On Being Present
I’ve talked a lot about bringing yourself Present and living in the Present Moment. In this article I’d like to give you some ways to easily make that a reality.
The way to connect with Self is to become Present and be in the Now. To do this you have to understand why you don’t experience your Self in the first place.. and the reason is that most people are primarily focused and identified with the mind/ego as their base reality. Our belief in separation along with our identity with our ego as being our ‘self’ is part of the issue The other part is that we’re not connected to our hearts, which separates us from our True Nature as well. So to get back home we have to reverse our course.
To accomplish this, we first have to realize that we are NOT our mind. The mind is only a series of neural pathways and corresponding chemical responses that came about primarily from your childhood and the way you were raised.. and also from what you have been taught since that time.
I recommend to everyone who wants to experience Self to practice being Present, and to do that you have to shift your perception from your thinking mind into your heart and your body/feeling nature. Meditation is a great way to assist this process.. but you also have to practice it during waking hours.
Then once you have dropped down into your heart (which is our connection to our fundamental Beingness).. pay attention to what is in front of you at every moment. Give Life your full attention, whether you’re at a job or talking to a friend or washing the dishes. This act increases your energetic alignment with the Now.. and begins to align you with your True Self.. and it will bring you deeply into what I call Present Moment Awareness.
If your thinking mind pops up.. realign yourself with your body and the Now by focusing your attention on your breathing for a while or on your heartbeat. When you do this consistently you find that your mind begins to be more quiet.. and with time it becomes second nature to see thoughts pop up so they are no longer able to take you out of the Present Moment.
There is another aspect to this process that has to eventually happen, and it has to do with Awareness and watching the mind and it’s shenanigans. When you become aware of how you got wired up mentally and “witness” (or bring consciousness) to those parts of your thinking mind that are keeping you spinning around, you free yourself one pattern at a time until your mind/ego is fully integrated into Self.
You do have to be fundamentally present and be Aware in order to see the mind though.. and to do that you have to bring yourself Present. So the whole process comes down to being in the Now. The beautiful thing about this is that when we completely relax into the Present Moment, we open the door for Truth to arise, and this is true even before we are mentally and emotionally integrated.
This is exactly what brought about my first Awakening. I dropped deeply into my heart and relaxed totally into the present moment and suddenly Being revealed Itself to me, and it’s happened three more times since that time. It works the same way for everyone also because we already are THAT.. but we don’t know it because we are keeping ourselves separate. But when we drop into the Now.. we will find that Self is revealed to us automatically. Until next time..