I have heard two schools of thought on this. The first school says that habitual (often unconscious) patterns of thought (mostly erroneous beliefs caused by painful experiences) hold you back, and that gaining understanding and insight into how those thoughts and beliefs originated can help you release them and free your mind for accomplishing greather things. This is generally accomplished by some form of therapy, whether that is self-therapy (such as meditation, or Eugene Gendlin's focusing technique) or any of the various forms of psychotherapy. The second school says that it is counterproductive to dwell on past negative thoughts and beliefs, and that dwelling on positive beliefs, thoughts and actions will eventually cause the old beliefs to shrivel and fade away. This is also the "feel the fear and do it anyway" school, because it acknowledges that your old beliefs will resist your efforts to move forward, and you may not understand at first what is causing the fear. I know the advocates of Abraham-Hicks teachings will say that the latter approach is preferable, but is there still value in gaining insight about your past? |
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I think too that it might depend on exactly what the individual has repressed. If there is a lot of repressed trauma from the past I have a feeling that maybe the former school of thought might be appropriate but if the repressed material is not too traumatic then maybe the latter would be more appropriate. What might be easy for one person to release, may require a lot more work and help for another to release depending on their personality type so I don't think there is a right or wrong answer to this. Interesting question. Thanks for the link to Gendlin's site. I had read about this before but never got around to looking into it, so thanks for the reminder :-) |
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I have read both school of thoughts, both have relevance, and can be useful to the person. The second approach seems more practical, but what is right for one person may not be right for another, so it would be up to the individual to decide how far they want to go with this, and what the benefits of doing one or the other are? |
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