It’s far too easy to get stuck in life. We can get stuck in mental stories of the past or in old patterns of behavior. We can also get stuck in anger and resentment at ourselves, others, and reality itself. And this attachment to the past makes self-improvement in the future way more difficult. But there is a practice in meditation that will help you to let go and begin again anytime you want. As meditation teacher Jack Kornfield says: “No matter how hard the past is, you can always begin again.”
January 2021 is almost over, and statistically speaking that means many of you have already bailed on your New Year’s Resolutions—in fact, January 17th is known as “National Quitter’s Day”. It seems as if the new year gives people far more faith in their discipline than is deserved.
So what is it about the new year that motivates people like this?
I think the obvious answer is that the new year is like a reset, a way to begin again with a clean slate. But this reasoning risks being shallow—just because an important element of the calendar has changed doesn’t mean that your slate is actually clean.
Deciding that January 1st will be the start of the “new you” is fine, but it requires that you first put in the work towards forgiving the “old you”—this is what cleaning one’s slate really means. To ignore or suppress the past is a recipe for failure.
But this isn’t to say that forgiving your past has to be some complicated feat. Meditation has taught me that there is a way—often a really simple way—to let go of the past without suppressing it. Through a combination of attention, compassion, and forgiveness, one can learn how to leave the “old you” in the past in order to truly begin again.
And it’s the key to changing yourself, your habits, and your relationships in a way that will last.
**Note: You can listen to our corresponding podcast episode on the psychology of new year’s resolutions here.**
How To Begin Again
In theory, the concept of beginning again is actually quite simple. The directions could be something like this:
- Take a few deep breaths so that you can clear the mind a bit and bring your attention into the present. Breathe long enough to feel some stability.
- Allow whatever thoughts to arise, especially negative ones, and just notice them.
- Take note of the thoughts that make you mad or resentful towards yourself and others, and take special note of shameful emotions related to your past behavior.
- Understand that they’re all in the past, a place you can’t change. Let them all go and begin again.
You could even simplify it into one sentence: forgive yourself and others, let go of the past, and start your life over today. When you connect to the concept in the right way, it feels this simple. But like many aspects of life, just because it’s simple does not mean it’s easy.
And it’s not a one time move. You will mess up, and so it’s not about purity. Beginning again—as one does countless times during a single session of mindfulness meditation—is beautiful precisely because you can do it over and over.
Yes, like anything, it risks being abused. This is not forgetting the past as in pretending it never happened or suppressing it. Instead, it’s realizing that reality is what it is and you can’t change the past. Plus holding onto the past in an unhealthy way will only mess up the thing you can change, the future.
Personally, I think learning some basic mindfulness meditation—sitting down to familiarize yourself with the mind—is one of the best ways to help simplify your ability to begin again.
Mindfulness Meditation: Simply Begin Again
“The three most important words in mindfulness meditation are simply begin again”
Joseph Goldstein
Many people start meditating with some kind of basic mindfulness practice, like this guided one by Joseph Goldstein. The goal is to settle one’s attention on an object like the breath in order to avoid being lost in thought. They assume it will be a peaceful time and their mind will eventually become cleared of thoughts.
But when they sit down and close their eyes, they collide with the chaos of the mind—the constant waterfall of thoughts on various trains of association. In one moment the mind brings up trauma from your past and in the next, it’s imagining the pizza it wants for dinner. A beginning meditator probably won’t stay with the breath for more than a few seconds at a time—they have to regularly “wake up” to discover that they’ve been lost in thought.
This is how my first attempts at meditation went, and it almost made me give up. I assumed that my mind must be too busy—or at least my focus too dull and scattered—and that I was doomed to be a failed meditator. But early on, I thankfully heard this amazing advice from meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg:
“The healing is in the return, not in never having wandered to begin with.”
After hearing her lecture on this, I realized that I had misunderstood the whole point of the practice. It wasn’t about tightly gripping one’s attention onto the breath and rarely getting lost in thought. It was actually about getting lost, after which you notice it, come back to the breath, and start over. In the framing of Joseph Goldstein, you could summarize the practice in two steps:
- Sit comfortably and gently rest your attention on the breath, wherever you feel it most clearly.
- When you notice that you’ve been lost in thought, take note of the thought and then simply begin again.
So without realizing it, I was already on the right path. In fact, the most important moment in meditation is not when you’re succeeding—when you’re up on the waterskis of mindfulness. More important is the moment when you notice that you’ve fallen. Such a moment brings a beautiful clarity and a genuine opportunity for change.
Nonjudgmentally Letting Go
So on a micro-scale, meditation is all about messing up, nonjudgmentally realizing you messed up, and finding the compassion and will to begin again. In a ten minute meditation, you might do this over a hundred times. But you don’t judge that as failing—you realize that you’ve had over a hundred times to practice the skill of letting go and starting over. And it gets easier each time.
Why shouldn’t we judge ourselves? I can think of three answers to this. First is that even highly skilled meditators regularly get lost in thought—it’s just how the mind works. The second is that the temptation to judge yourself means you aren’t lost in that moment—you’re in the clarity phase of the practice. And lastly, judgment is a form of gripping onto the past and it will block your ability to let go. You cannot begin again if the mind is filled with resentment towards the past.
After letting go, it takes just a few logical steps to realize that you can scale this practice up into a philosophy of life. Again, even though the idea might be simple, implementing it might not be easy. Depending on your mind, it might take a lot of work to view the past with enough compassion to just let go of it. But it’s the only way to achieve real forgiveness towards yourself and others.
Forgiveness
“This ability to begin again has ethical force as well—it’s actually the foundation of forgiveness. The only way to truly forgive another person, or oneself, is to restart the clock in the present.”
Sam Harris
There are countless ways to define forgiveness, and ultimately it’s an individual process. But I want to give one framing of forgiveness that I picked up from spiritual teachers Byron Katie and Stephen Mitchell. The basic idea is to reframe your view of the world: things don’t happen to you but rather for you.
Stephen Mitchell, with paradoxical language typical of spirituality, says “forgiveness is realizing that there isn’t anything to forgive”. His wife Katie defines it in a slightly different way: “forgiveness is realizing that what you thought happened didn’t.”
This echoes the teachings of Franciscan friar Richard Roar who defines love as “accepting what is”. When he talks about forgiveness, he says that the first step is to forgive reality itself. Our egos can get so wrapped up in the specifics of our lives, but when we zoom out in a spiritual way we remember that we are just one note in the symphony of reality.
So we first forgive reality—we let go of our grip on how reality could’ve been. Or as the popular quote says, “Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past.” This does not mean that we just “forgive and forget” in a shallow sense. We seek to understand unjust actions of the past and we don’t take our wrongdoings lightly. As Jack Kornfield says:
“We may resolve to never again permit such harm to come to ourselves or another. And at the same time we can also resolve to release the past and not carry bitterness and hate in our heart.”
jack kornfield, The Practıce of forgıveness
Forgiveness is a release from the past. It takes compassion towards yourself and others. It also takes courage: even though we all have our inner demons, we find the strength and faith for redemption and a fresh start.
So this ability to let go of the past and begin again, no matter how difficult, is the foundation for real forgiveness. And you will strengthen this “letting go muscle” every time you sit to meditate. Even if anger and resentment towards the past still arise, mindfulness will help you to no longer identify yourself with these emotions. You can let go of them quickly and when they’re gone, they’re really gone.
The Purity Trap of Resolutions
“Always remember: If you’re alone in the kitchen and you drop the lamb, you can always just pick it up. Who’s going to know?”
Julia child
So how does this ability to begin again work for resolutions? Basically, it fixes the delusion of purity that enticed us into a new year’s resolution in the first place.
We love purity for its simplicity. There are no messy exceptions—things are neat, categorized, and easy. The new year can feel like a chance to reset, to live life the way that you know you should. A new year’s resolution is like finishing the mountain of dishes that have been piled for a week—the kitchen is now sparkling clean— and vowing to never fall into that trap again.
But let’s be honest, you’re likely to let the dishes pile up again. Reality is messy, it’s not the orderly neatness that our minds crave. Sure, it’d be nice if you stick to your new diet every single day, but we must realize that purity is not the point. The point of setting a new year’s resolution is not to be a pure person but to be a better person. And if the purity of a clean slate is what motivates you, then what will be your motivation once you mess up?
Keep in mind that we’re talking about the ability to begin again, not just the action. Sometimes you should hold onto the past in order to learn some lessons. Begin again doesn’t say that we should let everything go, but that we should be able to let anything go.
So consider practicing this. Sometimes it will be simple and sometimes it will take time and work. But it is a practice, and the more you do it the easier it will get.
