When the Light of awareness shows us what we don't want to see or feel, what do we do? What happens if we choose to stay present? The power of Now and teaching present moment awareness.
"I was afraid of my feelings, and I thought that accepting them meant accepting they would be there forever."
Contents
Being Willing to Witness
Getting Perspective
Making it Practical: Present Moment Awareness
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“I Was Afraid of My Feelings and Thought that Accepting Them Meant Accepting They Would Be There Forever”
Eight years ago, I was very depressed. I wanted nothing more than to stop feeling this way and dreamed of escaping my body. I had struggled with depression for many years, and I was terrified that I might feel that way forever. Someone recommended I do a mindfulness-based course. This turned out to be the one of the most helpful parts of my journey. The therapist suggested I needed to learn to sit with my feelings instead of resisting them, but this terrified me. I was afraid of my feelings, and I thought that accepting them meant accepting they would be there forever. But as I practiced the skills of mindfulness and distress tolerance, I noticed that when I accepted my emotions they often shifted more easily. Or at least I didn’t make them worse by worrying about them. I realized that I had been making the depression and anxiety worse by resisting my feelings.
Being Willing to Witness
In this month’s shareable newsletter for members, I included the following thought (which, along with all the other content, you can customize and use as your own):
When we think of Light, we may think of warmth, joy, and expansiveness.
But sometimes Light may bring overheating or overwhelm.
It's like when a dark basement room has been unoccupied for years. It’s become an excellent home for cockroaches or rats, who found the dark space to be perfectly welcoming and cozy. When the day comes that you walk into the room and turn on a light for the first time in a long time, you see the invaders as they scurry and flee. After they leave the room, you see their excrement.
Did the Light cause the intruders' mess? No, of course not. It merely brought it to your awareness.
And now you can clean it up.
Getting Perspective
It typically feels easier to not look at unpleasant things, but when the Light shines on them, we see things as they truly are. On this planet, that can be an ongoing slog, with a nearly endless supply of messes being revealed. As such, I don’t wish to be trite about this seriously troubling aspect of being human.
Nevertheless, it is simply a fact that awareness brings us to a new enlightened state, where we now have the conscious choice of how we wish to respond. Not knowing there are rats in the basement means we lack the awareness that empowers us to make new choices. With awareness, we now have the option to clean up the room and patch the hole where they made their way in.
This Moment Will Not Come Around Again
Many clocks now are just numbers going in a straight line which feels wrong, because everyone knows time is cyclical. With the old clocks you could see them going around and around… The Maya knew a lot about time. When you study their calendars you see circles within circles within circles. It never ends… you never run out of time. Of course the most important thing about time is what you do with it… What you are doing with your time NOW is all that matters. Yes, Sunday will come around again next week and October will come around again next year, but this moment will be gone forever. This is the moment that decides what your life is all about. This is the moment you can decide to be happy, to accept all the gifts being offered, to be grateful for your life, to do what is yours to do. This moment is the moment to live your life, your way, doing what you need and want to do. But, you need to do it now because this moment will not come around again. Living in the NOW does not mean you don’t plan for the future. On the contrary, it means you make decisions NOW to ensure you will have the FUTURE you want.
Making it Practical: Present Moment Awareness
If that theme is interesting to you, and you want to explore it or teach it, here are some ideas from a yoga perspective.
The first Yoga Sutra may be translated as, “Now begins the instruction on the practice of Yoga.” Notice that the first word is “Now”.
As Anna Guest-Jelley wrote in a 2020 email, “The very first sutra is often translated as ‘Now the yoga begins.’ Now. Not yesterday, not what worked last week, not what you think you might do next month. Now. And now. And now. So when you’re riding the inevitable waves of life, know that changes to your practice aren’t wrong or weird or a sign that you’re doing it wrong. You’re doing it right. All you have to do is come back to this very moment and figure out what your right now yoga practice is.”
If we consider that this moment will never come around again, and that the most fundamental action we can take is to come back to this moment, we can be reminded of the vital impact of yoga and meditation to teach us how to do this, over and over again.
And when we consider that Light sometimes reveals things we didn’t want to see, we can stay gently present, allowing ourselves to become aware of that which needs cleaning.
Refraining from Strategies Designed to Protect Us from Discomfort
Admittedly, it’s difficult to maintain awareness when anxiety arises, because to truly experience the present as it is means we have to refrain from our usual strategies: trying to get control, trying to figure things out, going numb, seeking diversions, or some other escape. The sole purpose of these strategies is to protect us from feeling the discomfort that we don’t want to feel. But until we can refrain from these defenses and reside in the physical experience directly, we will stay stuck in the narrow world of “me and my anxiety…” The fact is, when we have discomfort like anxiety, it’s counterintuitive to bring awareness to the present moment because we naturally want to turn away from, rather than toward, any form of discomfort. And once we turn toward the present moment, trying to reside in it, there will always be resistance. We may encounter resistance even when the present moment is pleasant, because the small mind of the ego – the mind of thoughts – doesn’t like stepping aside, and it will forcefully attempt to reassert itself. So what is the countermeasure? It is to return again and again to the physical reality of the moment.
Ezra Bayda, Beyond Happiness: The Zen Way to True Contentment
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For more: Newsletter Archive