How To Live In PresentBy DanielI’ve written many articles telling people to live in the present and articles about my own adventures on how to live in the present , but I’ve never truly explain why it’s necessary and how to go about doing it. The way I see it is that it’s like a muscle, a skill that you must develop and strengthen where it gets easier with time.After a lifetime of conditioned thought patterns, we come to believe that thoughts are all there is to us. Rather than the quote, “I think, there fore I am”, I think it is more accurate to say “I am, therefore I think”. We believe that we are our thoughts.I lived this way for many years, most of my life actually. Even after coming to the realization that living in the moment is crucial to my wellbeing, I continued to listen to my thoughts and live in them. Even today, driving to University I had many relapses of living in my thoughts, and coming to believe them as who I am. The distinction that we must come to realize is that we have thoughts, and we always will, and that’s okay. But once we let thoughts become the master, rather than becoming the master of these thoughts then we will suffer.The senseless mental argument that you’re having with your friend about what the colour of the sky is doesn’t matter right now, and will only bring you suffering. Right now, whatever you’re doing is all it matters. If your thoughts are telling you your intelligence level is very low because you lost that argument, then that will only bring misery to the situation even if there isn’t something to be miserable about. Your true level of intelligence may be very low, or very high, but what are you going to do about it? You are born as you are, and you must come to accept that. And it doesn’t take much intelligence to memorise some facts. As Einstein said,““Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”That’s only just one aspect of how our thoughts can take the beauty and true essence out of the moment you are in now, and make you live in the past whilst also bringing worry to the future.Personally I’ve developed my intense presence awareness muscle so much that it is a lot easier for me to slip back into the now, as before it used to take me forever of battling with my own thoughts and trying to silence them. It was a struggle, and I understand that many of you who are reading this now struggle with it as well. But rather than fight it, we have to simply create space between it.A key point to understand is when we are present it’s not so much that we won’t have thoughts; it’s more that these thoughts don’t become identified to who we are, and simply become just background noise or static.Thoughts are just a function of the human brain, and doesn’t reflect your true state of living. If your thoughts are saying you’re an idiot for losing that argument, just don’t listen to it; don’t attach it to who you are to it. See it as simply background noise. In some situations you may not know a lot, and in other situations you may be an expert. It doesn’t matter, and you lose the essence of the present moment. You’re thoughts are just thoughts, and don’t reflect your who you really are.Before I start teaching the many methods of how to live in the present, I will explain why it’s so crucial and necessary to do so.Why Return To The Now?The first point to why it is so crucial is that it cultivates aliveness in your being where life just becomes joyful for no reason. A sense of joy arises where you don’t know where it’s from, but it’s there. I believe this is because happiness is our normal state; we are born with this joy, those blissful states. So throughout life we grow up conditioned with reasons why we can’t be happy, where commercials tell us we need to buy this, and society tells us we need to get a good job or we won’t be happy. All this does is skew our perceptions of reality. To get back into the present moment means to completely dis-identify with these thoughts of self-sabotage.Once we no longer identify with our thoughts, we start to feel good, and feeling good only spreads goodness into the world. We are happier, we don’t cause suffering, and we generally make the world a better place. In the current state of the world where fear is so present in the awareness of many, feeling good is something that will bring back balance to our lives and the lives of many around us. As the Buddha said, happiness is like the light of a candle, where spreading it won’t make the candle light any less dimmer.Another crucial point is that it brings a higher quality to what we do. When people do what they love, when they are so passionate about something and they do it — it automatically forces them into the present moment. Think about the last time you did something where time seemed to just completely disappear, whether it was playing a game, reading or watching a movie. You were so present that it caused time to simply not exist in your awareness, as you just simply forgot about everything else around you.I believe that this kind of presence will improve anything you do. If you currently work in the office, be there totally, when writing a book, be there completely, because if your thoughts are taking over you won’t put all your focus and attention on your work. The most successful people in the world are so successful because they do what they love, and in doing what they love they bring a presence to their work and they produce things of high quality.The third and very important point is to simply end the personal suffering which is caused by thought. The ego predominantly stems from our thoughts, which is never present but always in the past or in the future. That’s not a good way to live because the future is always never as you imagine it to be and the past you can’t do anything about. Change is constantly happening. If you’re always living in the past then you miss the essence of this change and you can even deny the change to happen. Let’s say someone has hurt you in the past, and you see them as that person who will hurt you again, you don’t allow them to change by the way you interact with them.“Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry — all forms of fear — are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.” – Eckhart TolleTechniques On How To Live In The Present– See more at: http://www.thehealersjournal.com/2014/12/13/5-effective-techniques-for-getting-and-staying-present-in-the-now-moment/#sthash.RTSbXydp.dpuf

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