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Awareness of the present
Every second you spend thinking
about the next moment you avoid
embracing the present. Ensure your
life isn’t lived entirely in your head.
With global advances in technology, our society is becoming more engrossed
in personal gadgets than in world around them. We hold our phones more
than we hold real conversations, and each other. We’re so busy looking down
at screens and engaging in digital interactions that we forget about the
environment around us.
It seems people would rather experience an event through a camera than use
their eyes to enjoy what’s in front of them. Concert audiences are lit up by
the shimmering of phone screens. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t capture
mementos of these precious times. But living through a screen prevents us
from being present in the moment.
As we continue to distract ourselves from the present moment, we become
more anxious, fearful and stressed. Worries overwhelm us in our everyday
lives because we’re now conditioned to live elsewhere, rather than right here.
What’s more, we ignore the people around us and our personal relationships
pay the price.
This is often why we feel distressed, disconnected and lost. Our vibration is
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lowered because we feel like we’re in some imagined situation that doesn’t
match up with our lived reality. We relive moments of the past, fear the
future and create obstacles in our minds. We devote creative energy to
destructive ideas – and this invites turmoil into our lives.
Now is the only time you have. Once your past is gone, it doesn’t exist, no
matter how many times you recreate it mentally. The future hasn’t even
arrived; but again, you keep taking yourself there mentally. Tomorrow comes
disguised as today and some of us don’t even notice. Nothing is more
valuable than the present moment because you can never get it back. You
may create a visual memory that you can retrace, but physically you cannot
experience it again.
Think about a time when you completely forgot to check the clock or look at
your phone. Perhaps you were around the people you love, or doing
something you enjoy. You were so engrossed in the moment that you had no
time to worry about the past or the future. You were simply enjoying where
you were. This is what’s known as being in the present moment.
Technology is a tool,
not a substitute for living.
As we’ll explore later in this book, planning for the future is vital in order to
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meet your goals, but we shouldn’t spend too much time there. When you
think about it, the present is still the future, disguised as now. Ten years ago
you may have considered the future to be this exact point in your life. The
future is today.
In my early twenties, if I knew I was going out on a Saturday night, I’d want
every other day to hurry up. I was wishing away my precious time – time I’d
never get back. Once Saturday arrived, and then passed, I moved on to focus
on another day on which I was planning something exciting… and sometimes
that was weeks away!
This is also the premise of life. Once we’re born, every 24 hours we’re
moving one day closer towards our death. The future we’re constantly
waiting for arrives only as the present. Once it arrives, it passes by so quickly
we don’t even notice. We quickly switch our attention to anticipating the next
moment, and then the next, and on and on.
This is how most of us live. We wake up to get through the day and then go
back to sleep. We do this 365 times a year. We wait for success, love,
happiness to show up, never really aware of what we have in the present
moment. Eventually, we realize that we’ve never really lived. Or we finally
have the riches we wanted yet we can’t enjoy them because there’s always
something else to achieve.
We make life all about a future that exists
only in our imagination and completely
miss what’s happening in front of us.
We could say the same about the past. Although we might have fond
memories that we enjoy revisiting every now and again, we must learn to
accept that once the past is gone, it cannot be changed. We can only
reconstruct or alter it in our minds.
The meditation exercise that I’ll discuss next can help you connect to the
present. By developing awareness of the present moment, we can maintain a
higher vibration because we avoid being paralysed by past pain or future fear.
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