John Sanei: Why you should take time to reflect and unpack your wisdom this Ramadan.
Ramadan is a time for reflection and I think it is a wonderful opportunity to unpack wisdom. This process stems from the idea that you can have memories with no triggers and you can move from unconscious memories to conscious memories, meaning that you stop blaming your past and on the contrary, start thanking your past. An interesting quote is “the knowledgeable man has to learn something new every day, but the wise man has to unlearn something new every day.”
Letting go of old identities and old trauma are the most important parts of reflection, and in order for us to have a brighter future with more opportunities, the most essential thing for us to do is let go of old expectations. Within our brains, we have developed certain belief systems, from growing up, from our culture, from our families etc. and we continue our lives looking for reasons to prove our belief systems right. So for example, if you had a bad experience with a partner when you were young, you will meet other partners with similar traits, and this will allow you to confirm to yourself that all partners are the same. Which is not the case. But this will be a continuous pattern throughout our lives, reconfirming the belief systems that we believe to be true.
So if you are taking some time out to reflect on your life over Ramadan, I would advise you to take on a practice that will allow you to reverse, release and recalibrate. What I mean by this is to firstly reverse back to where the trauma sits in your mind. Seek help to try to identify these patterns within yourself and find ways to release them, so that you can come out of Ramadan, not only cleansed spiritually and physically but emotionally as well. We are made up of three different bodies – mental, emotional and physical – and healing needs to happen on all of these levels. Memories sit in our emotional bodies and we need to be able to deal with these emotional traumatic hooks in a very specific way. Prayer and being connected to God is an amazing technique, but actually taking on the tools to heal our memories, is a different scenario – it doesn’t make you less or more religious – it just allows you to use different tools to deal with these traumatic memories and to go through the process.
Wisdom is ultimately this idea of letting go of the past, and if we want to prepare for the future in the most exciting and optimistic way, we have to clean our past and release and recalibrate parts of our memories that have kept us stuck in the past. The truth is that all of our memories are just subjective stories that we are holding on to. None of our memories are real, they are simply our interpretation of something that has happened. We must take on the task of reverse, release and recalibrate to allow us to start fresh post-Ramadan.
The first step is to become aware that your memories can be changed. Many of us don’t realise this and many of us don’t even want our memories to change because we feel as though they give us identity. So once we have that awareness, the second point is to seek help. There’s a fantastic modality called “Family Constellations” that can help you see your family lineage objectively playing out in front of you and this is a really interesting tool to help address issues from your childhood. It uses an incredible concept called quantum mysticism which is something really powerful that happens when you go through this, and it allows you to break patterns that your family might be carrying.
We also need to realise that our emotional bodies require the same attention that our physical bodies do. When it comes to our physical bodies we worry about eating the right foods, working out etc. but we don’t pay the same attention to our emotional bodies. And when you can manage your emotions, you don’t even need to go to the gym because your physical body will reflect what is happening emotionally within you! So what does that take? It takes constant engagement with professionals. So if you are seeing an emotional coach or life coach, the key is to make sure it is something that you do regularly, not just once in a while.
There are three ways to seek out help. The first is related to how you think. There is a great author called Adam Grant who has a new book which is about thinking about how you think. Ask yourself if you are putting enough effort into thinking about how you think? And can you change how you think? And I can tell you the answer is absolutely yes, you can. The second way of healing yourself is through dealing with your emotional state and family constellations is a wonderful way of doing this. And the third way is physical. Because our physical cellular structure is holding on to these memories. Your body becomes your mind and it starts to make decisions on your behalf as a habit that you have no control over. So we have to heal our bodies as well. You can try techniques such as reiki, body talk Kinesiology – all of these tap into the emotional intelligence that is around your body, which we often tend to ignore.
So in summary, I think it’s wonderful that Ramadan comes round once a year as it gives us time to reflect, but I think if we can go a little bit deeper and engage with professionals to understand the tools that we need to actually create more wisdom within ourselves, it could be an even more powerful Ramadan for you.
