Dear John,

When I was a young child, I would occasionally wake up crying in the middle of the night from a bad dream. Fortunately, I had a wise, loving mother who would come and sit by my bed to comfort me. Her advice on such occasions was always the same: She didn’t ask about the scary dream, but would say, “Let’s think about some happy memories, like when our family went to the ocean. Remember how much fun we had?”

Invariably, I would start feeling better, the scary dream would fade from memory, and I would soon drift back to sleep. Though I don’t think that my mother was aware of it, she was sharing with me an important aspect of Paramhansa Yogananda’s teachings: the right use of memory to change our consciousness.

He wrote: “Memory was given to us to keep alive only life’s good experiences and lessons. Get rid of wrong thoughts by avoiding recalling them. If they come to mind in spite of you, refuse to entertain them. Let me repeat: To remember bad experiences and dwell upon them is an abuse of God’s gift to us of memory.”

For the past two years, we all have faced many challenges in dealing with the global pandemic. The signs are starting to seem hopeful that we may be moving past the devastation of Covid into a new era free of the suffering and loss that we’ve seen. These painful experiences have left deep impressions for most people which have the potential to influence their life into the future.

Now is an important time to work consciously with our memories so that we don’t carry the suffering forward with us. Memory is the mental note made of every thought or action when it first occurs, which is stored in the brain as a thought pattern. The word “remember” comes from re, “again,” and memorari, “to be mindful of.”

Try consciously to bring to mind the good memories you’ve acquired during this period: the kindness of strangers, an inspiring story about the efforts of medical teams to help others, the times of deepened prayer and calling on God, the fulfillment found in simple pastimes, or loving conversations with friends, to name but a few.

Yoganandaji said, “Deep, alert attention with feeling is the needle that cuts grooves in the record of your memory cells.” This is true for both positive and negative memories. Since our memory is linked to past karma, by concentrating on good memories we can actually ameliorate and change negative karmic patterns.