Here or going somewhere?

Where are you? Are you in your head or are you in this moment?

You can tell that you are in your head when you are going somewhere. Your thinking is in the future. Your attention is on where you want to be. Your awareness is not here now.

This moment to you is then a means to an end, not the end in itself. Everything you do now is to bring something about, which means you are fighting with the way things are. You are fighting with life.

You cannot be truly alive if this moment is a means to an end. You will be frustrated, irritated. “Come on!” you will be saying to life, “let’s get there.” That is your mind speaking, taking you nowhere.

The mind is never happy where you are. The mind is never where you are and the mind is never happy. The mind always wants more.

Happiness is accepting where you are, accessing your being beyond the mind.

What I do when I find that I have left the moment is I gently bring myself back to it. Like, when I find myself shouting in traffic, I laugh at myself.

I bring myself back to the now and notice all that is happening in it, without judgement. I just look... at the movement of the trees, the richness of the colours, the vastness of the sky. I smell the interior of the car, hear the music playing.

It's like being a child again where everything is psychedelic and wonderful. It's not a big thing, a challenge or a chore, just another gentle reminder to come back to the moment, which steadily opens the present more each time.

Stop right now and look around the room. Just look, like you are doing so for the first time. Look at the stillness with which things are here, notice the movement of others, hear the sounds. Feel the energy of the now.

This moment is all there is and if you are fully present, you merge with life.