Stop hitting yourself on the head. At present, we are more often than not held captive through the revisitation of a problem, fascinated with looking at moment from the eyes of something that does not want what it is experiencing, and not seeing the contradiction in not wanting to experience something that we keep revisiting. These reruns of painful past life events are brought up by a mechanical mind, and we feel compelled to participate in them as they are played out like a movie projected onto a screen. We don't yet understand that when we participate in reliving the pain of the past, we are actually hitting our self over the head with the proverbial hammer. When you find yourself the captive of reliving a painful past life event, turn around and look and inwardly ask, "Where is this coming from?" Do your best to see that the condition you feel you're a prisoner of doesn't exist without you having agreed to walk into that prison. Seeing your complicity in the captivity, and then beginning to consciously struggle, is the beginning of freedom. You will begin to understand that you can't save yourself because there is no self there that needs to be saved; there is just a mechanical mind that never stops inventing a self that needs to be saved.