Are You Haunted by Ghosts?

Halloween is a big thing around our house. My wife is  a Halloween nut, so consequently my two daughters, Matrix Chick and Fingers ( who from here on will be referred to as  The Rock ) have been frothing at the mouth about getting dressed up and trick or treating. One was a fairy and the other was Minnie Mouse. We were going to take them trick or treating but didn’t because they were having too much fun handing out candy to other trick or treaters.

The Fairy and Minnie Mouse

With all this Halloween Hoopla and stuff on TV,  The Chick has been seeing ghosts lately. “Dad, there’s a ghost in my room”  or “I think there’s a ghost outside.”  Of course, I tell her that there’s no such things as ghosts, even though I know that there are.

I was watching Larry King interview a couple of guys that have this ghost lab that investigates paranormal occurences. One of the guys suggested that a ghost is the residual energy of a deceased person that won’t go away because there is unfinished business.

I wonder if you are  haunted by the energy of unfinished business? Are you aware of spectres from your past that keep you stuck in fear and trepidation? For some people, these demons are very real.

It’s said that ghosts, if indeed they do exist, don’t know they are dead or don’t want to be dead. They try to stay among the living, caught in a netherland of not alive but not dead.

How true that can be for many of us that are haunted by past tragedies, traumas, mistakes, and failures. Did  events happen in your life that should have stayed buried  that you continue to resurrect from the grave of  the past? Oftentimes these memories can take possession of us and keep us from moving forward.

Failed businesses, painful relationships, bitter divorces, the loss of a loved one, letting someone down big-time,  stupid yet costly mistakes, times when we felt we did not measure up to our ideal self. All can become goblin-like, so scary  that we never even try again or make judgements about ourselves which are no longer (perhaps never were) true. So we stay inside, windows shuttered, doors locked, afraid to venture out into possibility.

We all have a tendency to look to the  past for information about how to act in the future. But the future does not have to equal the past. What’s also true is that we are human, and as such, we will make mistakes, suffer loss, hurt people, and fail, perhaps many times before we get it right.  You are human, are you cool with that?

I’m no ghostbuster, but I think that  to allow these ghosts to rest in peace, you may need to:

• Forgive yourself
• Forgive someone else
• Apologize to someone
• Make it up so someone
• Reconnect with someone
• Write a letter but don’t mail it
• See the experience from a different perspective
• Recommit to our ideal self
• Find the wisdom and learning from the experience and move on.
• Change something major in your life (it’s said that those ghosts don’t like remodeling)

If you need a little technique to release the past, try this:

Close your eyes and get comfortable, taking some deep breaths. When you feel centered and grounded, See, feel or get a sense of the situation, person, or experience you want to release. Imagine cords of light connecting you to this situation, person, etc. See, feel or get a sense of a magic or special knife or sword or scissors in your hand and begin to cut the cords connecting you. When you are done, reattach the cords back to your self and imagine the cords of the person or situation reattaching themselves back to it or them. Imagine the situation or person fading away or getting smaller or smaller until they disappear. Imagining a grave where the situation/person is buried can be helpful to some people.

This is a good time to talk about letting these ghosts rest in peace; today is Dia de Los Muertos, Day of the Dead. Honor what came before and what is no more, taking the legacy of knowledge and wisdom and moving courageously into tomorrow.