Many spiritual schools of thought talk about human nature and how humans tend to spend too much time reminiscing about the past and worrying about the future. In other words, the human mind tends to wander everywhere but the present moment.
If you look at it, you see how it can actually rob you of the joy of living life happily. In fact, according to a study, most people spend 50% of the time they are awake away from the present moment and not focusing on what they are doing.
How Do You Spend Your Daily Thoughts?
When you are not thinking about the present moment and about the task that you are doing right now, what are you actually doing? The answer is that you are either ruminating about the things that happened in the past or worrying about things that haven’t happened yet.
The latter aspect is often accompanied by potential fantasies where you might be obsessively thinking about potential negative outcomes. Now, these sorts of thoughts aren’t only time-consuming, but they also evoke negative emotions that proceed to cause you unnecessary mental, emotional, and even physical pain.
Now, this aspect might perfectly explain why many spiritual guides and religions tell you to live in the present moment. At this point, you might be wondering how you can actually live in the present moment.
Read on to learn how to live in the present moment.
Practice Meditation
To live in the present moment, you need to guide your mind to the present, and one of the best ways to do so is to practice breath meditation. That said, one of the easiest methods to relieve your mind from overthinking is to become conscious of your breath and observe how the body and mind respond to your breath.
This aspect is also known as the mindfulness of breathing and is a different thing than a breathing exercise, as in a breathing exercise, you intentionally control the rhythm.
When it comes to the mindfulness of breathing, you will want to enter the stage where you contemplate the body and observe how your breath and the reactive sensations of your different body parts. Subsequently, you will want to contemplate your feelings. For instance, if you are feeling anxious, you will want to observe how the feeling of anxiety lingers in your mind.
The next stage of the mindfulness of breathing method is to consciously focus on your thoughts and observe how your thoughts come and go.
Touch Your Surroundings
Touch is a great way to link the direction of your thoughts and let go of negativity. There are various ways to bring yourself back to the present moment when you feel that you are being swept away by anxiety and stress.
For instance, you might want to go and sit on the sofa and let your hand slide over the seat to get a sensation of how the material feels against your hand. Another method is to hold a small object in your hand, such as a fidget or a marble. You can also hold an apple or some other piece of food and guide your thoughts to how it feels on your fingers and against your palm.
There are also other ways to incorporate touch and guide your mind back to the present moment through daily tasks, such as washing your hands and feeling the water against your skin or brushing your teeth and observing the sensation that it brings.
The thing is that mostly we aren’t very mindful of these daily tasks because we tend to do the daily tasks on autopilot with our minds being somewhere else. Nonetheless, the smaller habitual tasks are a great way to bring back our attention to the present moment and let go of excessive thoughts and emotions that we don’t really require in the now.
Become Aware of Your Thoughts
If you have read Eckhart Tolle’s “Power of Now,” you might already be familiar with the golden principle of waiting for the next book. Speaking of books, if you are working on one, you can save yourself loads of time by leaving the editing process in the hands of experts.
For instance, if you are working on a spiritual book, such as a Christian book, as a novice writer, you can immensely benefit from hiring a Christian editor, as the editor will not only fact-check your manuscript but also ensure that the dialogues are perfect and that you have no grammatical mistakes in the manuscript before you send your Christian book to a literary agent.
Nonetheless, to get back to the principle and power of living in the present moment and controlling your thoughts, you will want to become conscious of your thoughts. Once you become conscious of your thoughts, you will ask yourself what your next thought will be.
The point is to consciously anticipate your next thought and become aware of your stream of thoughts and which direction they flow. Soon, you will start to live in the moment. In fact, you will become the master of your thoughts; instead of being guided by your thoughts, you will be the one guiding your thoughts and controlling what you think.
Understand Silence
If you go out in nature, such as the forest, and you listen very closely, you will discover that nature is never silent. Even on a silent day when you are at home and cannot hear a thing, if you become aware of the present and listen, you will soon start hearing distant sounds, such as the sound of distant traffic, the sound of the wind, and the sound of birds. Even if you were to spend some time in a sound-proof chamber, you can never experience complete silence because your breathing and your body are alive, which means that there are sounds.
You will want to become consciously aware of the most sophisticated sound of your environment and focus on discovering silence as a way to enter the present moment.
