Tag Archives: living in the present

Thank you!

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Lovely blog post this morning from Live in The Present entitled “Gratitude is the key to happiness”. It reminded me of the importance of appreciating circumstances as they are, rather than as we may like them to be.

It’s easy enough to be thankful for life when things are going well (although we’re often so busy having a nice time that we forget to stop and appreciate them). But when times are tough, if we’re facing difficulties in our professional or personal lives, it can be difficult to see the silver lining. Indeed, it can be cathartic to have a rant and a rail about the unfairness of existence, but as a way to then get out of our funk, nothing beats conscious gratitude.

As someone who has written about personal development and coaching for the last ten years, I always recommend “thank you” lists as a very powerful exercise for moving forward and effecting change. But, as in many other areas of life, we tend to teach what we most need to learn. So I am grateful for the blog for reminding me, for all the readers of this blog…I’ll save the rest for my private journal :-) . Happy Easter!

 

Nice little grounding exercise

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Just a quick post tonight, but thought I’d share an exercise from my mindfulness course that I’ve found to be pretty effective.

Basically, you try and concentrate on your breathing for five minutes. Of course, most people immediately daydream or start worrying about something or imagining what they’re having for dinner. And forget about focusing on how the breath feels going in and out of the body.

So every time you lose focus on the breath and start thinking of something, just make a note of whether the thought belongs to the past, present or future. So if you’re thinking about a fight you had this morning, just say “past” to yourself and try and come back to your breath. If you start thinking about the fight again, just repeat “past”, and refocus on the breath. Same as if you are being distracted by feeling cold, think “present”. You get the idea.

It’s really simple, but a helpful way of staying in the present, but just for a limited time so the thought doesn’t feel too daunting. I also find it helps me get back to sleep after one of the kids has woken me up and my adrenaline is on overdrive.

Worth a try if you tend to live in your head.

I’ll be happy when…

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  • I’ve got rid of this bastard cold
  • My kids are sleeping better
  • I’ve got fitter and stopped eating crap
  • I’m earning more money
  • I’ve had a haircut
And so on.
These are just a few examples of some of the reasons I’ve put off feeling cheerful this week – and it’s only Monday! Admittedly having a low level illness that’s not serious enough to confine you to your bed but just casts a greasy film over your everyday existence can get you down. But I’ve caught myself falling into the trap of fantasy thinking, that life will be somehow magically transformed once a particular event has happened or state has ben achieved. I used to think like this all the time, then couldn’t work out why I still found things to be miserable about even when what I wished for had taken place.
In some respects I blame the motivational, goal-setting mindset I adopted some ten years ago. How churlish does that sound? I admit that identifying what I wanted and working out the necessary steps to achieve it has had huge benefits, both professionally and personally. But if done in isolation, it can reduce life to a series of steps to be completed and bullet points to be ticked off. Yes, there is some satisfaction to be had in crossing things off a list, but it’s rarely the state of nirvana you expected when you initially identified the goal.
Yes, goal-setting is all well and good, and because it’s the way I think I’ll probably keep doing it in spite of myself. But I need to remind myself to count the little moments of happiness in the present, as they are just as important, and more likely to provide satisfaction than some far-off “someday” situation. I’d been slightly neglecting my mindfulness exercises as they’d been feeling too much like a chore, but I’m going to renew my commitment to finishing the course and listening to at least one meditation a day, as they do keep me focused on the here and now. Oh dear, that sounds a bit like a goal. Erm…

Enough for now

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It’s about time for an update on my attempts at living in the present. I’m finding the style of The Power of Now a little wearing and repetitive (and isn’t it funny how all these books make their point in around 250 pages? It’s almost as if you couldn’t write anything profound or meaningful in any less). However, I’m convinced of the benefit of increased consciousness of my present life even without the spiritual element that Tolle promotes. I’m trying to remember to be grateful for what I have, even when I’m having a terrible day, but don’t always succeed.

I do find it helpful to recalibrate and go with the flow when the unexpected happens and be aware of my thoughts rather than be a total slave to them. But to be honest…I can happily leave the rest. The fact remains that I do have to multitask and plan ahead for a large number of activities, and all of that requires being ‘in the head’. You can’t lose yourself entirely in whatever you’re doing when there are many, many things to do. Maybe someone will come along and tell me how they do it (for which I’d be very grateful) but I think I’ll take the basic principle of trying to live more presently and keep on keeping on…

Right here, right now

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So… on my quest to find self-help books that are actually helpful and not too annoying, I’ve stumbled across Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. Maybe stumbled across is too disingenuous – it is, after all, a worldwide bestseller. I’m halfway through it, but the basic premise is that in order to be happy, you have to focus on your life in the present, rather than the past or future. And by present, he means this very moment, not what you’re doing this afternoon, or were planning on doing when the doorbell rang, etc.

It’s incredibly hard to do, and has made me realise how much I live in the future -in my head, that is. I’ve always been a daydreamer – I remember as a teenager thinking wistfully about what I was going to do when I became famous. I suspect I’ve always carried that with me, so that when I became a mother for the first time at the age of 31, I also had to come to terms with the fact that I was never going to achieve some of the totally unrealistic dreams I had. Not that I think motherhood means the end of dreams – far from it – but my dreams were of being an actress when I couldn’t act, or a singer when I sang very averagely.

I have often found solace and inspiration in plans and schemes, and have spent a lot of my life identifying goals and working out how best to achieve them. The problem with goals isn’t the aim in itself, but the feeling that you’ll only achieve happiness when you get there. I found in my notebook the other day a piece of writing from about seven years ago which said “by the age of 35 I plan to have published my first book and be living by the sea with my family”. This did, in fact happen, and I truly believe in the power of writing down what you want and then working towards that.

The problem was, that I didn’t feel half as excited as I thought I would when I identified that goal. At the time of writing, I thought it really was my dream life, and that I would be completely happy when I was living it. But of course, I didn’t factor in the tiredness of having young children, the everyday stresses and strains, plus the banal reality that once you are living a life, you adjust to new changes pretty quickly.

So I can totally “get” the idea of living in the present, as that is all we really have. The challenge, of course, is to undo the thought patterns of a lifetime and try to live that way, being aware of each moment, the sights, sounds, smells, tastes. I hope it will also work on my impatience with my children, how each stage will bring its own difficulties, and yet i know I will look back and treasure these times.

So that’s my intention. I’m sure it won’t happen overnight, but I hope to at least be aware of my “future thinking” and to try and bring myself back to the present where I can.