THE MIND-BODY MOOD SOLUTION by JEFFREY ROSSMAN PhD

Author:JEFFREY ROSSMAN, PhD
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rodale Inc.
Published: 2010-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Present Moment Awareness

Life can only be experienced right now. The past is gone and the future hasn't yet happened. Here and now is where the action is. When you are fully present, fully awake to life, you and your life become infused with vitality.

If you are like most people in our modern culture, you probably don't spend much of your waking life fully engaged in the present. Like the rest of us, you possess the uniquely human ability to reflect on the past and imagine the future. Our capacity to conceptualize the past and future has enabled us to learn from experience, invent, create, plan, and maintain our position comfortably at the top of the food chain. Unfortunately, our capacity to think about the past and the future is a double-edged sword: It allows us to be extraordinarily successful and immeasurably miserable. Our ability to ruminate on the past and worry about the future opens us up to considerable suffering. If you have ever lain awake at 3:00 in the morning plagued by thoughts that you can't get out of your head, you know exactly what I mean. Mark Twain perfectly described the cost we pay for our imaginative minds: “I've seen a heap of trouble in my life and most of it never came to pass.”

Practicing presence does not mean that you have to completely banish thoughts about the past or the future. That kind of connection to the present might work for your cat, but it doesn't work for you. Rather, the aim of presence is for you to be able to shift intentionally and flexibly from present moment awareness to thinking about the past or future. The idea is to be fully conscious of what you are experiencing right now, whether it is an immediate sensory experience, a memory, or a fantasy about the future.

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