Live It Totally
Seekers are rejoicing, dancing, singing, enjoying every moment to its fullest. And that is God’s approach, that: squeeze the juice of every moment, so that you have never to repent that that moment went away unlived. Don’t bother about the past and don’t bother about the future. The present is all there is, so live it totally.
Live here and now
Being in the present moment is one of the key steps on the path of yoga. You must have heard about this concept many times as mindfulness is gaining popularity nowadays. As Professor Mark Williams, former director of the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, says: “It’s easy to stop noticing the world around us. It’s also easy to lose touch with the way our bodies are feeling and to end up living ‘in our heads’ – caught up in our thoughts without stopping to notice how those thoughts are driving our emotions and behaviour.”
So why is mindfulness so important? Yogic teaching draws an important distinction between awareness and unawareness. Practising yoga means learning how to bring awareness into every single action that you perform. If you are unaware of whatever is happening around you and inside of you at this very moment, you have lost this moment forever. It will never come back. Unfortunately, most people are either stuck in their past or obsessed with their future. They are living but are not alive. Life is happening in the realm of “now” and it’s an incredible shame to be missing it.
Naturally you have to make certain plans for the future. Practising yoga does not mean that you completely withdraw from the external world and stop living your life. But do not get so overwhelmed with planning and preparing the future that you forget to live. So how can you be mindful?
How to do it
Whenever you remember or whenever the need arises because you are overwhelmed, give yourself a moment to practise mindfulness. Slow down, even just for ten seconds.
Take a deep breath, look around you. Notice the small details: the face expression of the person next to you, the wooden structure of the table you’re sitting at, the quality of the air that is touching your skin, the sounds near to you and those far away. Be aware of as many details as you can, as if you wanted to paint a picture of this moment later and needed to remember everything. For a moment, you stop; there can be noise and movement around you, but you are absolutely still. You are an observer, a witness. This is mindfulness meditation.
With this awareness, you can turn in. Inspect your body, observe your thoughts. Don’t engage with any of them, just watch them as if you were watching clouds moving across the sky – coming and going.
Appreciate the incredible force of the universe that brought you here, to this instance, in this place, with these people. Accept the state of your body and mind at this moment. Immediately you will start feeling gratefulness. You are where you are supposed to be. Take another deep breath. With this calmness and appreciation, you can go on.
The whole point is to understand that the future is not. The future is created by the ambitious mind. The future is not part of time. It is part of ambition. Because ambition needs space to move, you cannot fulfil ambition now; you can fulfil live now, but not ambition. Ambition is against life, anti-life.
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