October 18th, 2009] [
Warning: This post is 1,901 words long, it might just cost your patience to read . Readers’ patience is advised.
In the previous post “Are You Living”, I outlined how being present with every moment of your life is the way to live your life, otherwise you are really living inside of your thoughts about the future and the past.
I’ve also discussed about how important it is to be present within our lives. To be present means to be able to align ourselves with the outcome of our lives, that no matter what happens there is no resistance and negativity involved, but only the result of appreciation and acceptance.
If you want lasting satisfaction with life and therefore happiness, the only place you’ll find it is in the present.
Why live in the present?
Why? Because the present doesn’t contain anything that you could bring memories from the past, or predictions of the future. It is a place where everything just is.
- If you are fully present with your computer right in front of you, there won’t any angry memories associated with it when it froze on you, there won’t be any anxious anticipations of it going to freeze on you, there is just going to be a computer right in front of you.
- Meaning it just is for what it is, nothing more, nothing less, and once you realize it for its true value, you’ll start to appreciate it for its truthfully worth.
When you apply that principle to your daily life (career, relationship, personal health), you’ll start to see life in a clearer way, and accepting life for what it gives you.
The only way you’ll get to the present, is to have developed a habit of having a cleared mind, free of thoughts of the past and the future.
In this post, I’m going to show you 6 different methods to help you get started.
But remember that the rest is up to you to apply these practices into your daily lives. Only then you’ll really start to see lasting effect.
Anyways, let me just start right off with the 1st of the 6 methods right now:
Method #1: Consciously focus on your breathing
Your breath is one of the vital factors to what keeps you alive. They happen automatically, and we rarely pay any attention to them in our lives.
However, the best thing to our breaths is that we can only directly witness them during the present, meaning that if we have our focus on our breaths, we have our presence in the present.
During any time of your day, when you get the chance, try to focus on your breath. Think about the flow of air that goes through your nose and into your chest. Every time you pay attention to your breaths, you force yourself to pay attention to what you are doing right now (breathing).
When you pay attention to what you are doing right now, you automatically pay no attention to other thoughts involving the future and the past.
- Once you consciously focus on your breathing, you will let go of any thoughts you have. Any judgmental, predicting, and analyzing thoughts will not be present when you are consciously focused.
You’ll begin to feel some senses of peace within your head, as if there are no more complicated thoughts. However, bear in mind that these peaceful feelings would probably last for a short while if you are new to this practice, possibly even less than a second.
Perhaps you’ve been used to having your focus planted within your past or future for such a long time, that it is hard for you to stay within the present, that it takes actual intentional attention and effort for you to be in the present.
Do this everyday!
However, as you increase the frequency of you practicing this method to stay in the present, your mind will eventually become trained to focus on what you are experiencing at the moment more, rather than losing its focus on somewhere else.
In other words, it will eventually become a natural behavior of yours.
Once you’ve focused on your breathing, you’ll eventually begin to experience periods of peace within your head and surrounding, this is because by practicing this method, you create a sort of space around your thoughts.
Try to remember to focus on your breathing whenever you can, make it an everyday habit.
- Substitute your worries and fears of the future with focusing on your breaths
- Substitute your memories of sadness and anger with focusing on your breaths.
When you are consciously focused on your breaths, you are consciously present. This method is a very powerful method because of its easiness and of its formless attribute.
Keep doing this for a year and I promise you are going to feel more peace and meaning in your life.
Method #2: Visualize – Rise above your thoughts
One of the best ways to control your thoughts and mind is through visualizations. Your mind has a hard time distinguishing between what is imagined and what is real, which is why many people can get emotional from just their thoughts and imagined situations.
Despite of its harmful effect, you could also use it to your advantage. Use your visualization skills to clear your head of negative thoughts.
In order to clear your mind of thoughts, you must first be separated from them first.
In other words:
- You must realize that those thoughts are separate from who you truly are.
- If you let your identity be merged with your thoughts, then your thoughts have direct and complete control over how you feel.
- You are not your thoughts; you are someone who has control over your thoughts and how it affects your emotions, rather than it controlling you.
Once you’ve realized those facts, come up with a visualization of you being a separate entity detaching from your thoughts.
Visualization examples
Some of the ones I’ve used:
- You are a person lying on a grass field on your back; all you do is watch the clouds. Each cloud passing by represents a thought. All you are doing is watching them; you are not judging or analyzing the clouds, but to let them pass by.
- You are on the ground that is full of mess and filth, these messes and filth represents your thoughts. You can fly away towards the clear blue sky, where no mess and filth and exist. The sky has no noises, no clutters, but just empty peace.
- You are in the shower and you are cleaning yourself off of your thoughts. You come out clean and peaceful, without worries and fears.
Whatever you try to visualize, use a scenario where you are characterized as a completely separate existence from your thoughts/mind activities.
You could combine this method with the first method into a longer routine that you might do daily. That is what you could call a “meditation”.
I didn’t put meditation on here because meditation comes in many forms and sometimes requires past experiences, therefore I only mention specific actions that can be done by almost anyone without any previous knowledge regarding staying in the present.
Method #3: Question your presence
In order to condition your mind to stay in the present as much as possible, you fist need to be able to remember to come to the awareness that you might not be in the present.
To do that, you must question your presence of your “mind time-line”. In other words, as many times as you can during the day, ask yourself if you are within the present moment right now.
Look at what you are feeling and what you are thinking at the moment, are they associated with your present? Or are they associated with the future and the past?
This method is basically aimed at getting you to become more self-reflective during the day.
- During random times of the day, ask yourself a simple question: “Am I living in the present right now?”
- If you don’t think so, then try one of the methods mentioned above (#1, #2)
Do this enough times, and you’ll start to become more aware with how you think, maybe you’ll start to realize that most of the time you spend your thoughts on what is probably going to happen, rather than what is happening now, which is the only thing that happens in our world.
Method #4: Accept your feelings and thoughts that you have right now
It’s important to know how you feel, and it’s more important to accept them as a result. Many people go through their lives constantly trying to deny their thoughts/feelings.
When you resist a certain emotion that might not be pleasant for you, you actually create more negative emotions as a result. In other words, you can get even more unhappy at the fact that you are unhappy in general.
Once you try to escape from your thoughts and feelings, you also escape from the present – the only place where your life exists. Therefore, you’ll become absent from your life when you resist you thoughts and emotions.
So how do you return to the present despite all of your negative thoughts/feelings? The answer is to just accept them.
- Just agree that you have negative thoughts and feelings that you don’t like.
- Accept that it is part of reality that you don’t feel as well as you would like.
- Once you’ve accepted and recognized your thoughts and feelings, tell yourself to just “let it go”.
- Release them now that you’ve accepted them, there isn’t any point for them to stay for you to fight against them any longer.
When you successfully accept and recognize how you truly think and feel: you’ll start to realize that there are more options rather than being immersed within them, as if there is now extra space around how your thoughts/emotions.
There is extra space because acceptance is a form of “moving on”. You are moving past your disliked emotions and thoughts, instead deciding to stay and fight against them.
So accept any negative thoughts and feelings, and recognize them as your own. You aren’t a bad person having those, because everyone has them naturally. But if you decide to live a happier and better life, you must stop fighting against how you feel & think.
When you fight your emotions, you deny reality. When you deny reality, you don’t live in it at all.
Conclusion
Thank you for reading Methods to Present Living, I hope these methods have really helped you reach the stage of living in the present.
I’ve personally tried all of these methods, and the breathing focus has really helped me increase my presence in life the most – mainly because it is so easy to do and I could do it almost anywhere at anytime.
However, the other methods can work just as well under different situations.
For example:
- I usually use method #2 & #4 to calm myself down if I am ever stuck in a difficult situation. Those methods helped bring me back into the present when a more serious situation is at hand.
- Method #3 basically is for increasing your awareness for the moment of the present.
- Method #1 (breath focus) can be applied towards almost any situation, which is why it helped me the most.
Again, thank you for reading. Until next time. 
