How Living in the Moment
Can Help With Wellbeing

Honouring our emotions, thoughts and feelings with compassion in the moment, moves your focus to that moment only. When you’re living ‘in the moment’, the past and the future can’t touch you.

It can be a difficult task to put your feelings about the past or future aside. It’s like when someone says, “Don’t think of a pink elephant!” Did you think of one, just now?

Well, your grief is sometimes that pink elephant and it seems like there’s nowhere to turn. In this situation, you can look for help from present moment thinking.

Remaining in the present takes practice. While you’re learning how to live in the moment, remember that it gets easier as time goes on.

Using Mindfulness and Meditation

You can work on redirecting the attention from your thoughts, but one practice that’s all about staying in the present moment is mindful awareness and meditation. These simple exercise can also help you work with grief, stress or anxiety.

Here are some practice tips and options:

• For 1-week, create a meditation schedule – 30 minutes per day every day.
• Go to a place where you can relax and be alone and notify those around not to interrupt.
• Sit in a position with good posture or lie down on your bed with the doors closed.
• Take deep breaths in and out from the bottom of your lungs by holding your hand over your stomach to ‘notice’ the constant breath.
• You can use guided meditation apps that provide a “mantra”, visualisation or positive affirmation to help you focus.
• When thoughts arise, acknowledge them, and then let them go.

The most difficult thing you might encounter when learning to meditate is calming your busy mind. Focusing on your breathing helps clear away extraneous thoughts and worries.

When you’re grief stricken, it’s an especially difficult time to keep a clear mind. Thoughts of the past will more than likely keep coming up in your practice. This is normal. As you continue practicing, it will get easier to focus on the now.

An important thing to remember is to avoid judging yourself. Don’t punish yourself for thinking of the past when you’re trying not to think about it. Realise that your mind is taking a turn you didn’t intend, and then lightly nudge it back in the right direction. Be grateful that you were able to catch yourself in the midst of a negative thought, and then move on.

Keeping Up Your Practice

Once you’ve adopted a philosophy of present moment thinking, concentrate on keeping up with your practice. Rather than a mechanism you turn to only when you’re in a pinch, consistent present moment thinking can bring you an exhilarating new lifestyle!

When you learn to live in the moment, you’ll find peace and happiness in life. You’ll be more calm and collected and enjoy every moment for what it is. How amazing is this!

Moment By Moment

As your practice deepens, you’ll fully realize that life is just a series of moments. It’s not a definable measure of time, but you’ll feel many moments in every minute. Little by little, you’ll learn to recognize them.

You may find it difficult to remain in the present just because you must refer to the past and plan for the future in order to live. This is true, of course, but once the reflection is over, and the planning is put away, your goal is to remain in the moment as much as possible.

• Refer to the past when you must, but avoid reliving grief or daydreaming.
• Plan for the future, but don’t obsess over it.
• Simply look at what you’re experiencing right now and immerse yourself in it.

Living in the moment can help not only processing grief, but also help strengthen the ability to catch the thoughts and feelings before they spiral out of control.  When your mind is completely focused on the present moment, you’ll be surprised at how much lighter life can be!

Tools and resources

Explore the various forms and tools of guided meditations and practices available to integrate into your everyday life and become more equipped to support yourself when times get tough. The Little book of Mindfulness has been a great tool to use when getting away from the desk for 10-minutes a day. Simply steps that make a big difference.

The free Insight Time App also provides a variation of guided mindfulness tools and meditations tracks, music and talks on the various practices available. Just search keywords of what you’re struggling with or curious about and the app with narrow down some suggestions for you. 

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Amanda Salvara MBACP

Accredited Counsellor, Psychotherapist and NLP Coach

Contact

+4420 8106 0776
hello@amandasalvara.com