The Good Life is Now.
The best start to a new year is the decision to live in the present moment.
Does what you want for the new year seem unattainable right now?
Do you feel stuck and scared that you don’t know how to get there?
What if you weren’t doing anything wrong, but you’re just trying to start from the wrong place? If the train leaves from Platform 2 you can’t be at the airport.
One of the simple (never easiest) things you can do is check where you are trying to start from. We can only ever take action in the present moment, but we spend a lot of time in the past and future-perfect where action is impossible. And it can make you feel completely stuck and far away from everything you hoped for yourself.
Our thoughts can pull us relentlessly to try and correct a past that already happened.
I should have…
I didn’t…
They weren’t….
And our thoughts can vault us to living in the future-perfect.
If this…
When that…
Then everything will be alright.
The only problem is you can’t move from either of those places. Living in the past and the future are like being put under a magical spell where you can think of everything, but nothing can ever change. We can’t make decisions there. We can’t take action from either place.
No matter how much we want the past to be different we can’t change it. We can, now, decide how to feel about it. We can apply compassion and curiosity where needed, we can abstract the lessons we want whether that’s simply to do better next time or to commit to the care and support we need to heal now.
The seductive future without a map to getting there will never come to pass. Courage isn’t just in the dreaming. It’s in the fumbling and wrong turns that come with deciding to take action now towards the dreaming. From here. Now. Finding value and excitement in the steps that get you closer each time.
It’s much harder to be in the active Now because it requires offering love and support to yourself. It’s a demonstration of trust in your abilities and your community of support to handle experimentation and things not always working or looking like where we want to end up.
So how do we bring ourselves back into the Now when we recognise we’ve camped in the past or future again?
Think about meeting your bodily needs—feed yourself something nice, rest, stretch, move, drink water.
Seek joy. Joy and all the other emotions can only be felt in the body in the present moment, no matter where your mind is. Understand what brings you joy and seek it relentlessly. Joy feel like a stretch? Process some emotions with a movie. Watch a comedy show to surprise yourself with the sound of your laughter. Practise feeling.
Offer yourself some understanding and compassion that the world hasn’t been terribly interested in you inhabiting a place where you’ll take action from. It’s been much better to keep you dreaming on the production line. So it is difficult and makes complete sense that you actually have to make an effort to stay present. Giving yourself the permission to do so is revolutionary in my books.
You’ve got this.
Want to go further into How to Give Yourself Permission? Download my short audio course and listen instantly. Here.