Back to the Present: How to Live in the Moment
There’s a nice article (or was) in Psychology Today on the topic of mindfulness. It contains a lot of useful tips for bringing your awareness back into your present-moment experience.
Here are some practical tips to help you get mindful now.
• Meditate. Meditating is nothing more than focusing on the present moment. The easiest way to meditate is to simply focus on your breath—not because your breath has some magical quality, but because it’s always there with you. The challenge is to keep your attention on your breathing. Inevitably, your mind will wander and thoughts will arise—and that’s fine. When it happens, just let go of the thought and bring your attention back to the present by focusing once again on your breath.
• Use a reminder of the string-around-your-finger variety. Wear your watch upside-down, put a quarter in your shoe, or put a smudge on one of the lenses of your glasses. When you notice it, let that serve as a reminder for you to notice your surroundings, become aware of your senses and your bodily sensations, and bring your focus into the present. If you get to the point where you’re going entire days without noticing it, switch up the reminder.
• Practice slowing down time by attending to the subtleties of experience in the here and now. Take a minute and go get a handful of raisins. Now eat one—but don’t just pop it in your mouth. Instead, imagine you’ve never seen a raisin before. Look it over carefully. Consider its shape, weight, color, and texture. Rub the raisin gently across your lips, noticing how it feels. Now put the raisin in your mouth, and roll it around slowly with your tongue. Notice how it feels in your mouth. Take a small bite, noting the flavor. Next, chew the raisin slowly, focusing on its taste and texture. Then swallow, and follow its path down your throat as far as you can. You can have a few more—but remember to focus on what each one looks, tastes, and feels like on your lips, in your mouth, and down your throat.
• Make it new. When you’re performing music, giving a presentation, or even just recounting a favorite story, try to make it new in subtle ways, delivering it in a way you’ve never done before. Rather than performing it by rote, take a risk and try something different—use different words, add a pause, try to express a particular emotion to the audience. Not only will you enjoy it more yourself, but studies find that audiences prefer such performances too. Somehow mindfulness seems to leave an imprint on everything we do.
• Mind the gap. Whenever you find yourself waiting—for the checkout line to move, for the traffic light to change, for the Web page to load—get present. Instead of being impatient and wishing things would go faster, be grateful for the gift of a respite—for the 30 seconds or a minute or two minutes during which you have no obligations. Take the opportunity to mindfully breathe in, breathe out, and savor the moment.
• Focus on the soles of your feet. Here’s a good trick to return to mindfulness if you feel angry or aggressive. Shift all your attention to the soles of your feet. Move your toes slowly, feel the weave of your socks and the curve of your arch. Breathe naturally and focus on the soles of your feet until you feel calm. Practice this exercise until you can use it wherever you are and whenever you find yourself feeling verbally or physically aggressive.
• Focus on your senses. When you observe your surroundings without judging them good or bad, you naturally nudge your awareness into the present moment. Close your eyes and focus on your sense of scent and mentally list all the smells you’re aware of—the restaurant downstairs, the wet pavement outside, the perfume of a nearby co-worker. Next, list all the different sounds you can hear—the ventilation system, cars in the distance, the hum of your computer, typing, footsteps. Then open your eyes and list all the things you see—the rustling of the trees, the faces in the crowd, the wrinkles on your palm. Finally, list all the things you can sense that you appreciate—the way a beam of sunlight hits the brick building across the street, the welcome sight of a friend’s smile, the smell of cookies baking. Remember, you’re not looking for things to appreciate—you’re appreciating the things you sense. With luck, this exercise will put you in a state of relaxed attention that reduces anxiety and makes you feel more fully alive.
6 Responses to “Back to the Present: How to Live in the Moment”
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You’re currently reading “Back to the Present: How to Live in the Moment,” an entry on Bodhipaksa's blog, bodhi tree swaying
Published: Feb 26 2009
minding the gap was something I would do years ago on the bus ride to school. Not eager to be at school, I wanted the ride to last as long as it could.
thanks again!! great article….tho the one yesterday or the other day (already lost track!) the article on “multi-tasking” AWESOME! as a practicing Buddhist, even tho i got rid of my cell phone, i am always sucked into that arena! aaahhh, to live in the present moment is nothing but being mindful in the moment!
hazel
As an aside, in Buddhism you often hear people talking about “living in the gap,” which means something quite different from “making use of waiting time.” In modern Buddhist parlance it means paying attention to the gap between sensory stimulus and emotional response, so that the mind doesn’t produce automatic, habitual, and unhelpful responses.
Technically, the gap is between our first, automatic response, which arises in terms of a feeling that is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, and a truly emotional response. It’s in this gap that we can choose to respond, for example, with patience rather than restlessness. So we perceive that we’re in a slow-moving queue (that’s the stimulus) and that feels unpleasant (that’s the automatic part of the response, and then there’s a gap in which we have the space to find a creative response so that we remain in the present and not start a whole pattern of emotions and thoughts that causes us (and others) suffering.
Smudge your glasses? Mindfulness of bumping into things?
Justin,
You’re going to have to quit hitting the bottle before mid-day
(Just saying that was kind of surreal).
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