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Mental energy is such a precious resource.

It can be used intelligently, and devoted to the process of creating the life of your dreams. Or it can leak away and be wasted while your mind secretly dwells on the demons of your past.

The problem is that until you dispel the demons of your past, a substantial portion of your mental energy will be allocated to them. As a result, you may only have access to only 50 percent of your usable mental energy, instead of the full 100 percent.

Wouldn’t you rather allocate your mental energy as you please, and use it towards completing more important tasks such as, oh I don’t know, writing that book you’ve wanted to get started for the past few years, acing that class you’ve been struggling with the entire semester, or tackling <insert daunting and spectacular project here>?

Answered yes? Keep reading.

My Biggest Demon

In the second grade, about 15 years ago, I decided one Monday that I didn’t feel like being in class for the remainder of the day, so I would devise an intricate plan to get my mom to come and pick me up from school. I told my teacher that I was feeling sick and asked her if I could go to the restroom with the most authentic “sick” face I could possibly muster up. She graciously granted my request.

When I finally got to the restroom, I waited around for a few minutes, washed my hands, and returned explaining to my teacher that I had just spent the last five minutes puking my guts out, and that I had to go home. To top it off, I figured I would be extra tricky and tell her I had been throwing up the last few days at home also, just so she felt extra sorry for me and so that my lie made even more sense.

My mom was there in no time to pick me up, and had a look of confusion on her face when she arrived. In front of my teacher, she asked me how I was perfectly fine that morning, and how I managed to start throwing up just a few hours later. My teacher interjected and asked my mom about me being sick the past few days. My mom told her that she had no idea what I was talking about, and that there must have been a misunderstanding.

There was no misunderstanding. I had definitely lied through my teeth no more than 20 minutes ago.

I walked out of the classroom holding my mom’s hand while looking back at my teacher, and make no mistake about it, she was glaring at me. I flashed a devious smile her way, and was mentally preparing to celebrate my victory over a fun game of Super Mario Brothers.

Round 1 goes to Rahul!

Little did I know, my teacher was determined to win Round 2 and the rest of the subsequent rounds the very next day. I should’ve known better than to get involved in a battle of wits with such a vindictive woman. I would soon find out she didn’t care if I was a 3 foot tall second grader, or a 6 foot tall teacher like her. She would have the final say on this matter.

When I arrived at class the next day sporting an “I’m all better now” look on my face, everything went like it always did; nothing was out of the ordinary. However, as soon as the class settled down, something strange happened. My teacher exclaimed that she had an announcement to make. She called me up to the front of the class.

She wouldn’t dare!

Standing right next to me, she put her hand on my shoulder and announced to the class that I was a liar, and that I shouldn’t be trusted because of what I did the day before. Immediately everyone started chanting LIAR, LIAR! I busted into tears, searching for sympathy and consolation from my classmates. There was none to be had.

It was the most humiliating moment of my entire life, and at the time I felt incredibly angry and embarrassed. I was wondering how a woman as old as her could do something like this to a kid as young as me. I thought adults were supposed to be compassionate and mature, not vindictive and retaliatory. What was she trying to prove by humiliating me in front of the whole class?

For the rest of the year my nickname was “The Liar”, and none of my friends ever really trusted me again. Fortunately for me, my family moved the next year and I transferred to a new school.

Everyone Has Their Share of Demons

This experience hardly seems like a “demon” to me now, but when it actually happened 15 years ago it was a huge deal to me. Rather than facing and dealing with this experience emotionally when I was 7 years old, my mind has slowly absorbed and filed away the pain associated with it over time. This doesn’t mean the memory ceases to exist in my mind, and it doesn’t mean the negative energy associated with it has dissipated on its own as I’ve grown older.

We all have disagreeable things happen to us at all stages of our lives, and many times we are unprepared to deal with the wave of emotions we feel when these things happen. The mind has developed a coping mechanism to deal with such experiences to ensure mental and emotional stability in the future.

Given this truth, everyone should give the exercise outlined in this article a fair chance. Empty your mind of any preconceived notions or beliefs you may have for a short amount of time while you give the exercise a try.  Don’t attempt to intellectualize the process, just dive right in and see if it works for you.

Objectify Your Demons

Disclaimer: If you decide to complete the exercise outlined below, take note that it can be a highly emotional process.  If you do plan on completing the exercise, please make sure you are in the appropriate state of mind to deal with the “demons” of your past. If you find that you aren’t in the right state of mind, come back later and do the exercise when you feel more prepared to do so. If necessary, seek the help of a trained mental health professional or spiritual guru to guide you along with the process. This is a very serious process and it should be treated as such.

As long as the demons of your past stay filed away in the depths of your subconscious mind they will continue to wreak havoc on your supply of mental energy. You must learn to objectify your demons, and bring them to the surface of your consciousness. Once you’ve managed to do this, you must befriend these demons, neutralize their parasitic effect on your mind, and then neatly file them away in your mind’s database of memories.

Here’s how you do it.

Exercise: A Trip Down Memory Lane

Lie down or sit somewhere you can get comfortable and relax your entire body. Close your eyes and allow your mind to wander for a minute or so.

Now, rewind through your memory, and pull up the most painful memory in your past that you can find into your mental movie theater. Preferably, it should be an element of your past you haven’t come to terms with yet. If you don’t have the courage to face such a painful memory just yet, choose one that isn’t quite as painful for now.

Once you’ve pulled the memory up, attempt to relive it to the best of your ability. Absorb yourself in the memory; let it play out exactly as it did when it actually happened. If you can’t remember all of the small details, remember whatever you can and stay focused on reliving the memory as accurately as possible.

Notice anything peculiar? Are you feeling some of the emotions and sensations you experienced when the actual event took place? Maybe you’re feeling an equally powerful sensation or emotion as you did when the original event took place. Allow yourself to fully experience this emotional feedback. Decide that you’re not going to run away from it any longer. Understand that as long as you run from this memory, it will have power over you and will continue to sap you of your precious mental energy.

The emotions and sensations you are experiencing are in reality a tied up supply of mental energy. The stronger the emotional feedback, the more tied up mental energy the memory contains. The key to regaining this mental energy is to negate the emotional charge associated with the painful memory. The way to do this is by repeatedly exposing yourself to it.

Now that you’ve run through the memory once, run through it again. And then run through it again and again and again. What you’ll start to find is that the charge associated with the memory slowly begins to diminish, until it eventually disappears entirely.

Relief

When I relived my most painful memory for the first time, it stung almost as painfully as when it actually happened 15 years ago. Feelings of anger, embarrassment, and humiliation immediately resurfaced. It was fascinating to observe how something that happened so long ago still had such a deep effect on me.

After neutralizing the charge of the memory by running through it many times, I felt incredibly relieved. It was like a huge burden had been lifted off my shoulders, and I was free to move around again as I pleased. I quickly figured out that if I were to continue applying this process to all of the memories in my past with a charge, no matter how small the charge, I would free up a considerable amount of mental energy in no time.

I’ve been using this process for over a year now, and let me tell you, it’s made a HUGE difference in my life. I now have more mental energy at my disposal to delegate to important tasks. Emotionally, I’m more stable. My focus has enhanced considerably. I’m more productive and things get done faster and more efficiently than ever before.

Don’t Just Sit There, Give It a Try

Regaining conscious control over the allocation of your mental energy is not the easiest of processes, but trust me, it’s definitely one of the most rewarding processes you can commit to. There will be a night and day difference between your productive capacities before and after going through this much needed tune-up.

Afterwards, you’ll notice life flows better than it used to, because you will be able to concentrate a larger portion of your mental energy towards your most important tasks. For example, these words simply flow out of my fingers without much conscious thought, while prior to going through the tune-up process myself, these articles were much more tedious for me to write (which was half of the reason I gave up a year ago).

Of course, after completing the process numerous times you’ll occasionally identify a demon of your past you happened to overlook the first few times around. But when that time comes you’ll be prepared to deal with the demon consciously and come to terms with it, no longer allowing it eat up your precious mental energy. It’s an ongoing purification process, and as you face and neutralize more and more demons of your past, you’ll gain greater access to your usable mental energy. You’ll finally have the ability to allocate it as you see fit.

Sounds amazing, doesn’t it? Now get in that movie theater, and start watching some of your old personal faves and make it happen! :)

Please do share your experiences after completing the exercise outlined above. I’m very interested to see how it may have helped you, and what benefits you experienced after freeing up some of your mental energy. Plus, others will get to see that I’m not the only quack this process has worked for.

Stay tuned for Part 2, which I will post in the near future. The article will be on how to free up mental energy by addressing areas of stress in your life. While this article deals with demons of the past, the next article will focus on the demons of the present and how to identify and face them courageously.

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“A man sooner or later discovers that he is the master-gardener of his soul, the director of his life.”

- James Allen

The above statement is a truth most people realize later than sooner, and sometimes never at all.

These powerless people spend their whole life looking to someone else to give them direction, handle their problems, and assure them everything will be okay and work out the way it’s supposed to.

But for some reason, their desired results never manifest in reality. Sure enough, after it’s too late these poor souls come to realize they squandered their chance to live the life of their dreams simply because they refused to accept total responsibility for their results.

Be completely honest with yourself when you answer the following question.

Are you one of these people?

• Do you believe that in miraculous fashion, the results you desire will appear out of thin air without putting your nose to the ground and consciously creating them yourself?

• Do you constantly turn the other cheek when faced with an important task or area of your life requiring urgent attention and think to yourself I’ll get to it later, it’ll be okay until then?

• Do you attempt to delegate your responsibility to someone else by constantly blaming others for your persistent mediocrity and failures?

How the hell am I so good at diagnosing the symptoms of a classic case of Relinquished Responsibility Syndrome (RRS)?

Because up until recently, I suffered from a case of the same syndrome myself!

How I Came to the Realization

About a month ago, as I was reading Steve Pavlina’s brilliant book for the very first time, it suddenly dawned upon me that my life looked nothing like the dream life I had spent so much time imagining. Even worse, I realized that if I continued down the path I was on at that moment in time any longer, there was absolutely NO WAY I would ever create something even CLOSE to resembling the life of my dreams.

I began to investigate the cause of my less than spectacular results, and after much deliberation I finally ran head first into the source of all of my problems.

Subconsciously I believed my parents would always make sure everything would be alright, and that they would take care of me and accept responsibility for the areas of my life I chose to turn away from.

No! This couldn’t be. Here I was thinking that for the last 21 years of my life I was the master and commander of my ship, while in reality I was subconsciously sabotaging my results by relinquishing my responsibility to my parents the whole time.

So THAT’S what my Dad has been babbling on about for the last three years. Oooooooh!

As soon as I realized this truth, no other action was required on my part. It was an absolutely HUGE insight that had an immediate and drastic effect on the way I looked at my life.

• No longer did I look to my parents to tell me what needed to be done.

• No longer did I turn the other cheek to the ugly reality of my situation, thinking it would all sort itself out in time.

• No longer did I wait around for the results I desired to manifest in my reality.

I immediately started taking action. I put my nose to the ground and started 30 day trials for new habits I wished to form. I changed my career back to one centered in purpose, passion, and contribution. I created a new daily routine that facilitated my productivity on a day-to-day basis. I made an active effort to ensure the relationships in my life were empowering and of high quality.

I realized that no one else has to live with the results in my life except for me. I can complain to people until their ears fall off, but at the end of the day they can leave my life behind and go back to wherever they came from. I don’t have that luxury.

Neither do you.

Taking Back Control of Your Results

Take a moment to look around and investigate the state of your reality.

Are you proactively creating the life of your dreams by consciously accepting complete responsibility for your results?

If your answer to the above question is yes, but for some reason the results haven’t shown up yet, then ask yourself:

Five, ten, or twenty years down the line will the path that I’m on right now lead me to a life filled with the results I desire?

If the answer to this question is no, then it’s time to do a self-diagnosis for Relinquished Responsibility Syndrome. If you skipped it the first time around, scroll back up to the bulleted and bolded questions at the beginning of the article and answer each one as honestly as you possibly can.

If after answering these questions you come to realize that you haven’t been accepting responsibility for your results up until now, then you should be feeling the immediate need to take action and change things up. If you don’t feel a sense of urgency, and you aren’t instantly able to see the connection between responsibility and results, nothing has changed and you haven’t deeply realized the truth of your situation.

Keep exploring the source of your Relinquished Responsibility Syndrome until you find the answer that gives you an AH HA! moment. It should make you want to get off your ass and start fixing your life right away.

Remember, no one else has to live with the results in your life except for you. Accept this truth, and you will find that manifesting the results you desire is much easier. No longer will you constantly sabotage your efforts by relinquishing responsibility for your results to someone else. That brings us back to Mr. James Allen and his words of infinite wisdom.

Sooner or later you will realize that you are the master-gardener of your soul, the director of your life.

Let’s make it sooner rather than later.

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