We are always on the move, absorbing information, completing tasks, thinking about the next thing. We don’t often sit and be with ‘what’s here now.’ ‘What’s here now’ is a stock Co-Active coaching question, and it allows you to slow down and look at what’s really happening externally and internally in this very moment.
All we really have is this moment now, but according to a recent stat I learned from The Leveys we spend 80% of our time either thinking about the future or the past. So only 20% of our time is spent actually experiencing the right here right now. What a shame. Because the world is filled with beauty and when we’re always thinking about sometime else, we miss that.
Slowing down and being still can be scary, because we are forced to be with whatever emotions or sensations come up in that space. But most often our fear of experiencing an emotion is far worse than the actual feeling of the emotion itself. So we sit in the fear and we think about the future or the past rather than being with what’s truly going on for us.
But what happens when we slow down, notice what’s around us, and allow our emotions to surface is an openness of mind, access to more creativity, connection and feelings of abundance. It’s a good place to be, but for some reason we have scared ourselves away from spending too much time here.
Mindfulness, meditation, coaching, dancing and being creative are all strategies to bring us back to the present. And a book I’m enjoying at the moment that talks about presence in more detail is Thich Nhat Hanh ‘Silence’ – it’s well worth a read.
Here’s to being in the present, because all we ever really have is what’s here now.
With love, Hannah
*Image by Josh Adamski, www.unsplash.com