How to stop worry and regret

The 5th way that your ego erodes your happiness

“There is no lasting resting point for the unliberated mind, only some brief moments of appreciation and immersion, and then the mind starts worrying, planning, feeling tension all over again. Life is a never-ending dance between moments of feeling good and moments of feeling bad.”  Phillip Moffitt

This article is the last of five articles on the harmful ways in which your egoic mind behaves. I call them the Five Red Flags of Ego, namely:

• Judging,

• Blaming,

• Endless seeking,

• Controlling, and

• Regretting and worrying.

If you are engaging in any of these behaviours, then you can be fairly sure that your fearful egoic mind or protective personality is acting out. As mentioned in prior articles, the ego engages in these behaviours because it thinks it will keep you safe. But this is a lie and it backfires, causing you and others pain.

This article is about regretting and worrying.

Without you being aware, your egoic mind lives almost exclusively in the past and the future. It loves to dwell on the past and worry about the future. In fact, it can not stay in the present moment, so spends most of its time dragging you back into old memories from past events and predicting and fretting about future events.  

Although you might not think that a bit of regret or worry is a bad thing, or perhaps you think it might even be healthy, you will see here that regret and worry have no meaningful purpose and are simply the result of your immature egoic mind.

The past does not predict the future

Although the past is gone, your egoic mind thinks that the past still exists and is directly impacting the current situation as well as the future. For example, it thinks that because it rained on your birthday last year, it might rain again. So, you select a different day for your party, and it rains anyway. It thinks that because your boyfriend betrayed you two years ago, a future partner will probably do the same. It thinks that if you missed a dentist appointment last year, you are likely to forget the next one.

So what your ego does, to deal with these “predictions,” is not just worry and fear that it could happen again (which is a compete waste of time) but it spends hours trying to figure out ways to prevent it from happening again. Usually unsuccessfully. It actually believes that worry and planning will prevent bad things from happening. Yet we have no idea if this is true.

Your ego not only can’t stop thinking about things in the past, but assumes the past is permanent and the only way to avoid its impact is to deny it or control it. In its' narrow mindset, your ego thinks that if you control, manage and arrange things in a particular way, things will work out. Yet they don’t. Indeed, the very act of anticipating that things might go wrong, can result in predictive programming, causing things to happen they way you thought they would.

The ego also spends significant time regretting what happened in the past and wishing it hadn’t happened at all, which is also a waste of time.  

As for the future, the ego also believes, erroneously, that something that happens today will result in something specific happening tomorrow. As a result makes you fearful, careful and overly thoughtful. It thinks about all the things that could possibly go wrong and tries to control them. Yet, they may never happen. This happens 24/7 even though we have almost no idea how things come into being or how life actually unfolds.

Not living in the moment

A more significant problem, however, is that when we are looking behind or ahead, we are oblivious to the present moment. And this is where everything is actually occurring. Indeed, it is the only moment that really exists. The rest are just thoughts. This is a huge blind spot in our awareness. As author Pema Chodron says, when you orient toward the future you can never relax into what you have,  

“One of the most powerful teachings of the Buddhist tradition is that as long as you are wishing for things to change, they never will. As long as you are wanting to get better you won’t. As long as you have an orientation toward the future, you can never relax into what you already have or already are.” Pema Chodron

Some suggest that this egoic tendency to focus on the past and the future is at the root of most of our human problems. That is because (if you think about it) there are actually no “problems” in the present moment. There are just situations. You either deal with them or you don’t.  Life circumstances are simply showing up and if you do not touch them or label them, they don’t stick. Only when you judge them or cast a shadow from the past or future, do you evoke feelings of things like regret, worry, shame or guilt. In fact, it’s the egoic mind that turns a simple situation into a problem.

The cost of regret and guilt

Regret is perhaps one of the most brutal tools of the ego. In its fearful state it actually thinks you need to repeatedly go over past events in order to learn your lessons.

It tells you that it is necessary to feel embarrassment, shame and other harsh emotions in order to prevent you from making the same mistakes you made, and thus keep you safe. Your ego will berate you and condemn you for something that happened years ago. It will remind you of how bad it was and create a constant knot of worry. It won’t let it go.

In his book “The Addicted Mind” Gerald Jampolsky refers to these thoughts as “guilt bombs.” They are memories of things that we did in the past and now feel guilty about. As Osho says, guilt is not only wrong, but a complete waste of time and worse, has actually been used to keep people weak,

“I am utterly against any kind of guilt. Guilt is absolutely wrong. But is has been used by priests and the politicians and the puritans down the ages, for centuries. Guilt is a strategy to exploit people, to make them feel guilty. Once you have succeeded in making them feel guilt, they will be your slaves.“

There may be no past and no future

And to make things more confusing, there is emerging science that suggests that the past and future do not actually exist.  Although it might seem odd to the logical mind, there is evidence that our very thoughts are actually making things happen – moment by moment. Our thoughts are projecting things into being. In his book, “Love is Letting Go of Fear” Gerald Jampolsky explains it this way:  

“What would happen if we believed that what we see is determined by the thoughts in our mind? Perhaps we could entertain an idea, that may at the moment seem unnatural and foreign to us; namely that our thoughts are the cause and what we see is the effect. It would then make no sense to blame the world or those in it for the miseries and the pain we experience, because it would be possible then to consider perception as “a mirror and not a fact.”  … like a motion picture camera, projecting our internal state onto the world. “  

So what to do?

So how do you deal with your impulse to regret and worry? By noticing it and out-growing it. First watch it in action and you will see that it does nothing to improve your life and actually prevents you from enjoying life. In this realization, your ego will mature, let go of its compulsions and start living more in the present moment. And you will be happier.

As well, there is a particularly powerful tool for guilt and regret, and that is forgiveness. The most powerful thing you can do to overcome regret is to forgive. This means forgiving yourself and all those involved. The level of forgiveness that works best is the type mentioned in “A Course in Miracles,” in which you come to realize that there was actually nothing wrong in the first place. So, there is nothing to actually forgive. We are all innocent at the most fundamental level, as described here:

“Forgiveness is, of course, a very desirable quality, but often we misunderstand what it means. Forgiveness means finally seeing that the other person was not responsible for what we thought came from them.  …  [As opposed to pardoning someone which] is intellectual, pseudo, and self-deceptive. It puts us more out of touch with our inner experience. It can even inflate the ego, because we think we are generous enough to forgive. True forgiveness means understanding that the original blame was wrong; it is not the granting of a pardon for what we mistakenly believe someone has done to us.“ John Ruskan  

This level of forgiveness can be difficult for many people to understand, yet it is the level that frees you from your ego-created guilt and shame in one fell swoop.

Here is some non-worry/regret behaviours  

• I rarely worry about the future

• I don’t dwell on the past

• I see my past as my education

• I don’t harbour bad feelings from past events

• I forgive myself and others

• I tend to stay in the present moment

In my next entries I talk about:

• How to transcend the ego

• What is the shadow?

• How to do shadow-work?

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This is an excerpt from the book I am writing: “Wake the F Up.” Thanks for joining me on the journey! This Substack is completely supported by you the readers. The best way to support me is to buy my books, invite me to speak or become a subscriber here.