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LIVIING IN THE MOMENT...ok, help me understand please. If you're not living in the moment where are you? In the past? In the future? And obviously there must be so many people not living in the moment that it became a "thing" with people extolling the virtues of living in the moment. Any assistance from those "in the moment" would be appreciated. 🙂

lerlo 8 Mar 17
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ok....I've had a friend for many years - she lived a fairly comfortable life and yet the conversations between us usually went something like "I can't wait till Thanksgiving is done and gone - I'm totally stressed out about ( blah blah blah I usually tuned out about then)" and then came the "Oh good grief - all this stress over the christmas season - food - events - gifts - I'll be soooooo glad when all this mess is over". So you get the picture? She literally "wished her life away" - one stressful event after another thinking that as soon as things were all nice and calm she could "begin" to properly enjoy her life.
And then she developed serious health problems.....and then her husband committed suicide in his own bedroom so she had to be the one to find that and deal with it.....and she just last week got out of rehab for the second time. So I guess the reason why people say that it to remind us all that we should stop obsessing over how perfect everything will be day after tomorrow (or ever). Just enjoy the sun on your face today....that great song on the radio....a phone call or letter from an old friend. Just sayin'......

Makes sense but apparently living in the moment was too stressful for her and not fun at least those holiday moments

@Allamanda I looked at it like she was living in the moment but not enjoying the moment. I hope people don't think that living in the moment guarantees happiness

@lerlo no - she actually never was able to live truly in the moment - because she was so stressed out about things that had happened in the past (holidays) and her "projections" about things to come. If she would have just relaxed and let it all unfold around her - she would have seen that most of her fears were relatively ungrounded....each day could have been a good day in some way or another...

@Lavergne Yeah, that's the stuff I don't buy into. Trying to talk yourself into being happy when bad things are happening. If things are bad and you're unhappy, that's reality. You try and work through it. But to deny reality sure doesnt seem to be living in the moment to me.

@lerlo I get what you're saying....you can't pretend everything is great when its all falling to pieces all around you - but I don't think that's what they mean by living in the moment. I think its more the ability to deal with what you're currently experiencing - in real time - without being overly concerned about the past or the future. ???? Which is easier said than done - because obviously our past has a tendency to influence our present state... I think Allamanda said it best...

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Eckart Tolle did a great job of promoting The Power Of Now in the eponymous book. Science is coming on board nowadays with Jill Bolte-Talylor's My Stroke Of Insight, Iain McGilchrest's The Master And His Emissary and Roderick Tweedy's The God Of The Left Hemisphere, which all deal with the idea of the right hemisphere of the brain attending to the now and the left hemisphere to analysis and comparison of the past and future to the now.

and we somehow have control of which side of our brain we use and when?

The idea in all three books is that they are always used together but each side attends to information in its own way.

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