Live the here and now to be happy

In order to achieve a more fulfilling existence, the great sages and spiritual masters of the East have incorporated into their daily behavior the principle of keeping a clear mind. focused on the present moment.

It is about trying to live a life in full contact with the here and now, without being carried away by the tendency of the mind to ruminate over and over experiences of the past or to constantly fantasize about future events.

It’s easy to get stuck in the past.

All our life unfolds in a continuous present; no one can live either in the past or in the future. However, we spend a large part of our existence psychologically oriented towards the past or towards the future.

We refer here to dysfunctional or problematic orientations, since remembering or anticipating are not, by themselves, pernicious acts; quite the contrary, they are extremely useful faculties for the human being.

If we get stuck in the past through longings

It is an attempt to “revive” relive pleasant moments that have passed and experience again those feelings that we once had. This in itself is not a bad thing.

The problem arises when, the worse we are here and now, the more we tend to go there, to the past; then, miss it becomes a way to avoid being here.

When our habitual response to difficult situations is to constantly remind ourselves of what we lost and no longer have, what we achieve is, far from reliving the sweetness of the past, begin to live the galls of the present in the form of sadness

We can psychologically orient ourselves towards the past with self-blame

It is another way of staying in the past. For example, a young man has studied a certain career and, as he has difficulties finding a job, he begins to tell himself that he should not have studied something with such little professional prospects, that he should have chosen another specialty…

Again, these thoughts have double standards. If they are punctual and we use them to draw a conclusion from the experience and apply the learning to the present moment, phenomenal.

The problem arises when we remain anchored in the blame and we were not able to extract the learning from that experience.

As the saying goes, “old water does not move a mill”; that is to say, it is a sterile and exhausting exercise.

Also, as with unhealthy longingsIt is a way of avoiding looking at the present head-on and facing it with resolution. When this procedure becomes habitual, the feeling we experience is almost certainly one of guilt.

People often get stuck in the future.

To “worry” is to take care of something before it happens. Parents know a lot about this. When children start going out at night, parents are predisposed to anticipate all sorts of potential problems. Until the children return and go to bed, they do not rest. While the son is away, the parents’ minds are abuzz with somewhat catastrophic images. Here we can also find a healthy and an unhealthy function.

We anticipate problems before they occur

If the anticipation of the possible problem leads us to take measures in advance to prevent it, we will have managed to reduce the risks. but if what we do is nothing more than go around, over and over again, what we fear will happen, we are torturing ourselves based on “re-living”, over and over again, the possible event.

Our favorite phrase when we get carried away by worries begins with what if… “And if you get into the car of someone who has been drinking and has an accident?”

Even though this and if… talks about possibilities, the approach contains a hidden message, a catastrophic statement: “I’m almost sure he’s going to get in the car and have an accident.”

In this case, when this procedure becomes a way of functioning, the most common feelings we experience are anguish, anxiety and fear.

I once worked with a patient who was intensely “worried” about how he was going to behave on a first date with a woman. When I asked him when he had a date with that woman, he told me that she didn’t actually have a date, but that she was very concerned about that moment.

Expectations also constantly place us in the future

We also look to the future when we move guided by our expectations. An expectation is a way of anticipating the future based on what we believe or want to happen, usually in relation to the behavior of a person or a group, or a certain reality.

Many times expectations end up taking the form of strong implicit demands, especially if we build them in reference to a person.

But when reality does not meet our expectations, when that person does not behave as we wished, we usually experience frustration, we feel disappointed.

The intensity of these feelings will depend fundamentally on two factors: on the one hand, the mismatch that we perceive between our expectations and reality; and, on the other, of the importance that what we expected has for us.

The bigger the mismatch and the more important those expectations were to us, the more disappointed and frustrated we will feel.

As in the previous cases, having expectations is not harmful in itself. The problem comes when we are more focused on them than on our reality, when we only see ourselves and our expectations, and not the person in front of us.

Let go of expectations

Every time I teach a course, on the first day I ask the attendees to introduce themselves and explain what they expect from the course and from me. Sometimes I ask them to write it down. When they have done so, I get up, put a wastebasket in the middle of the room and ask them, please, may they be so kind as to throw away their expectations.

I explain to them that the only thing I can guarantee at that moment is that what they are going to experience in that meeting will be, with complete certainty, different from what they expect.

And I invite you to attend the workshop trying to be as free as possible of desires, expectations, prejudices…, allowing yourself to discover the experience as you go, without forcing reality, so that everything runs smoothly.

This does not mean, although it may seem contradictory, that we have to forget about our expectations.

It’s about being aware of them and decide what meaning to give them. There is a story, collected by the author and yoga teacher Ramiro Calle, that will be illustrative.

“Once upon a time there was a man who had never had the opportunity to see the sea. He lived in a village in the interior of India. An idea had settled firmly in his mind: “I could not die without seeing the sea.” To save some money and to be able to travel to the coast, he took another job, in addition to his usual one, saving everything he could and longing for the day to come when he could be in front of the sea.

They were difficult years. At last she saved enough to make the trip. He took a train that took him to the vicinity of the sea. he felt enthusiastic and joyful. He made it to the beach and watched the marvelous spectacle. What gentle waves! What a beautiful foam!

What beautiful water! she approached the water, took a little in her hand and brought it to her lips to taste it. then, very disappointed and dejected, he thought: “What a pity that it tastes so bad with how beautiful it is!”.

It would be nice if we gave ourselves the opportunity to discover the ocean in its essence, assenting to its wholesomeness with total acceptance, and that we could also, at the same time, use our expectations as a way to discover our desires.

This attitude will allow us to enjoy a more spontaneous and clean relationship with the sea, with life, with people, free of demands and prejudices. It would be sad if we end up living a lifetime next to our loved ones waiting for them to become “drinking water”. Ramiro Calle concludes this beautiful story by saying: “The way to free ourselves from these disappointments is to wait only for what happens.”