How To Become Truly Madly Deeply In Love with How Your Mind Works
What we are talking about is learning to live in the present moment, in the now. When you aren’t distracted by your own negative thinking, when you don’t allow yourself to get lost in moments that are gone or yet to come, you are left with this moment. This moment–now–truly is the only moment you have. It is beautiful and special. Life is simply a series of such moments to be experienced one right after another. If you attend to the moment you are in and stay connected to your soul and remain happy, you will find that your heart is filled with positive feelings.
-Sydney Banks
Over the past 10 years, I have become truly, madly, deeply in love with how life works and how my mind operates from moment to moment as it gently guides me through life. Indeed I am truly, madly, deeply in love with my imperfectly perfect humanness as it teaches me how to evolve and grow into the best human being I can possibly be and I am eternally truly, madly, deeply in love with each moment of life I am blessed to experience on this earth.
You see I am just not afraid anymore of how I experience my life.
Sydney Banks stated, “That if the only thing people learned was not to be afraid of their own experience that alone would change the world.” OMG, How right he was and not just about the little things it’s about absolutely everything you can possibly imagine. Lately, I keep seeing this more and more deeply.
Over the past few weeks, my students and clients have come to me with various forms of “being afraid”. Often it doesn’t look like that is what is happening. It can often appear as a debilitating habit, a phobia, emotional trauma, procrastination, laziness, not putting yourself out there and playing small, etc etc etc.
But we all do that from time to time, don’t we?
Consider this …..The party you don’t want to go to because you have put on weight and are scared what others will think of you, the blog you dream of sharing but you are afraid of what others may think, the online course you want to share with the world but you feel you are not clever enough or know enough to put yourself out there, the boy/girl/woman/man you really like but don’t want to contact for fear of appearing too keen, the business you want to contact because you know this understanding will really help their staff reduce their risk of stress and burnout but you don’t because you are scared of appearing too “spiritual and woo woo” . I could go on and on and on and on and on about this but already does this sound familiar to you?
What are we humans doing to scare the shit out of ourselves?
It is so simple yet we just don’t see it. It is happening in each moment of every single day. It is so normal that we become blinded to it. However, there is a simple explanation. Every single time we are frightening ourselves we have simply time traveled. Let me explain. Every human being has a concept of time and we name those concepts, the past, present and future.
All we have ever in this life is the present moment we are rooted in, yet as humans, we believe we have a special ability to travel through time to our past and to our future. The distinction is so subtle and we are so well-rehearsed at doing this we simply do not notice that it’s happening within us. Our minds are using us BUT there is a way to become the watcher of your mind. To fully understand the power of each moment.
When we are aware that we create our experience of life from the inside out, that we are the ones bringing our thoughts to life by putting our awareness on them we become more and more awake to our experience of living. In my case, I started to become interested in my reactions to various situations when I first understood that I was the thinker and that by adding my awareness or consciousness to my thoughts I was indeed bringing them to life. I saw that I time traveled frequently. Looking to my past or projecting into my future. I began to be able to observe these thoughts and not become invested in them.
This week one of my clients I wrote about previously who had been self-harming for many years and had had 4 years of psychological care with very little impact was now 8-10 weeks free of self-harming in spite of challenging circumstances. She is now independently able to witness how her moment to moment experience of life can guide her down a path that is difficult and challenging or it can illuminate an opportunity to witness her operating system simply glitching in the moment as a result of tiredness or hunger.
Another client is effortlessly letting go of adding meaning to every single thought that ploughs through her mind; something she has been struggling with for over 30 years.
SO how did they manage to do that and is there a trick to this?
They managed to do this through the wonderful gift of insight. They managed through no effort of their own. They innately had the capacity to gain an accurate and deep understanding of someone or something that was troubling them, in the moment.
You see suffering has its roots in time, we are either looking to the past or looking to the future. How often do you think of something that hasn’t happened yet and scare yourself silly innocently believing that you know what will happen? You don’t, you can’t and you never will. I used to do this all the time, in fact, I still do from time to time until I catch myself. You see what we perceive as the future is always tinged with our state of mind in the moment, so if we are in a low mood we see a murky future and if we are in a good state of mind we see a better outcome. All of it though is simply an illusion. We cannot predict the future.
Another of my favourite Syd Banks quotes is that ” Memories are just thoughts carried across time”. The first time I heard that I couldn’t stop laughing.
All problems are illusions of the mind exacerbated by the illusion of time.
As soon as we honour the present moment we realize that we are well and everything is alright in this moment, even in the midst of physical pain. I remember when I was in labour with each and all of my children that there was an unconscious surrendering to my body to enable it to do what it needed to do to deliver my children, safely. I was calm, in tune with each and every single contraction and delivered all of my children naturally without pain control. Life kinda works the same way. With each contraction, I wasn’t time travelling to the next one or the one that had just past. I was in the moment riding the waves of contraction and expansion in my mind and body. Our thoughts are no different. They come and they go.
Please become aware of how rarely your attention is in the now, of how your thoughts and awareness take you swiftly from the past to the present. Trust me, seeing this is a wonderful step towards truly living in the moment.
Until next time
Take care,
Dinna Fash
love,
Jacquie
Coach Mentor Trainer
