“Remember: there is only one time that is important and that is now! The current moment is the only time we have power. "~ Tolstoy
Stop for a second and tell me: What were you thinking about? It is very possible that you have thought about something in the past or in the future.
Of course, part of this thinking is necessary. For example, we are considering what we need to have in the store tonight to prepare dinner, or what we saw on the news yesterday to think about where we are and what to do about it.
Sometimes it is also a pleasure to think about the past or the future: to remember happy times or to expect something exciting in the near future. But often – usually – instead we stick to things we can't do anything about, because past and future only exist in our minds.
We have our present moments filled with negative emotions caused by something that is not happening – and that can never happen!
Caught in a mental sand trap that we made ourselves, we miss real life – what is happening right now in front of us.
These are the thoughts that rob you of the present. They evoke very different feelings: usually regret, anger and sadness (the past) or fear and dissatisfaction / longing (the future). Although we all indulge in past and future thinking, most of us tend to focus on one thing or another.
Usually my tendency was to focus on the future. I used to worry a lot. With this technique, many people have tried to control the uncontrollable – the future – by imagining all possible outcomes and how they could react in any case.
The extreme version of this forward thinking is a debilitating fear that deprives the here and now of every opportunity for joy. You cannot live your current life if all your energy is used to think about what could happen in the future!
We thinkers of the future also tend to be obsessive planners and goal-setters. We rarely take a break to enjoy what we have achieved and are already focusing on the next step in the plan. This (often unconscious) feeling of dissatisfaction with the present and longing for something else can also occur in the form of daydreams about the future.
What we have now is never enough – there will always be something "out there" missing in the future, the magical ingredient that will make us really and really happy.
Unfortunately, this mythical something we are chasing is a constantly moving target that prevents us from experiencing and enjoying our actual life as we live it.
That once occurred to me when I was living in a cute little apartment that was only a few blocks from the beach in Hawaii. Back then I was obsessed with buying a house (which I couldn't afford in Hawaii) and moved back to the mainland to later regret missing this wonderful opportunity for the next thing on my list.
On the other hand, if you focus on the past, you are often caught in a pattern of sacrifice. We become prisoners of what has already happened to us and carry our stories and experiences with us like a burden that we cannot (or do not want to) put away.
Yes, they are part of us. Yes, we can learn from them, use them and legitimize their impact on us. No, we do not have to constantly experience it anew in the present moment.
This is a difficult question. In the case of a previous physical and emotional trauma, the body actually bears a sensory imprint of the original event, which when triggered can send a cascade of emotions from your past into the present moment. In this case, you have no choice but to deal with these very real emotions in real time – but even then you don't have to be drawn back into the story. Try this instead:
Recognize the emotions triggered, let them wander through your body and stay present. What's going on in front of you Do you feel your feet on the floor or your back against a chair? Can you take a deep breath and hear sounds or smells around you? Let your physical environment gently move your body and mind back to the present. This is the only time we have power, do you remember?
Mostly it is not trauma reactions that hold us in the past. Usually it's just our stories. Stories about bad decisions we made. Stories about people who didn't treat us well. Stories about things that happened to us. These are the thoughts that rob us of both the strength and the joy that we can only experience at this moment.
You can always tell by the emotions that trigger an unhelpful story – usually anger, sadness, and / or regret.
Most of our stories are very well rehearsed because we have thought and talked about them many, many times. Your familiarity gives us a sense of identity and even a strange comfort.
I think about how often I have told the story of my divorce to myself and to others, but I could not finally heal my life and continue until I stopped telling the story. I stopped letting it define who I was.
The past and future only exist in our heads. Concentrating on them is a bad prerequisite for real life, but for many of us it is such an omnipresent habit that we do not even notice that we are doing it. This is the moment when life actually happens to us, and if we don't pay attention to it, it will disappear into the unreality of the past.
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