Love letter to now
How my meditation practice helped me navigate 2020
This is a love letter to the present moment.
It’s January 2021, a continuation of the 2020 experience of being all together on hold. Time has its own agenda, and our wishes and desires are not the ones setting the schedule.
It’s tempting to think that something different should be happening, that our day to day experience should be different. It’s the nature of our human mind, it takes us on wild excursions to the past, or drifts to extraordinary future adventures. We visit things we miss and generate expectations of futures we want to live. We go over yesterday’s conversation, and worry about what our next meal will be. We are masters at escaping the now, that moment when the mind is quiet and all there is is presence.
How can we be present? How can we stop following the intrepid mind to future tales? How do we stop thoughts from inhabiting our past? How can we bring our attention to the now?
I want to share with you how my meditation practice helped me to navigate 2020, and how it continues to help me in 2021.
I’ve been meditating for 25 years, and cannot imagine my life without it. All while living an ordinary life. I don’t live in a monastery, I’m not a holy person, nor do I spend most of my time sitting in a meditative posture. What I want to share is how simple it can be to bring our attention to the here and now, as absolutely ordinary people having absolutely ordinary lives.
I get the appeal of the stereotypical meditation master. I spent a lot of my life in parts of the world where those stereotypes come from. I love to spend time in silence, meditating in temples & caves in the Himalayas. I’m often called to sit and learn with teachers in red robes. But do I need any of that to have the experience of being in the present, to connect with myself and bring my attention to this moment? No, I do not need any external conditions to change in order to connect with the here now.
Staying focused in the stereotypes can be unhelpful because it becomes a perfect excuse to not meditate. The reality is that our beingness is accessible at all times and in any setting. It’s simple. And because it is so simple, we find it demanding. Used as we are to the complicated.
2020 was made of moments “at home”, in the place I was born in. The here now kept continuously happening here, in one place. The experience of being in one same location for an entire year is something I had not experienced for around 25 years. It’s much less familiar than the experience of constant novelty through location that we get from traveling.
At first, that change felt huge. Continuous present moments showing themselves as this one place. However, while the external situation was greatly different, what was happening inside was the same. It was simply me, showing up to myself and bringing my focus to the present moment. Day by day I started noticing how similar the experience was. As I kept bringing my awareness to the here now, it did not matter whether that happened here “at home” or out and about in a mountain temple. It’s never about the external conditions.
There was the unfamiliar world situation. That too an unknown external condition. Some kind of global fog. But as I showed up day after day to meditate, there was me, my breath, my attention being directed to the breath, and that familiar sense of staying in the present moment.
As I shifted the focus to the now, my mind was not drifting to concerns I had the day before or worries about the future. There is so much space there, it’s all space. The present moment is not packed with concepts we associate to thoughts, to feelings, and to things we name. It’s much simpler. And sitting in attentive presence throughout 2020 helped me fall in love with the ever now.
Wherever we are, we can always find a way back to us. It doesn’t require a specific location, a particular ritual, or even a minimum amount of time per day.
At any moment we can abandon the habitual pattern of focusing on the external, and redirect our attention inward. You can try it right now. Sense your breath naturally flowing, innerly watch your posture, look within and scan your body for sensations. Take a tiny mental pause and connect with yourself. Who is it that is looking within? Who is aware of that looking? Is there any external condition required for you to have that intimate experience with yourself? Does anything need to be different?
This feeling of presence, of bringing all awareness to the here now, is what most helped me navigate 2020. The experience of being present is not different in 2020 than in any other year. In the present moment there is nothing to change, and that capacity to be present helps life flow more freely.
2020 helped me expand the awareness of how important meditation is. As the external events of the year brought chaos, scary change, and at times a sense of helplessness, my meditation practice helped me to be grounded. It helped me expand the space between apparent events and naming them, so I could stay rooted in spaciousness.
Meditating comes in multiple forms. Some days it looked like sitting in my cushion in silence, other days as being very present on walks in nature, while other times it was the act of mindfully cooking for myself, or working in conscious flow, keeping clear awareness while spending time with friends, taking decisions from a grounded space, and bringing the quality of presence to all my actions. With practice it starts to flow on its own.
2020 and 2021 may be a particularly strange period in time. Yet life has an ever perfection to it, and there is never a need to change the present moment. Just like the source of happiness is always internal and already present.
How about grounding your meditation practice this year?
There is no need for it to be perfect. It’s not about starting at the right time, waking up before dawn, or sitting in perfect posture for 2 hours.
It’s about showing up, for an amount of time that that works, and checking in.
Connecting with the breath, being attentive to the mind drifting, keep bringing the attention to the breath coming in and going out, focusing in the present moment, as it is. It’s about being curious, and continuing to show up. Enjoying our intimacy with ourselves.
