What’s in Your Inner Photo Album?

I have been reading You Are the Answer by Michael J. Tamura, and one idea really stood out to me. He explains that our memories are like pictures stored in the subconscious.

Much of our suffering comes from the pictures we keep revisiting. These old images hold the energy of fear, resistance, and self-judgment.

Because we invest so much emotion into them, we begin to treat them as if they are alive, as if they are still happening now. The more we believe in those pictures, the more power they seem to have over us.

The truth is, they are just images. When we recognize that we are only fighting a set of pictures, we begin to free ourselves from their control.

Tamura teaches that we do not need to change the picture or rewrite the past.

What matters is how we relate to it.

• Stop feeding it energy.

• Stop believing it is the whole story.

• See it, acknowledge it, and then let it fade.

Over time, the emotional charge begins to fade away like layers of an old film strip. What remains is clarity. The picture itself is not the problem, it is the energy we keep giving it.

I think about all the days in our lives and how many truly great moments there have been. Maybe tens of thousands of amazing things have happened, small and big, but we rarely carry those with us. Instead, we often keep only the old broken pictures of what went wrong, what hurt us, or what we regret.

Imagine what would happen if we flipped that balance.

Something that helps me is to go into the photo album on my phone and favorite the pictures that bring up good memories. Then I sit with one of those photos and imagine what it felt like to be there. The warmth, the laughter, the peace.

It is as if I step back into that moment and re-experience it fully. In doing that, I am creating a new inner photo album for myself, filled with calm, love, and beauty.

Even throughout the day, I try to take mental snapshots of the moments that feel good. For example, this morning the sun was rising and the air was cool. I stopped, took a breath, and imagined capturing that image, a quiet sunrise becoming a living memory inside me.

Healing does not always mean erasing the past. Sometimes it means remembering that the old pictures are not who we are anymore and choosing to fill our inner album with new ones.