The present moment.
Now is all that exists.
That's all we ever live in.
All we ever live in is the now.
We can worry about the future,
Be anxious about something happening tomorrow,
But in reality tomorrow never comes.
All we have is a continual string of nows reaching into the future.
It's now,
And then when tomorrow comes,
Tomorrow will also be now.
But the problem that our brains present us is,
And one of the things that makes humans quite good,
Is our ability to predict,
Perceive,
And manipulate the future.
We can play with the idea of the future in our mind,
And that allows us to create great arts and works of science and plans and all of these things that we can do.
But when that ability runs rampant,
We fall into neurosis and anxiety.
We live in the now,
But we're dreading the future.
It's like our now versus the dreaded now when it comes.
Perhaps we have a meeting or a family gathering that we're not looking forward to,
Or a surgery or something coming up,
And that can cause us to dwell on it,
To ruminate,
To get anxious,
And just,
Oh,
I'm sure we've all felt that.
So the real question is,
How can we best return our focus back to the present moment,
Back to the actual reality of where we are now?
And thankfully,
Mindfulness gives us a bit of an answer.
When we draw our attention to our meditation anchor,
This could be the breath,
Our vision,
Our hearing,
Any of the senses,
Even the thoughts in the moment,
But that's a little bit of an advanced or a little bit of a tricky practice.
But that can be done too.
But whenever we return our focus back to the anchor,
We're drawing our attention back to the present moment.
So one of the things that I'm working on as an anxiety reduction technique is to continually return my focus back to the breath,
To sync my body up into the present moment,
My mind up in the present moment with slow,
Calm,
Mindful breaths.
And I'm going to be doing this in transitions.
So when I go from one task to the next or one place to the next,
I'll set a timer on my watch for about three minutes and just do some calm,
Deep,
And slow mindful breaths.
I'll breathe into the tension.
I'll breathe into the physical sensations of anxiety.
I'll breathe into the mental feelings of anxiety and just watch the whole process.
I will connect to my five senses,
Grounding myself in the present moment.
And then once the timer goes off,
I'll reevaluate and see if I need to do it again.
And I'll just keep going through that process until I'm calm.
And typically,
I only need that first three minutes because what I'm finding is that I have an active level of tension that's a bit too high to be functional.
So instead,
I'll do my meditation,
Do these calm breathing activities for about three minutes in transition,
And then my active level of tension is quite reduced.
I strongly suggest that you give this a try.
So in transition,
The next time you transition somewhere.
And at the end of this session,
I'm going to play three minutes of silence so you can do this as well.
All you do is just get yourself comfortable.
You can have your eyes open or closed.
I like to have them just nice and relaxed.
And just start breathing.
In through the nose and back out through the nose or back out through the mouth,
You're going to take a deep,
Big breath into the belly.
You know that big sort of belly breath where it fills your belly first,
Then your chest.
And then the exhale,
It releases from your chest first and then from your belly.
It's like the yogic breath or pramayama breath.
But as you're breathing in,
You're imagining the breath going into the belly and then into the area,
Either physical or mental,
That's tense.
So if you've got tension in your shoulder,
The air will go into your belly,
Filling up the belly,
And then into the shoulder.
And then on the exhale,
It's sort of taking some of that tension out and releasing it.
And you just do that for the three minutes,
And that's it.
And what we end up with is a grounded mental state because we're mindfully focusing on the breath.
We're healing ourselves through visualizations and we're just getting generally calmer.
Our anxiety is reducing.
And then if your mind wanders into that anxious feeling about the future,
The dreaded now,
When it comes,
What's going to happen?
You just do another three minutes and you'll find that it goes and you'll get used to and get good at seeing and acknowledging and moving past that anxiety feeling.
And then eventually,
When that thing happens,
When that dreaded thing comes,
You've now got a tool,
A practiced tool,
To calm yourself down beforehand.
So with that in mind,
I encourage you,
Take a seat.
And I'm going to just let the audio run silent for three minutes and just do some calm breathing.
And then after that,
We'll sign off.
So close your eyes,
Take a calm,
Deep breath.
Let's begin.
Great work.
So how'd you go?
As you transition into the rest of your day,
Remember that you've now got a tool of breathing to help bring you back down to reality,
To ground you,
And to reduce that anxiety.
Have a great day.
This talk was taken from the book Mindfulness,
A guidebook to the present moment.
