Dealing With the Past on the Level of the Present the Key to Beating Depression

Here is a key passage from Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment:

[D]eal with the past on the level of the present. The more attention you give to the past the more you energize it, and the more likely you are to make a "self" out of it. Don't misunderstand: Attention is essential, but not to the past as past. Give attention to the present; give attention to your behavior, to your reactions, moods, thoughts, emotions, fears, and desires as they occur in the present. There's the past in you. If you can be present enough to watch all those things, not critically or analytically but nonjudgmentally, then you are dealing with the past and dissolving it through the power of your presence. You cannot find yourself by going into the past. You find yourself by coming into the present.

Depression results when we give up contact with reality, which can only be realized in the present moment, for the mental construct called the past. The past is a present moment that doesn't exist anymore, but people often continue to live in it for long stretches at a time as if it did continue to exist.

Without doubt, emotional trauma from the past has the power to affect us in the reality of the present moment, usually because that trauma was not fully dealt with (fully felt) in the past present moment when it occurred, thereby adding negative emotional energy to the pain-body (see The Pain-body: What is it?).

The pain-body (whether characterized by depression, anxiety, hatred or some other form of negativity) is what affects our present moments, and it can only be dissolved by taking it head on with our complete awareness of it in the present moment.

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