Week Twenty-four: Returning to the Moment

As a continuing practice, I’d like to invite all of us to return to an awareness of this moment. As the days and weeks have progressed since the terrorist attacks, I have found myself increasingly grateful to have the practice of being in the present moment, as it has helped allay my fear and has grounded me in the experience that’s happening now. Being in the present moment allows me to sit with people as they process their pain and fear. It’s the present moment that has continuously offered me moments of surprised delight in Central Park, as I wake up to the moment and become aware of birdsong all around me, or notice that a particularly beautiful tree is revealed by a shaft of morning sunlight.

Someone once told me the saying, “Yesterday is a cancelled check, tomorrow is a promissory note. The only cash on hand is today.” I’ve never forgotten that, especially since I used to have a habit of worrying about absolutely everything – everything that hadn’t happened yet. It’s for this reason, I believe, that I’ve become such a proponent of living in the present moment. Most of my fears had to do with things that never became anything at all, and the energy and focus required by so much worry really wore me out.

Because fear can be so debilitating and such a burden to carry through the day, and because we’ve all been through an experience that understandably generates fear, I want to encourage all of us to keep coming back to the present moment when we feel overwhelmed or afraid. Generally, it’s true enough to say, “At this exact moment, in this exact place, I’m okay for now.” While we can’t predict or control the future, the present moment is what we have available right here, right now, and most of the time we’re safe in this moment.

Of course, if something’s happening to you in the present moment that is painful, terrifying, or in some other way unpleasant, it’s not all okay right now. There’s a lesson we can learn from pain management approaches, though. When working with pain reduction with hypnosis, a paradoxical experience is that the more we allow a full awareness of the pain, rather than trying to push it away, the less it hurts. It seems that by softening into it, but bringing our full awareness to our sensation and experience, we actually lessen the distress of a painful or fearful present moment.

And so, for this week, I’d like to invite all of us to continue to experiment with being in the present moment, and to explore how it is to simply be with what is. Remember, though, being with what is doesn’t mean being passive and unable to act. It means being fully aware of what’s going on in this moment, fully experiencing the present, and then deciding what to do about it.

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