Are you rushing or are you in the moment?

Last week was busy! I was taking classes that met 3 out of 5 nights. My mentors are on the West Coast, so late becomes relative.

I have a pretty standard nighttime ritual that starts at about 8:30 pm. I do some red light therapy, take a shower, journal, and then read until it's time to go to bed at around 9:30 pm.

I know, I know, it's so early, but I have to get up no later than 5 am and this girl needs 7-8 hours of sleep a night. Needless to say, my evening ritual didn't look like it normally does. That's the art of the pivot. Life changes and you have to change with it. We learn to bend so we don't break. A few nights I was up until almost 11 pm and I felt like I was really partying! 😂

Not only do I have an evening routine, but I also have a morning routine. The first thing I do when I get up every morning is meditate. Sometimes I use an app with a prerecorded meditation and sometimes I just set a timer. The other morning, I opened up Insight Timer to meditate. If you've never used the app, when you first open it they always have a quote of the day. On that day it was by Maya Angelou and said, "This is a wonderful day. I've never seen this one before."

What a gift to look at the world through that lens because we so rarely do that. Most of the time we are lost in the past or busy thinking about the future. When life is tough and filled with worries, those thoughts and worries tend to bleed from one day to the next.

We find ourselves caught in this loop of worry and we forget to be present.

I've incorporated mindfulness techniques in my life to help me remain more present, but more often than I'd like to admit, I find that I’m not.

This became very clear to me last week when I caught myself rushing through my rest time at the end of my yoga practice. I tend to pack my days with things I both need and would like to get done. While I have gotten much more realistic about what can happen in a day, I am still overly optimistic.

Most of the time, this quality of mine is ok because I can see when I am overestimating my time and energy and will let a few things go that don't need to get done. But because this is such an old pattern for me, it can also cause me to slip into old habits without even noticing.

This is exactly what happened when I caught myself rushing through my rest time at the end of practice. I realized that instead of being present, my brain was already off to the next thing that I was going to be doing. Lists were being made, an order of execution was being prepared, and I lost track of how long I had been laying there (not long at all).

I sat up, ready to move on to the next thing when it hit me like a ton of bricks that I needed to slow down. I wasn't being present but instead living in the future. I wasn't taking advantage of this intentional pause in my day to just be. I wasn't allowing the wonder of the present moment to truly sink in.

One of the greatest gifts of awareness is that you have the opportunity to change your behavior the moment you become aware. This is exactly why we practice mindfulness so that we can be aware when we are not living our lives the way we want to.

Once I realized what I was doing and that I had fallen back into an old pattern, I chose to do something different. I lay back down on my yoga mat and closed my eyes. I could feel my entire body and nervous system relax and it felt so good. This is why those intentional pauses are so important.

Here's the thing, there will always be a million and one things on our to-do lists. Our lists don't really get shorter. Once you take something off there are three things ready to replace it. Those lists can easily keep us from being present because our minds are busy with all that we need to do. We can't change the past nor can we predict the future. The only moment we really have is this one, right now.

How many moments will we choose to miss? What if instead of being lost in a moment other than this one we can look at it and say, this is a wonderful moment, I've never seen this one before. And right then we can choose to be present again, without any judgment.

Sounds great, right? So what's holding you back?

Here's your reminder to start again, at this moment, right now.