I try to spend a period of time each day ‘Accepting The Now’.
That sounds easy right, no problem. Accept the now, wait, how do I do that? What even is ‘the now’?
Well, it changes.
What I mean is spending time just accepting that you’re alive, and listening to your environment, perhaps you’re with someone, perhaps you’re not. For me, I nearly always chose a place of rest and silence to begin with and then I gradually moved on to other, more chaotic, environments. I found the silent and peaceful environments easier to start with because I could really be sure that I was tuning in to (being aware of) my body, mind, energy, spirit, and not the noise and dust from around me.
I mentioned in my Little Recognitions of Courage article that there is noise and dust that surrounds us in life. Energy in thoughts, and energy in the environments that we live in.
There are tonnes of different techniques that spiritual practices teach, and religions as well. Prayers are very much turning into the now and asking for what it is that you want at that moment. That’s a slight tangent from here so I won’t go there, but it’s true.
What matters is that you use a technique that’s right for you, to get you to that place.
‘Accepting The Now’ means just that, you accept everything in that moment, you accept your position in your life, you accept the people around you, you accept the things that you want, but don’t have, are currently not in your life, you accept the things that you do have in your life, and what they contribute, you accept the people in your life and the large number of ways that they contribute to your life.
Acceptance can feel great. You’ll feel lighter and more aware.
With acceptance, you let go of resistance to your environment. This doesn’t mean that you’re environment miraculously becomes a calm and pleasant place, because life isn’t like that.
There’ll always be challenges.
What it does mean is that you can see life for what it is, and not what you want it to be. Allowing you to react to life as it is, and not your thoughts or expectations or how you perceive life to be.
Conflict starts when miscommunication of expectations happen, so if you’re reacting to life based on your own thoughts and expectations — and you’re not absolutely honest with yourself and others about that, then there’ll be a larger amount of miscommunication, and therefore conflict.
You can’t stop having expectations, you can be honest about them.
One of the best people I’ve come across to help me live this way is Byron Katie, and her book called: ‘Loving What Is.’
This might sound overwhelming to begin with, and it can be. It can hit you like a wave, and be hard to unpick.
That’s where the breath is most important.
Lori Duchene
You never receive anything in life that you can’t cope with.
Breathing allows us to live, we always have the breath. When we start to focus on the breath we can start to realize that it is always there. I’ve never been in a situation where it hasn’t helped me to recognize that I still have my breath.
When we start to realize it is always there, then we can start to understand what different situations do to our breath.
Different situations change our breath in certain ways:
Situations that make me scared shorten and constrict my breath.
Situations that make me angry make my breath long and hot, or short and fiery.
Situations that make me joyful make me cry out and expand in my breath.
It depends on who you are.
Accepting The Now is a practice that I try to do once a day, but it can become a way of life. I’ve experienced it in my job, watching a concert (which admittedly is the same thing for me, but I don’t always watch concerts I work on), riding my mountain bike, or simply just sat in a chair in my house and taking time to observe how I feel.