Living In The Present Moment

By Jill Marie

How many times have you heard of the benefits of living in the present moment?  Do you totally understand what that means and how to do it?  And if you do...and you practice that, do you find yourself feeling so much more alive and connected to the situations and people in your life?

There is a wee bit of a crude saying you may have heard, "If you have one foot in the past and the other one in the future, you end up messing all over today."

I cleaned it up a bit but you get the idea right? Eckhart Tolle's book The New Earth was good but it wasn't one of my favorites. His book The Power of Now, on the other hand, is one of my top 5 favorites (BTW I have noticed that there are about 20 book in my top 5 currently so hopefully no one is keeping track of that).

I used to get really confused about being in the Present Moment and still being able to live and function in this physical world.  I wondered how I was supposed to utilize my memories of the past or plan for the future and still be in the Now.

As I pondered those questions pretty intently I was directed to The Power Of Now and it helped me understand at a much deeper level.  Here is a section in that book that really helped me begin to understand at a much deeper level.

Letting Go Of Psychological Time

Learn to use time in the practical aspects of your life - we may call this "clock time" - but immediately return to present moment awareness when those practical  matters have been dealt with.  In this way, there will be no buildup of "psychological time," which is identification with the past and continuous compulsive projection into the future.

Clock time is not just making an appointment or planning a trip.  It includes learning from the past so that we don't repeat the same mistakes over and over.  Setting goals and working toward them.  Predicting the future by means of patterns and laws, physical, mathematical and so on, learned from the past and taking appropriate action on the basis of our predictions. 

But even here, within the sphere of practical living, where we cannot do without reference to past and future, the present moment remains the essential factor.  Any lesson from the past becomes relevant and is applied now.  Any planning as well as working toward achieving a particular goal is done now.   

The enlightened person's main focus of attention is always in the Now, but they are still peripherally aware of time.  In other words, they continue to use clock time, but are free from psychological time.      

Those few paragraphs really helped me begin to live my life more in the Now moment, though I still get lost in psychological time now and again.

What do you find helpful for you as you live in the Now?