Regret, like all emotions when grasped onto blocks flow, traps one in a imagined past of ‘should of’ giving birth in the same moment a mourned for future that cannot be of ‘if only’.

True regret can point one to different paths in the present and if skillful then released, but my experience and observations is that regret is the emotion we tend to hold onto more then the others. I wonder if thier isn’t a perverse pleasure of holding on to our disappointments and failures so tightly while discounting out gifts so easily.

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd – The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.― Fernando Pessoa

How does one stop? By stopping.  I suspect that stopping is so easily difficult is that we attach our emotions and experience to time.

“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas…. – J Campbell

How does one stop? Stop naming and break the dam that hinders flow. We stop by flowing – a ironic paradox .

Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.  ― Richard Siken

Cry until you laugh… I recognize that person on the floor… We are such wonderous, messy absurd beings.