Choosing the Present Moment

One morning my dog Horton and I were on our morning drive to the Iowa City dog park.  It’s a short drive (less than 7 minutes) and a wonderful way to begin my day.   I take my small tape recorder with me to record inspiration and guidance about my book or other projects.   I felt great joy driving on this beautiful morning, with Horton to my right, blue sky, birds everywhere.

We turned the corner from our block and right in front of me was a beautiful patch of Bee Balm, one of my favorite flowers.  Bee Balm is in the mint family (thus it has a square stem) and grows to about 4 or 5 feet.   Hummingbirds love it.  This particular patch was a deep magenta.

When I saw the bee balm, in an instant, I thought of another patch of bee balm, the bee balm that I planted at my house in Massachusetts, the house I sold before moving to Iowa City.  In another instant, a feeling of sadness arose.  Why sadness?  Because my conditioned mind has been programmed to think thoughts that cause sadness, to focus on loss as reality.  (I’ve explored all of the reasons for the conditioning, actually spent the greater part of a decade ‘looking there.’)

The speed at which this happened truly amazed me.  I went from joy to sadness literally in seconds.

This is how the conditioned mind works.  In a moment, something in our environment can trigger an old way of thinking and perceiving oneself or life, and KA-BOOM (a technical term), off we go down the slippery slope into a low vibrational feeling, into a story so familiar we don’t realize it’s a story.

This time, however, very quickly, I brought myself back to the bee balm in Iowa, twenty feet away from me.  This was my point of power.  This was my present moment.  I saw what was happening.  I made a choice not to go into the past and into the story.  You see, we lose the present moment when we look back.  The spiritual connection to All That Is and our Essence is eclipsed by the mind when the mind dominates, which mine tried to do on this day.  Because of practice, I was able to shift it within seconds.  It wasn’t always that way.

I love teaching my Choosing Self-Love Mentoring Program because in the first module you learn to many tools for shifting into the present moment.  Nothing is more important, really.  And, I want to emphasize that this does not mean that you ignore the difficult feelings.  When there is wisdom in them, you explore them and learn.   When there are thoughts and stories and ‘children’ who need love, you bring in love.  But when they are simply repetitive patterns long ago processed, you pivot in another direction, toward your happiness.  You choose.  You select your thoughts, the ones that take you in the direction of your desire.