Life is in living NOW.
It’s all about the choices we make now, the habits we form now, the actions we take now, and the enlightenment we receive now.
Regretting about the past is like wasting time and energy on the impossible. And worrying about the future is like having no belief in your capabilities.
However, we don’t appreciate the living present because our ‘monkey minds,’ as Buddhists call them, vault from thought to thought like monkeys swinging from tree to tree.
The Buddhist scholar B. Alan Wallace says –
We’re living in a world that contributes in a major way to mental fragmentation, disintegration, distraction, decoherence. We’re always doing something, and we allow little time to practice stillness and calm.
We need to live more in the moment – in a state of active, open, intentional attention on the present.
But how do you do it?
Here are a few quick things that have worked for me over the past few years –
1. Remove unneeded possessions. They hold us with their memories, which keeps us living in the past.
2. Forgive past hurts. Choose to forgive others and yourself, and move on.
3. Do work you love. Bhagavad Gita says that joy, and not the material fruit of action, is the true and main reward of your work. And when you work on things you love, you can feel that joy day in and day out, without worrying about what the future may hold. That also lets us into the state of total absorption that psychologists call ‘flow,’ when we forget about the past and the future and concentrate all our energies on the present.
4. Appreciate the moments of today. Observe (don’t just see), feel, and appreciate the sights, the sounds, the smells, the emotions, the joy, and the sorrow around you. And they are aplenty.
5. Don’t dwell on past successes. ‘Success’ is not a destination, but just a milestone in our life’s journey that we pass by. Dwelling on the same may keep us away from working on creating our ‘today.’ Stop doing that.
6. Stop worrying. You can’t fully appreciate today if you worry too much about tomorrow. You anyway control much less than you think. That’s true for your present and also the future. So why worry? Better to redirect your energy elsewhere.
While guiding us towards a restful state after the asanas or exercises, my Yoga teacher advises –
Become aware of being alive. And breathe. As you draw your next breath, focus on the rise of your abdomen on the in-breath, the stream of heat through your nostrils on the out-breath. If you’re aware of that feeling right now, you’re living in the moment. Nothing happens next. It’s not a destination. This is it. You’re already there.
Yes, this is it. You’re already there.
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