Dance with the Present Moment and Experience Real Life

“Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life. ― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

In my life, as I try to grasp the present, I’ve found that many triggers jolt us away from the Now.

The triggers are omnipresent, forever invading. We don’t even notice them. Life can quickly become one trigger after another, dragging us away from what life was supposed to be.

Then, when real life happens, we tend to see life itself as a distraction. When really, we couldn’t be more wrong. The things we focused on were typically not real life at all. And the things that distracted us were real life, calling to us.

Real life was the rare human moment that someone wanted to share with us. But when it finally happened, we failed to realize it and shrugged it off.

It was the birds singing, but we were too busy to notice. It was the stranger on the street who was having a bad day and needed help. Real life was the sunrise, sunset, and the stars above. Or the face of your loved one that you hadn’t bothered to truly look at.

But when these things happened, we thought they were the distraction, not real life itself.

The distractions from real life were in the job that we do, where if we ceased to exist, someone else would fill the slot within 48 hours. It was the negative and judgmental words that we yell at ourselves in our minds. It was the worries about the stock market going up or down. It was the concern over the most negative news story of the day.

We thought we were living real life in these times, but we were not in the present moment here. Instead, we were upset about the past or worried about the future or focused on our made-up problems. Or perhaps, we were just distracted by nonsense.

As we become so-called mature and modern adults, we get to a point where whatever it is pulling us into the Now becomes the thing that we wish to avoid. The Now falls into the background. We somehow manage to escape the unescapable.

Adults have escaped from the present as if it were a disaster to be averted. But we weren’t meant to escape the Now. It’s like trying to outrun your shadow. Humans today are disjointed from their own shadow, living in a world of illusion when they become disconnected from the Now.

So why do we seek to escape it if this cannot be done?

The present may be too powerful for us to handle. It is a zone where anything could happen. The plans you had may work, or they may come crashing down. Your feelings may be validated or dismissed. A revolutionary idea may help you find success, cause you to have a massive failure or even both.

But rather than give in to the power of the present moment, we often wish to take power back for ourselves.

Our inflated egos make us want to hold on to the need to control, plan, achieve, and predict.

Some mysterious Now couldn’t possibly be at the reins of this life – no, we mortal and temporal humans feel that we are the ones in power. This is the illusion that we work on maintaining all our lives. Our lives become not life but rather the illusion of one.

I was once driving to work, and I saw a disheveled man with a chaotic, long beard. He was swaying his hands almost like a musical conductor. He seemed to be guiding traffic and buses to go where they were going. This man did not work for the city. He had a wild smile as if he was having the time of his life. Somehow, I understood what was happening. In this man’s mind, he was controlling the universe. He directed the traffic, the pedestrians, and perhaps even the animals. In his mind, he had orchestrated it all.

But of course, they were all doing what they wanted to do, and he was pretending to have made it happen that way. He felt the power and the control but had none.

Sometimes, that feels like the analogy for what humanity has become. We insist on maintaining control over that which is actually out of our hands. We are happy to take the credit when it works in our favor, but any time something goes wrong, it was out of our hands.

Yet, just maybe, things were always out of our hands. I can’t force my heart to beat, but it continues to happen. Until it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, it’s because it was never in my control, to begin with.

Maybe we are trying to control a universe that is actually out of our hands.

We find it difficult to let the Now be whatever it will be, to give us whatever it has to give, or to take from us whatever it wishes to take. And so, every day, we are resisting that present moment, as we have made it into the enemy.

We are not in the present moment because we have made it the enemy of our lives. We have succumbed to the triggers all around us.

Someone could spend a lifetime documenting these triggers that lead us away from the present, away from the Now.

When we have scheduled our lives away, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have plans and perceive nothing beyond them, we have resisted the present moment.

When we convince ourselves that we are failures and get stuck in self-pity, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have rejected a chance occurrence just because we did not expect it, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have labeled with language that which words cannot confine, we have resisted the present moment.

When we needed the security of knowing the outcomes of everything we may do, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have insisted on living by the patterns we have always lived by, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have denied our wild, spontaneous, and free side, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have failed to see the beauty in the beautiful, the sadness in the sad, and the wonder in the wonderful, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have gotten lost in thoughts rather than lost in the experience that is life, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have been convinced by false thoughts and ideas that do not stand up to reality, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have confused our temporary selves, emotions, and problems with being more important than the universe, we have resisted the present moment.

We do these things. I do them, you do them, and perhaps everyone I have ever known does them.

Seeing these triggers for what they are can take us even further away from the present, strangely enough. In seeing them, we start to notice them, label them, think about them, and interpret them, and all of this takes us further away from life.

But if we give ourselves to the Now, then there is nothing left to resist, and we become a part of that Now.

We don’t need to put much effort into this, as effort often works against the now. Going with the tides of now is effortless, but because we have resisted this for so long, it may appear to take effort to get there.

The Now is happening to us, whether or not we are ready to take it in and accept that. The power is more in the present than it is in us. We are predicting it, reacting to it, and explaining it, but are we experiencing it fully and living it? That is another matter.

Rather than grasping at the present, which cannot be grasped, it makes more sense to dance with it. We can focus on becoming aware and in sync with real life and strive to find a piece of that now. Even if we can’t have all of it, we can find some of it for ourselves.

The alternative is to live a life outside of the now. What kind of life is that?

Living longer is a focus for many, but it doesn’t mean much if we didn’t actually live those years. What percent of our lives took place in sync with the Now? That may be a more interesting metric to shoot for.

I’m not sure that being in the present is a skill or practice. It may be as simple as letting go of our ego, of our need to control and direct this thing called life. Rather than living the illusion of life, we can let it go and truly live.

Humans do have great power. But how great is that power when our lives are temporary, and every loved one will die? How great is it when everything built will fall, most of our predictions are wrong, and much of our lives occur in the imaginary world of ideas?

Our true power was in our ability to acknowledge the power of the present and to become one with it.

Join me in a never-ending dance with the present moment. That is the goal of this life if there ever was one.

If you are interested in learning more about the Present Moment, you may wish to read 7 Thoughts to Live Your Life By: A Guide to the Happy, Peaceful, & Meaningful Life.

Controlling Our Emotions So They Don’t Control Us

I am sometimes surprised at how easy it is to manipulate a person. We all have a range of emotions, personalities, beliefs, desires, knowledge, understanding, and human connections. Yet, despite our complexities, is it really so difficult to manipulate us? If someone hacks or invades our emotional centers, can’t they then hijack our mind and body?

It’s quite easy to make someone angry if you think of it. This involves calling someone a name, badmouthing their mother or other family members, insulting their intelligence or skill, making offensive gestures, or referring to a person’s most deeply held beliefs as nonsense or idiocy. If you make someone angry, they tend to lose control, yelling loudly, becoming offensive in their own word use or gestures, perhaps even be willing to engage in a fight. They tend to get into a revengeful mindset – wanting to hurt the person hurting them.

Understand that to make someone angry is to poison them and those around them and make them do foolish things. So, if you anger someone, you have controlled them into taking actions against their own best interest. Of course, most people assume they are not being manipulated. Most people assume that the antagonist is legitimately being himself, and just by his own faulty character, he happens to be anger-inducing. Somehow, that belief probably makes us even angrier, thinking, how could someone be such an imbecile, so uncaring, so offensive?

Perhaps much of the time, the antagonist is legitimately himself. Still, other times maybe he enjoys gaining control over others, knowing that if he doesn’t like someone, he can make them angry and make them lose control, turning them into his puppets. As long as the antagonist maintains some control over himself, he will appear to be the better person, in the end, perhaps even coming out to be a hero if he helps to calm down the person he has angered or to stop the one he angered from causing too much trouble.

Anger is just one powerful emotion, but any other could be used just as well to shift someone into a different frame of mind where they cannot think clearly. Can you think clearly if you feel overwhelmingly sad, happy, jealous, embarrassed, hopeless, or scared? Don’t those emotions tend to put you on a one-track mind, where all you can think is of one thing? Generally, you will work toward alleviating that strong emotion to get yourself back to normal. Still, in doing so, you may be easily manipulated and controlled into taking a course of action that works against your best interests.

I recently heard of a scam where people are contacted by the FBI, only it is not truly the FBI, but just an imposter who wishes to trick the target into transferring money to them. These villains can trick many people because they scare them. To many people, it is one of the scariest things to be contacted by the FBI, to be told that you are wanted for crimes – even, of course, when you are fully innocent. We will do anything to alleviate the overwhelming emotion of fear, even if that means telling these people all of our private details or transferring money to them.

It isn’t until later that we realize none of it made sense. The caller didn’t know the target’s name but rather had to ask to confirm it. The caller didn’t know the target’s address, or social security number, or which bank he used, or anything at all about the caller, until the caller provided that information.

So why would the FBI call someone if they did not know who they were calling, nor anything about them? Of course, they would not.

We must be wary of someone who insists on putting us into extreme emotional states. Someone who constantly reminds us that we should be scared, worried, or sad should not easily be trusted. When taken to extremes, these emotional states do not help us work our way through problems or see clearly.

One of the greatest skills anyone can learn then is emotional control. We have to practice this. When someone is yelling and behaving in a threatening way, a part of us must recognize that this is a potential threat, but it does not help to cower in fear and panic.

Recently, I stopped at a gas station to fill my tank. While I was pulling into the gas station, I got an uneasy feeling, as four men were partly blocking the entrance. One of them begrudgingly moved out of the way to let me in. There was a huge truck to one side blocking the view to the street – it crossed my mind that this may be on purpose, to obstruct the view so no one could see what these men were doing, but I ignored that idea. Some gas pumps were out of order, and the one closest to the street was in use, so I pulled up to the one next to these four men. They were standing, appearing to do nothing. This struck me as a bit strange since we were at a gas station, but I reminded myself that they were not doing anything, so there was no problem.

As I parked my car at the gas terminal, I noticed that one of the men had his eyes on me. He was the biggest of the group and only about 10 feet away from me. I stepped out of the car and in front of my door, and suddenly the man had one arm fully behind his back in an awkward manner – he was not stretching, nor was he just quickly pulling out some cigarettes. His hand was back there purposefully as if he were holding something. He was smiling at me, inching forward very slowly, as if he didn’t want me to notice he was getting closer. He complimented my nice-looking car, and I said Thanks, man.

He continued to inch closer and closer, with his arm still behind his back. I was outwardly as casual as possible, while at this point, every red flag had been raised in my mind. I realized that my life was possibly in danger. On top of all these red flags, the man was smiling with a sort of grimace that did not seem right at all to me.

Somehow, through years of working on my emotions, not allowing them to go out of control, and always keeping my composure, I had been able to be fully calm at this moment where I realized I was in trouble. I had never been so sure in all my life that something bad was about to happen to me. The man was almost within arm’s reach now. In a flash, I had realized that the big truck blocking the view was not a coincidence. The four men clustered, doing “nothing” was not a coincidence. This man’s arm awkwardly behind his back could not be a coincidence. I believe he wanted to threaten me with a weapon.

He was almost within arm’s reach.

I quickly yet casually stepped behind my car door (with it between the man and me) and into my car. I imagined that from his perspective, he might have assumed I just forgot my wallet or something in my car. Of course, I was ready to leave. I put my keys in the ignition and got out of there as quickly as I could.

The first lesson here is I should have trusted my intuition earlier. I knew something was not right immediately when I saw these four men doing nothing, and then the big truck blocking the view from the street and the many “out of order” pumps were other signals. The man with the hand behind his back staring at me was another signal. I waited until the last possible moment when he was almost within arm’s reach, and that was a mistake, but luckily nothing happened to me.

Emotional control is critical. If I had gotten too scared, I might have entered into the animalistic “fight or flight” response. As humans, we should remember that the options are actually endless, not binary. But if I had frozen there, obviously, this would have been a mistake. If he had me scared and frozen, that was probably the perfect victim he was looking for. He could have taken all my money, my phone, and the car, in that case. If I had panicked and run on foot, they might have been ready to stop me. Even though I got back in the car, if I was too scared, not thinking clearly, I may have forgotten to lock the car, I may have dropped the keys or struggled to get them into the ignition properly, giving them enough time to open my door and force me out.

It was of utmost importance that I remain calm and composed.

Luckily I did.

Just because the environment is moving us toward an emotion does not mean was must let those emotions run out of control. Something in the environment may press our Anger button, or Fear button, or Embarrassed button, but we can rewire ourselves not always to need to respond with the same thinking patterns, and certainly to not always need to respond with the same behaviors and actions.

You can imagine emotional triggers as passing through you, not happening to you. This means if someone insults you, it goes through you. You do not need to take it in and respond to it. Similarly, if someone near you fears many events: diseases, wars, financial troubles, you do not necessarily need to let this affect you. You can imagine those feelings passing through you, not needing to get entangled with your emotional self. The words and the fears of this person are just going through you. You are not adding energy to it by taking it seriously. You may even empathize with this person over their fears and try to help, but you are not required to take in their negative energy even then.

Sometimes I have thoughts such as this:

This anger (or fear, sadness, etc.) is not helping me see clearly and behave rightly. I must let this feeling go so that I can move on. When I move on, I will be able to see clearly and behave rightly once again.

When you feel the emotions start to run out of control, think the above thought (or read it aloud). Then talk to a loved one. Practice taking deep breaths. Go for a walk or jog. Watch a stand-up comedy or a comedy film. These are the things that help me. Maybe they will help you too. And of course, if you have a problem with an individual, consider talking it through with them after you have calmed down a bit.