Living in the moment: easier said than done.
What does it mean when someone says “live in the moment”, or “You’re not living in the moment”.
The most obvious explanation of “living in the moment” involves paying attention. If you are distracted by a thought, you are missing the moment.
Mindfulness awareness trainings abound. Mindfulness is a form of meditation practice which teaches folks how to pay attention to the smallest of details, moment to moment to moment. It’s a skill worthwhile developing. They say most accidents occur to infants and small children when caretakers get distracted, for only a few seconds. Many a responsible adult has felt terrible about their attention having wandered for a moment or two during which time their child had a mishap.
A good example of living in the moment can be seen watching an NBA basketball game. Basketball is fast. It doesn’t matter if you made the last shot, blew the last shot, did something fantastic or did something terrible, because the next play is already in motion. You don’t have time to get stuck in the past. If you get stuck thinking about what just happened a moment ago you’re a step behind what’s happening in the moment.
You may not be aware of your life moving as quickly an NBA game, but circumstances are always changing from moment to moment to moment. For example, new moments are occurring right now. In this moment, you can become aware of sounds, sights, feelings, thoughts and body sensations which may not have been occurring in the same way a moment ago. Meditation/Mindfulness training can assist us to learn to remain focused in the moment.
A less obvious explanation of not living in the moment involves reacting to the present as if it was the past. In fact, the foundation of every form of depth psychotherapy involves clarifying the influence of the past on one’s experience of the present to reduce the influence of the past on how we respond in the present. For example, imagine a two year old child sitting at a picnic table when a bunny rabbit jumps onto the picnic table surprising the child, who then gets extremely frightened. Now, imagine this same person 30 years later, again sitting at a picnic table and again a bunny rabbit jumps near the picnic table and the young adult experiences an anxiety attack, with no recollection of what had happened at age 2. This is a clear example of interpreting an emotional reaction from the past which has been held in the body as a memory then being projected onto the present. The adult may insist that he is reacting to the present, explaining, “I’m just afraid of bunny rabbits”, with no understanding that when he experiences his fear of bunny rabbits he is in fact, living in an emotional memory from his past.
This example of the bunny and an anxiety attack is more extreme than many other examples of how we project the past. For instance, we may have been raised by a parent who criticized us when we made a mistake so we find ourselves unable to stress ourselves out of fear of being criticized, or we may have had a parent who felt anxious whenever their child was out of their sight so, as an adult this person is very cautious about exploring new places, and may just like to stick close to home. Maybe a child was raised in a home in which no one ever expressed their feelings so, as an adult, there is no ability to even identify a feeling let alone express it. You get the idea.
Addiction is one way we learn to protect ourselves from re-experiencing early childhood traumas and early childhood programming. Once we break the hold of an addiction, then deeper work can begin: to identify and challenge old patterns of behavior we developed in childhood which continue to influence us to avoid living in the present as adults.
A good reason to enter into a process of therapy can be to discover why, as an adult, we act in ways which don’t really represent how we see ourselves or how we would like to behave if we felt free to be spontaneous, to be ourselves.
I look forward to your comments and questions at www.steve@shrinkdifferentradio.com