Right now, Everything is OK
Right now, in this moment, right here, this very nanosecond, and this nanosecond and this one…. Right now, everything is ok. Right now in this body, you have breath. Right now in this body, you have spirit. Right now in this body, you are energy. Right now you have life.
Right now, everything is ok. If you’re thinking it’s not ok, then you are not in the present moment. How do I know? Because I’ve spent half a lifetime outside of the present moment, and I’ve shifted my focus to learning about, studying, intermittently and obsessively chasing the seemingly elusive present moment. But I can also report that I have successfully dropped right into the space of the present moment where time, matter, and the energetic vibration of all human problems does not exist, but is replaced by unlimited human potential.
Be present. We hear it all the time. We see it’s oversaturated message on t-shirts, printed on yoga mats, even on the bumper sticker of the jerk who just cut you off without even being considerate enough to use a blinker to indicate he’s cutting you off, right next to his coexist sticker. Breathe… come back to the light of the present moment, where everything is ok.
What does it actually mean to be present and why is it important? I feel like being present is shoved down our throats, for good reason, but nobody every really tells you WHY! Well I’m here to break it down for you!
Continually training yourself to come back to the only thing that actually really exists right now, the present moment, is perhaps the most important skill to carry you through this thing called life. Because right now, you are whole. Right now when you are focused on this moment, this breath, your energy completely belongs to you, at center, full and complete. Right now, with your acknowledgement of your completeness in this moment, you strengthen the energetic muscle that allows you to return to this completeness more effectively and efficiently.
Here’s a really important perspective I’ve heard a few times over, neither depression nor anxiety can exist in the present moment. Depression results from past thoughts and anxiety arises with future thoughts, therefore neither can exist in the present moment, thus the present moment is perfect. Truly a present, a gift!
How can this be true you may say, because presently I’m feeling pretty miserable or presently I’m overcome by anxiety. The truth is if you experience either or those feelings, you actually are not by definition, present. In actuality your current experience is informed by vibrations of past experiences by way of allowing memories and projections to set the tone of your analysis of your current experience.
Finding the present moment, the ACTUAL present moment takes practice. When you sit in silence and thoughts arise or you catch your mind having wandered off, the exercise is in acknowledging it and bringing it back, catching yourself and returning back to where you started. It can feel daunting and perhaps like an exercise in vain that nothing will stop the mind from its own fodder. But consider for a moment… do you have the expectation that your little chicken legs could squat 200lbs just because you decided to start working out? No, of course you wouldn’t!! You’d set a schedule of going to the gym, multiple days a week, increasing the amount of weight you put on the squat rack, and you’d have patience and grace with your muscles as they began to get on board with your goal of squatting all those L.B.s! So why not have the patience and grace with your mind as you’re training it!
Maybe you didn’t know that you were training the mind. We’ve set expectations that WE are in control of our mind and we can change it whenever we want… because, well, its our mind. Yea, right! I’m so sure… because how easily we break down when we’re on a diet but some co-workers brought in donuts, or you’re doing 30 days of no drinking and your friends call for a happy hour. Yea- you can control your mind! No, it needs to be trained! You see, we’ve trained our mind, or rather, our mind has trained us, utilizing a survival technique, which admittedly we’ve corrupted. That survival mechanism is called the path of least resistance. Instinctually, this mechanism is very important, it is set in place so that we preserve our energy. If you’ve got a boulder you need to get from point A to point B, and there is a hill in between point A and B, the path of least resistance response would inform you to go around the hill, because going up and over that hill, although it’s a shorter distance, will require far too much exertion and would tire you out, even put you in danger. It’s a smart mechanism, the problem is, we’re no longer Neanderthals with a centered focus on mere survival, so our mind has adapted its survival mechanisms in a new age, and we tend to misuse it, often.
Lets go back to the happy hour example. You decided “I’m not going to drink for 30 days so I can give my liver a rest and some time to repair,” now this isn’t a life or death situation, OR it may actually be a life or death situation for some, but in either case, what is comes down to is exertion of choice. It’s much easier to bypass the mental decision making than it is the physical. What I mean is that, if you were having to roll that boulder the implications of your choice would be pretty immediately evident, but we live is a pretty cushy day in age where we don’t have to roll boulders for shelter and thus this path of least resistance survival mechanism still operates the same in a much different setting. In this day and age, typically, we apply our survival mechanisms far different than the application during Paleolithic times. We’ve become more of a thinking society vs. a physical survival society and the impact of our choices, which train our mind, are more subtle and actually likely more long term!
The subtlety of the choice to defy your well intentioned self and just go to happy hour, while it may not seem like a big deal, and it may not be, is reinforcing how you are directing your energy and building that energetic muscle. So let’s bring it back, I started this tirade talking about training the mind and the path of least resistance. Since the immediate harm and subtlety of changing your mind about going to happy hour appears innocuous, its actually becomes the path of least resistance. It’s hard to say no to “fun,” We all know this! Making a choice to stand firm on your commitment to yourself requires a change, backed by energy and while it may feel like rolling a boulder up a hill, its evidence that we have conditioned a misuse of that survival mechanism, because the reality is… If you’re cutting out drinking to repair your liver, you’re probably going to survive longer!
That was an intense example and I may have called the majority of my audience out, so let me gentle win you back with another example of what training your mind looks like. If you were navigating a dirt path through the woods to get to, let’s say, Grandma’s house, and suddenly you realize you are no longer on the dirt path, that you’re wandering through a deeply wooded forest, you’d likely find your way back to the dirt path that’s leading you to Grandma's so you could actually get there, right!? But when it comes to our mind, that simple example seems like a futile endeavor, that’s why most people give up and resolve to “I can’t meditate,” or “I can’t sit alone with my own thoughts,” but I’d argue that these statement arise from either just not understanding the value of observing one’s own mind or just plain being lazy. There I said it! Shoot I said I was going to gently win you back, sorry! I will concede that laziness is a byproduct of not understanding the importance of exercising the mind to continually find the imperative present moment. Why is the present moment imperative…because, again, depression and anxiety DO NOT exist in the present moment.
Lets tackle a few arguments that are likely to arise, shall we?
Argument 1: Depression is a chemical imbalance.
True. But how do you think those chemicals became imbalanced? Do you think that one day the body just decided to clock out and not do its job. That Sammy Serotonin took a lunch break never to return!? The one thing I’m certain of is that the body is designed to heal. All of nature is constantly seeking homeostasis, but certain events can cause a shift, sometimes a storm, resulting in a wake of restructuring to find homeostasis. When our physical body’s chemicals become imbalanced, something in our environment has shifted; it could be diet, location, relationships, emotions, even consciousness, as we live and accumulate experiences, our wisdom and consciousness shifts, and what we needed in the past may no longer serve us, so the body calls on all signals to fire, to get our attention to work with it and get us back into our correct energetic vibration.
Argument 2: Anxiety can be hereditary. It’s not my fault.
Of course, there can be a predisposition to it. Proven by science to be genetic even! However, I will not allow that disempowering statement be where we end this debate. With the mass amounts of epigenetic studies, proving that situational experiences pass down from generation to generation, and further studies are proving that the environment plays more of a massive role in the expression of a gene, than the actual gene itself… then simply, genetic coding is not a strong enough ground to stand on! If a situation can change a gene in the first place, science has already proven itself that it can be changed back to a state as if that initial ancestral experience never happened, by way of changing the environment! Summed up, if you are continuing the vibration of what you’ve learned from your parents or that same environment, (environment encapsulating culture, location, or even the environment of your own mind and thought processes that is perpetuating how you feel) then you, my friend, are furthering that vibration. Science has proved that you have the power to change!! In fact, the simplest scientific law is that the only constant is change!
Argument 3: When I’m present with my thoughts it gives me anxiety or it makes me feel depressed.
If you’re thinking, you’re not present. It’s that space in between the thoughts that is the present moment. The way to get there is to not necessarily eliminate your thoughts, that’s what the brain was designed to do, but to increase the length of time between the thoughts, and strengthen the muscle of being able to return to that space in between the thoughts more often. Really to get a sense of what that energy in the space feels like, because once you feel that sensation, you’re going to want to get back to it! But you must work for it! Just like squatting 200lbs.
So what have we learned so far?
Depression and anxiety do not exist in the present moment.
Arguments against that statement are useless and proven otherwise.
In the present moment your energy is whole and complete.
When your energy is whole and complete you feel whole and complete!
Depending on what your energy is doing, determines what you will draw into your life. (Oh, wait we didn’t cover that yet! Here we go…)
Your body carries an electromagnetic charge and your energy informs that electromagnetic charge. Our thoughts have an effect on our energy; see where I’m going here? Memories, which are thoughts of the past, and utilized for projections into the future, both of which are outside of the present moment, create a coding in our electromagnetic field. This coding is a frequency that aligns to similar frequencies outside of our own field, in the world. When we speak in terms of frequency, and when we do, we are speaking about EVERYTHING, because everything is energy, frequencies entrain. Entraining means to meet something where it is. A high frequency has the ability to bring a low frequency up and vice versa. Similarly, the more frequencies working in proximity, the more likely they are to get on the “same wavelength.” In yoga classes, I instruct students through a breathing exercise called Bhastrika breathing. It is a moderately fast repetitive breathing exercise of which we do a minimum of 300 repetitions. There’s always a point in class, where nobody knows it because our eyes are closed, that a giant smile comes across my face due to the delight of hearing the sound of every single persons’ breath inevitably linking together in pure harmony. It never fails that the bigger the group the more likely this breath becomes completely synchronistic. Like attracts like. You’re friends with people who have similar likes as you because that thing that you like carries a frequency, and you both align to that frequency and thus each other!
All that said, if you live in your memories, perceptively “good” or “bad” your frequency will align with that memory and continue to draw into your experience anything that is aligned with that frequency.
“But isn’t learning from the past so you don’t make the same mistake, a thing?” you contest. Yes, you learn and grown from a frequency that wasn’t aligned with you and then you upgrade, you don’t live in the memory of it, because that experience already informed your vibration on an energetic and subconscious level, that you needn’t worry about it so long as you move in a progressive manner. However, if you keep reaching back into that vibration of that past experience, surely you will keep pulling it into your current relative experience. Move on, move up!
Let’s consider the importance of mindfully integrating the present moment. It’s fair to assume that a strong energy that is complete and has stabilized its frequency is less susceptible to volatility. Now let’s say that strong energy is you and when your energy is stabilized that energy is complete. What do I mean by complete? Picture your energy as a full bucket of water. Now visualize memories of the past and projections of the future as cups around this bucket. Each cup comes with a drill, that drills a hole in the side of the bucket and releases water into the cup. Now if the water is representing energy and energy cannot be destroyed only changed, then let’s imagine that the holes in the bucket empty water into the cup and the cup has a hose that goes back into the bucket. Ok- so your water quantity remains the same, so what’s the problem? Now let’s imagine that the cups have mold in them. The mold represents less desirable memories. As that water leaves the hole of the big bucket and springs out into the cup it picks up the mold and by way of the hose, returns it to the bucket. Remember the cups are your memories and projections that are feeding into and informing your current state, so in this analogy, when you reach back to the past, you’re bringing that vibration into your current energetic field and thereby defining the vibration you are experiencing; and if you don’t get mindful of this process and catch yourself, you will most likely project that vibration into your future.
“What about good memories, they can’t possibly ‘poison’ my current state.” Good memories are definitely helpful in informing our emotional body. If you think of a fond memory and bring that feeling into your current state, yes, it will help shift your vibration, however, even good past memories, drain your present moment, and living in the past will not move you forward in the direction you want to go.
Moving forward in a new direction requires tapping into potential. Let’s go back to your bucket full of water. Imagine we take the cups, representing memories of the past and projections of the future, away from the bucket, and the bucket has no holes and the water level remains high. Now picture you’re doing a science experiment, where you put an avocado pit to sit on the top of the bucket, held up by toothpicks, it’s a very small bucket by the way! It is necessary for the avocado pit to graze the water line in order to soak up hydration for the seed to start to sprout. This avocado seed represents your untapped potential. SO… if you are trying to tap into your potential in the present moment, you need your water levels to remain high enough to nourish it, ie- your energy must be whole and complete. If we put those memory cups back around the bucket and they drill into the bucket, although the water will cycle back into the big bucket and the volume of water remains the same, the water level will never be high enough to nourish the avocado pit of your potential. The present moment is the only thing that can do that!
Within the present moment resides the nonexistence of stress, depression, or anxiety; a foundation unmovable by mind chatter; peace, strength, harmony, health, wellness, abundance; the more often we visit the present moment the stronger we build that energetic muscle to return to the harmony. When your body and mind are in harmony, you recognize that you are unlimited. The boundaries perceived by the mind, fall away. Because at home in the present, you the alchemist, decide how you want to feel, how you want to live, how you can experience your power and life to the fullest. For within the present moment you, my friend, find freedom! Visit it often. Recalibrate your energy continuously to emulate the vibrations of the limitless universe, because you are the universe, unlimited beyond your wildest imagination!
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Disclaimer: Please note Mind Your Chakras and all affiliated entities are not medical doctors and assume no liability for choices made by listeners/readers. This podcast and blog are for informational purposes only and is not meant to prescribe, diagnose, treat, cure, or replace necessary medical treatment. It is the listeners'/readers' responsibility to be mindful of seeking proper healthcare.
