No time to waste...

You often hear your yoga teachers telling you to stay within the present moment. There are days where this is easy and there are days that... Well, they look like this.

I'm wrapped up in work, I have no time, I need to get to x, y and z before they close, I wonder if I have peanut butter at home, I need to get my passport renewed, does Lady Gaga eat toast, my project is due soon and I should start, I am hungry and wonder what I'm going to have for supper, will I be able to catch that episode of CSI.... Ahh!! Kaboom!

A really simple thing to do when you catch your monkey mind going bananas is to use any and all of your 5 senses to come back into the moment.

The easiest suggestions:

- Start with your breath. How does it feel entering and leaving the body? Can you tune into the sound of it?
- The sensations your body is experiencing at that moment. The textures of clothes upon your body. The feel of the chair you're sitting on or the floor you're standing on.
- If you're eating, can you actually taste your food? The subtleties and hints of flavours here and there.
- What can you see right now? The leaf that blows in the wind. The way somebody's eyes gleam?
- The sounds around you? Can you single one out and concentrate on it?
- Now go back to breath...

Better?

We lose so much of ourselves and before you know it, you check the calendar and realize that March is almost done and we'll be rounding off the first 1/3 of the year. Maybe you look in the mirror and wonder how 1 year went by so fast? The last 5 years? The last decade?

The essence of our being is indeed, nothing of a collective series of memories we have stored away.

This is most apparent to me when I study and see the detrimental effects of degenerative neural diseases like Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. As the effects of these diseases progress into the later stages, the mother/father, brother/sister, friend, lover, co-worker, it is affecting is left as just a shell of a person.

So it's important for so many reasons to stay in the present moment. Those tiny moments, those are actually the ones that will matter to you. It's not going to be about that huge pay raise you got, it's not going to be that moment you finally bought that thing you wanted for a long time...

It's going to be the way somebody's hand felt in yours. It's going to be the way you can't help but smile when your friend looks into your eyes. It's going to be that time when you laughed so hard, you ran out of breath and just laid there shaking with silent laughter as tears streamed down your face. It'll be the way somebody hugged you and the way that embrace felt so warm and comforting. It'll be that sunrise you caught with your best friend on the summit of a mountain. It might even be the way the sun sets upon a city winding down as you make your way home.

These tiny moments are actually huge!!

So I pose the question to you...

How much are you willing to lose?

All the times you are absorbed in your phone as your loved ones sit across from you!
All the times you are buried in your work and missing everything.
All the times you are rushing from point A to B without even remembering how you got there.

Life is happening all around you! Don't miss those tiny huge moments.