Many people have found themselves in situations where they are practically stressed, feeling pain or guilt, worried, anxious, and may even have it all and are simply dissatisfied with their life up to that very moment. These feelings that in one way or another come to us and invade our thoughts on a daily basis are simply a result of our mind, for that reason, below we will share some lessons from the book “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Toller that will surely help us to control and avoid those thoughts that in one way or another do us harm.
Contents
Past and future
When we find ourselves invaded by thoughts that only lead us to feel stressed or uncertain it is usually due to our mind is being focused on a moment that happened or will happen, that is, our mind leads us to live in our past or in our future, this latter is perhaps the most harmful thought since we are projecting on a moment that has not happened and perhaps it will not occur, however, it fills us with uncertainty, anxiety, and stress and this can slowly get us sick.
Identify and accept the problem
In the moments when we are invaded by thoughts that hurt us, it is important to stop and observe these thoughts, put aside the good or bad feelings that our past gave us, and our future can give us, recognize that in both cases they are situations that have already happened (past) or are simply an illusion (future) and focus on living in the now, take advantage of what is our present and choose to do the things that can really make us happy, now. Therefore, we must change and direct our attention and thoughts to our moment, our now, and enjoy it to the fullest.
Us or our mind?
When we think of doing physical activity, we often prepare and equip ourselves with good previous nutrition and hydration, however, we must be aware that when we start such physical activity we must take certain periods of rest for our body to recover, and when we finish the activity the most sensible thing to do is to take our body to a quiet and comfortable place to enter into total relaxation and rest, if we do not do this, we should go probably start to get sick and suffer from muscle aches, joints, and continued fatigue.
In the case of our mind, it is totally the same, if we are in a full physical activity our mind will be working focused on that activity; but if we take our body to a state of rest the most common thing in most people is that the mind continues to work, maybe thinking of the newly implemented activity or thinking of other things like what we will eat afterward or worrying about debts, to mention a few. The truth is that our mind does not stop thinking and without realizing that, it is hurting us little by little, so we must decide between ourselves and our mind because if we do not know how to control it, it can make us sick and even take our lives, because this type of thinking generates stress, anxiety, dissatisfaction, among other things.
Sterile thoughts
As we already know our mind is a very powerful tool, but as we have already seen, we do not let it rest, as it is always active either with a good or bad thought constantly, but we must be attentive to this activity in our mind because if our mind is always active and we keep an internal conversation all the time it is harmful to our physical and mental health, and if our thoughts are repetitive they become useless and therefore sterile for our products in our moment, therefore they become harmful thoughts that will take us little by little further away from our reality, they will take us away from our life now and therefore we will stop living our moment.
What we can do to avoid getting away from our present, is to pay more attention to our surroundings, pay attention to everything we have, if we are getting dressed to enjoy the feel and softness of our clothes, the smell, when leaving our house to enjoy the weather and that breeze that brushes our skin, in the same way, we will realize that the mind will always ram us with a different thought that will prevent us from continuing to enjoy the moment, but what can we do?
Observing our mind
We have already realized that we must take control over our minds and thoughts, it is us or our minds, but how can we control those thoughts and prevent them from taking us away from our reality and our now? We must take a pause when the mind starts to take control over us and start observing it, as Eckhart Toller mentions, “observe the thinker”; as we mentioned before, it is us or our minds, therefore we can treat it like someone external, or two different entities, in this way, we can realize how our mind works to call our attention and take us away from the now, it is at this point that we must observe it and be more present than ever, to continue enjoying and living the now, that way, there will be no place for our mind to invade us with sterile and harmful thoughts.
Negativity and pain
One of the moments our mind wants to take us with our thoughts is to our past, but it does this in a very stealthy way because it keeps active “in the background” negative thoughts and pain that have been accumulated throughout our life; Eckhart Toller calls it the “Pain Body”, and the moment when the mind brings them into the present awakening this “Pain Body” is when we find ourselves in an uncomfortable situation motivated by a word or action and our response is violent or simply because of that we just let ourselves sink into a bad day.
The important thing is to know that this “Pain Body”, like our mind, is not us, but it is another entity that lives in our shadow, and just like our mind it only lives thanks to the attention we give it; many times we let it externalize and supplant our identity, giving others to understand that we are the way we react at the moment, it’s not really us, it will never be us. We must keep in mind that due to our experiences in life, we all have a “Pain Body” the important thing is that as our mind, we must know how to identify it, and if we have already started to live our now being present and conscious, we must know how to control it when it wakes up. So, let’s identify it and observe it, once we do this and live in the present it will simply disappear in our time.
Time and mind
Now we have seen many ways and situations in which we are affected in thoughts of our past and our future, and have commented that we can take control by living in the now and enjoying our present, but how do we manage to live our now and enjoy our present? Well, we must be aware that time and mind always go hand in hand, the mind always makes all our thoughts, as we have already seen, focus on the past or the future, that is to say, we are talking about time, but if we set aside and control the mind by eliminating those thoughts we can realize that time, the past and the future are automatically eliminated, what we would be doing is always focusing on the now.
That is why Eckhart Toller teaches us that we can use time as a practical tool, for example, to define goals or activities at a given time. The important thing is not to focus on the final results and live in them forgetting the present moment and the now, that way we would not be using time as a useful tool. Therefore, let us remember to live in the now and enjoy our present, let us enjoy every moment and every path we have to take throughout our life to achieve our goals.
Do you have any opinion on this topic? Do you have another lesson you would like to share with us about this book?
If you have any doubt or question you can contact us or write your query in the section below (comments section).
Image of Mohamed Hassan via Pixabay.com under Creative Commons license.
