in the Now

I remember when I constantly lived in Fear, but it seems lifetimes ago. I remember when it was so easy for me to conjure feelings of anger and resentment. I remember it much in the same way I remember being an infant; I know it happened, but I can't really tell you what it was like.

Every day, I practice being truer to myself than I was in the past. I don't frame it that way in my mind, but that's obviously what I'm doing. I'm improving and improving and improving and due to the improvements, I've improved.

I've become someone I really admire and like. This is very helpful when I have my more insecure and sad thoughts, because I'm able to relinquish the more negative self-talk quickly due to the fact that I know those thoughts aren't my prevailing reality. As a result, I haven't been truly depressed this year. Maybe that doesn't seem like long, but when you've struggled with depression for 20 years or so, going six-seven months without a serious bout of it feels triumphant. Yes, I've felt sadness. Waves of it that lasted for a few days. But, no depression.

I try not to think too much about the Past. After all, it's over. At the end of each day of my life (around bedtime), I usually mentally go thru the day and make sure I've extracted the lessons I feel I would expect myself to have learned. If there is anything I need to think more on, I put it at the fore of my mind and resolve to think more about it later. I fall asleep thinking about why I'm unsettled by whatever it is I need to think about further and conversing with whomever it is that converses with me in those moments, shedding light on things and not allowing me a moment's self-deception.

Rarely, I'll awaken agitated. But, when I do, I know I need to do more introspection, more forgiveness, more putting-down-of-fear. And, it feels good to go thru this. Perhaps my mother was right: I'm a masochist.

But, this is how I know how to live in the Now. This is how I know how to take the Past, learn from it, and leave it in the Past, where it belongs. There was a time when I could not figure out how to separate the Past and the Now. There was a time when I lived for the Future, because the Past/Now felt so overwhelming.

No more.

I have to be firm with myself. When a thought pops up that may lead to sadness and delusion, I have to tell it to get out. When it won't leave, I have to practice Pranayama, recite mudras, reverberate Om throughout my head. This has not simply happened to me, this ability to stay in the Now and hence, the lack of depression. I work at it constantly. It is my job. My life depends upon it and I treat it as such.

There are really only two things I give this level of commitment to: living in the Now and Motherhood. I look at everything as Practice and there are some things I haven't practiced, yet, because I have found it more difficult to stay in the Now and do them at the same time (like be in an intimate, sexual relationship). Since staying in the Now takes priority at this point in my life, I've consciously released opportunities to practice those things. Over the weekend, I began an attempt at holding that against me, but then I remembered that I will have many more opportunities for that Practice. I'm in no rush.

I think. I mull. I analyze. Those are my constants, and so, every opportunity for Practice that I pass up is used as an opportunity to rehearse what that opportunity will look like in the Future. This helps build my confidence as I'm the sort of person who feels most comfortable when she can see the Past, Present, and Future simultaneously.

All of this happens in the Now. There is no other time for it to happen. And, because every Now is another moment's Past and another moment's Future, I am able to keep a wonderfully forgiving perspective on Life. Mine, in particular.

Sometimes, it amazes me how even the Past and Future are happening in the Now.