Living in present moment sounds simple until you try it. You’re projecting! You drop it! You stop projecting on me!
One of the side effects of accepting full responsibility for everything in your life is that you feel things you don’t want to feel and have to admit you are creating them.
The more I step back from my mind and monitor the chatter in my head, the more aware I am of how much thinking is unfounded, unnecessary, and as Zen teachers call it, pure makyo: an illusion of the mind not congruent with universal reality.
Why Anxiety Can’t Survive in the Now
Jesus asked his disciples: Can anxious thought add a single day to your life?
The Buddha taught that the root of suffering is found in our constant wanting and craving.
Much of our anxiousness comes from our perspective of past and future. In every now moment, instead of enjoying the present for its grandness, we use the Now only as a way to measure how we’re shaping up to beliefs held in the past and aspirations set for the future.
The problem is that many of us hold the ideal version of ourselves at arm’s length. It’s something we always hope to attain but can never convince ourselves we’ve attained. We don’t allow ourselves to be successful, because really going for success would mean accepting that we might fail.
Too often, it feels safer to just not go for it. This happens in our subconscious without our even knowing it. And so our dreams remain dreams that rarely manifest in physical reality.
Past and Future Are Illusions
Start living for the present and never for the illusion of the future. The past and future are just illusions. The only thing you actually experience is this moment right now. Everything else is a recollection of how you remember something or hope it will happen.
But those recollections are weighted by your current worldview at the time of the experience. Ten different people might all experience the exact same event and have vastly different recounts of what happened.
Our belief patterns decide how we remember the past and view the future. When we are not satisfied with what is happening right Now, we make ourselves a slave to past and future illusions.
It is difficult to experience a future void of anxiety if you hold very much anxiety about the future. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Projection Is the Mechanism
For me, this plays out when I project my own shortcomings or anxiety onto another person. Then my mind tries to convince me that the anxiety is coming from them, not from me.
But it isn’t ever coming from outside of me.
It is my belief that they feel a certain way about me or something I did which makes me anxious. It is my projection of my own insecurities onto others that allows me to justify my anxiety without having to accept that I am the one creating it.
When we are content in this Now moment, anxiety cannot exist. We have been programmed by our linear minds to always gauge this moment on something that has happened in the past or will happen in the future. This is counterproductive and the source of much stress in our society.
Confront It in the Now
What I’ve tried to do is confront these feelings in the present moment.
Instead of putting bills aside that I cannot pay and just worrying about them nonstop, I started acting in the Now and accepting that synchronicity is always in my corner lining things up exactly as they are supposed to unfold.
When I have a bill I can’t pay Now, I make a call or send an email immediately to find out the options. Can this payment deadline be extended? Is there a payment plan available? Can I barter services?
Arrangements can almost always be made that suit both parties. Once the call is finished, it’s as if a huge weight has been lifted. Shortly after, I find that the means to settle any back payments just show up. It’s the magic of synchronicity, but it doesn’t work until you’re able to release the anxiety.
The Blissful Default
I have full confidence in every decision and action I am taking lately. I feel as though I’ve come to a great understanding of who I am and why I exist in this physical reality. With all of that Knowing, there should never be an outside opinion or energy that can convince me otherwise.
But given I’m relatively new to this higher-consciousness thing, it happens. I get upset when other people disapprove of what I’m doing, or worse, when I assume someone disapproves of me because I’m projecting my own insecurities onto them.
I’m counteracting this by basking in the joy of this moment. When I take a walk, meditate, exercise, or just stick my head out a car window on a cool day, I’m able to turn my mind off and just enjoy things. The more I can enjoy things right now, the more I program my mind to gravitate towards a blissful state as its default.
A blissful default mode is a grand thing.
Take Action Now
This existing for the present moment thrives on taking action Now. Never let something that can be addressed Now linger until tomorrow. Never let something that cannot be addressed now affect your present well-being.
In any given Now moment, you can only address what you can address. The key is addressing them when you are able.
I’m rewiring my mind to choose bliss as its default mode. I’m taking responsibility for my thoughts and understanding more every day that my projections onto people, places, and things around me are not reality, but an illusory method of shifting blame from myself to someone else.
Like the bird who lays an egg and then sits on it until it is ready to hatch, so should our imagination exist in the now, basking in ideas yet to hatch.
Once ideas are birthed out of intuition and inspiration, and only then, will we find that we merely have to open our wings, take the leap, and fly.
It is only when we have learned to Be that we will ever truly Do anything of brilliance.
This is the work that actually changes things.
Explore the Shadow Work practices for guided exercises that help you feel, process, and transform.