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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
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
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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