When it is very hard for you to remove anguish from your heart, picture that there are wooden beads in your heart. For every anguish, take out a wooden bead and throw it so far away that it is never seen again. You can do it. Fling the beads away. No longer are you to make a necklace of them in your heart, for such a necklace gets a stranglehold.
These are dull beads We speak of now. They have been hanging around for too long. Two minutes is too long. Many of the anguishing beads in your heart have been there since childhood. Your childhood is important to you, but such beads from your childhood are not to be kept. Whatever events and aftermath from your childhood have congealed in your heart, I ask you to throw them out now.
And as you throw away these beads of discontent, throw them a kiss if you like. You have thought that they are precious and that you must keep an altar to them, or, you simply never had the idea that you could throw them out of your heart. Now you know. And now you pick out these age-old painful thoughts and emotions. You don't want them anymore. They are like spoiled food. You didn't have to be taught to spit out something bad-tasting from your mouth, and yet you have to learn to be done with unwieldy thoughts.
Unwanted thoughts and emotions will burn up in the atmosphere. They will evaporate. Kept, they do harm to your heart. When you fling them away, they are gone. They have no strength except the strength that you give them. You honor them too much. They are an unwanted guest in your heart. They have stayed too long.
You may think that an event today brought soreness to your heart now. The soreness is not new. An occasion from the past came up disguised as something new. It is something old. It has repeated itself. In the past you were cheated, and as soon as you get this old feeling, a red light goes on in your heart, and something is amiss. No matter who cheated you or offended you in whatever way he or she did, no matter the unfairness, no matter the gall, no matter the other’s weakness, no matter the other’s patterns, you, right now, have to let the sweaty beads of your past go. Those who are offending you right now are going through recurrence of old wounds from the past as well. They have been cheated. They have been denied, and they will not let it happen again, so they beat you to it.
It becomes a contest, beloved. They must take advantage before they are taken advantage of. They do not see it this way, of course, for they see it as only fair because of their wounds from the past, the same way you see what you see as unfair. They got the first shot in. They protected themselves ahead of time, and now you seem to be tagging along. They made a pronouncement, and now you react. You feel called on to react with frustration. It has become automatic. And now, once again, I ask you to rise above.
Start by tossing out those beads of previous hurts. Do it for your sake. Do it for theirs. Previous hurts are not doing themselves any good either. Toss out old fermenting anguish in your heart. Beloveds, truly it is nothing new. Others didn't cause it. Whatever others' offense, you took an unhappy bead from their heart and popped it into yours. That was what you did. A few words from them, their intent, their distraction from love, you compounded, and made it yours.
It was always theirs. It was never yours, yet you took it on yourself.
Toss out those hanger-on beads of thought. Watch those beads go over the moon. Watch the moon be not swayed by what has seemed so dreadful to you. Be like the moon.