You’ve seen many emails and articles on our website now that have mentioned Present moment awareness and Mindfulness. To explain them further and give you an understanding of just what they are, I found a great explanation that follows:
Mindfulness is conscious awareness of what you are feeling and experiencing in the present moment. But there is more. To get to joy it’s not enough to just be aware of the present. To get to joy you have to trust that the present moment is exactly where you belong.
Joy comes from the knowing, the trust, the deep understanding that you are, right now, enough. With that trust and the joy it brings, you can let down your defenses and stop seeking validation. You can lean into happiness, which is the bubbling up of little pieces of joy in the moment.
As adults with histories, we can’t know happiness unless we know it’s opposite and find it in our hearts to trust despite that knowledge. It takes vulnerability and reliance on forces outside of our control, but, mostly, it takes a commitment to creating live out loud joy for ourselves.
Huffington post; Debbie Woodbury, author, speaker, survivor
Wow, that says a lot! I find this to be a beautiful explanation of what we’re talking about when we mention these terms. A real example in my life; things are running smooth and happy, my husband was able to retire from the Fire Dept after thirty years of putting his life on the line. Then, BAM, someone comes in to our home and steals our emergency money, right out from under us. All the plans we had for that money, gone…..
How do you stay present when these things happen? Debbie said it best above, that it takes being vulnerable to trust in the things that we cannot control! Yes, we felt violated and crummy!!
Yet, we allowed ourselves to feel these emotions and then come back up from them to more positive feelings, like gratitude and love. Does this happen overnight? Everyone is different as to how long they stay in that space and hold negative emotions, but the more practice you have in processing through them, the quicker you can move.
Our strategy? We started counting the good things about it all; they did not hurt anyone or anything! They took nothing else. We can always replace the cash! Present moment awareness example; where do we go from here? Better, stronger locks; no hidden keys for starters! So, no big vacations for us this year, we’ll take smaller local ones. Wait until next year though, we’ll have saved more and learned more from this than we ever thought possible and we will concentrate on Today until then!