Regret: emotional and spiritual meaning

What regret is

If you feed on regrets, you feed the body on sorrow, grief and discontent about what you should have done or not done, said or thought. You face a reality that crosses you. You feel you have lost something or someone for good.

A pang after a real mistake is human. Regret becomes costly when it is what you eat, every day.

The entry does not name one organ. It says the regrets gnaw inside and lower your level of energy, and that they create a ground favourable to illness. That is the source's warning about a life organised around "if only". It is not a claim that regret is the medical cause of a disease.

The emotional meaning of regret

The whole entry is that gnawing, and the way out. A positive attitude rests on knowing you always do the best you can with what you know. You learn from the past. That allows you to improve, to gain experience, to become wiser.

It is close to nostalgia, which the source calls a melancholy caused by regret. Nostalgia is the drift out of the present. Regret is the feeding on the other choice.

A gentler way to hold it

The aim is not to pretend the loss was nothing. The emotional perspective invites you to stop using the past only as a punishment.

• Name the exact "should". An act, a sentence, or a thought.
• Admit the sense of a final loss. That impression is the centre of the reading.
• Notice the energy. Gnawing has a cost, even before any illness.
• Take one lesson, then set the rest down. Wisdom is what the source says the past is for.