Living in the Now

Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist teacher said, meditation “has two aspects. Stopping and calming is the first and looking deeply to transform is the second.”

Now, meditation is ubiquitous. Many people will meditate because it reduces stress and it calms us, relaxes us. It has great physiological benefits as well as emotional and mental benefits. 

But there's a whole deeper access that's available through meditation, which is this self-inquiry, introspection, and reflection. This is where we're not just calming our system, but we're able to actually transform it through that reflection of ideas, thoughts, and beliefs that we have.

That's the power of the MindTravel experience: in the music, we're able to feel what's there – what’s happening deep inside us – and actually transform it.

This brings up a really important point, which is this idea of where is life being lived? And in particular, when is life being lived? 

Now, to be sure, life is being lived now. That's not what we're talking about. 

But if we actually think of most of our experience of where life is happening, for many of us, life is happening in the future. 

 Let’s use an “if/then” exercise to illustrate this. I invite you to fill in the blanks here, and the question can be about anything in your life. And this could pertain to anything in your life.

“If I had ___________ (insert a thing you want for yourself), then my life would be _____________.”

Some examples could be, “if I was 10 pounds lighter, I would be more attractive and I would have a partner.” 

“If I had X amount more money, then I would buy a nicer car.”

What these point to, though, is a life that's not happening now. It's a life happening in the future. (And by the way, this is equally true for the past.)

“If only,” right? If this, then that. If this, then that. 

And that really points to this deviation of our life happening from right now to either the past or the future.

So now that we’re aware of that, we can accept it and start to shift it to life being more of a verb, as opposed to a noun.

How are we defining our living of life? That's what we're actually talking about here. Is the quality of the life we're living attached to things in a way that we can't feel fully lived until we have them? 

And that brings us to the ultimate fear, our Original Fear, which happens at birth. 

Now, I hear you – “But Murray, how can we be afraid of something that we don’t even remember?” We’ll talk more about that!