the life that’s here: so how do I be here?

Our minds take us away from the present moment, from the life that’s here and now. We spend much of our thinking ruminating about the past, the future or beset in distraction, on an automatic pilot or in continuous entertainments.

Here, now though, is the only life we truly have and can live.

The life that’s here is not hard to find, but it is difficult to stay here; the habitual pull into distraction, away from here and now is compelling and powerful. To dwell or to be caught up in what appears to be unresolved issues from the past-a past which does not actually exist save in psychological time-and to be tied to a yoke of recycling old regrets, resentments, old pain and suffering, this seems part of our human  condition, yet to attempt to live in the past or to be caught up in the past and expect a change it is akin to living in a hell realm of impossibility; there is only the life that’s here.

We should learn from the past, seek to find the meaning in our past wounding but living there is simply to waste the life that’s here.

What is pain? Pain is an unpleasant physical sensation caused by illness or wounding. What is suffering? Suffering is what we do next after feeling pain, and suffering, our suffering is how we carry and often prolong our pain by living in and maintaining our story of suffering.

Where do we find pain? Where do we find suffering? Where do we not find these things? Love, work, children, religion, sex, food, shelter, race, age, achieving, education; all of the contexts of our life have the potential-and usually actually have-pain and suffering in the them; pain and suffering are stitched into the experience of being human. Though we will never be separate from this experience it does not have to define the totality of us, we do not have to live anchored in the past story of our pain and suffering.

There is another reason why we might be pulled into and spend time in past wounding. We have what is known as a negativity bias, where difficult to traumatic experiences leave more of mark on us than positive ones: bad is stronger than good. In our deep past, in evolutionary terms, a certain focus on negative or life-threatening events kept us aware and alive (of sabre toothed tigers at the cave door, so to speak). These threats would come and go and we could relax, though still be slightly wary of any possible threat.

In the 21^st Century things are different. Most of do not come across a sabre toothed tiger in our high street, yet we are overrun, at times over stimulated by experiences of challenge, low level but chronic threats (emails, material demands, workplace assessments and so forth), so much so that out threat level, our “antennae” for threat and negativity is always up, we get very little respite; if its not one thing, it’s the other.

In the midst of all this we get landlocked in an unconscious identification with our suffering past because our nervous system (itself a “nervous” system) is primed by social media, gaming, modern consumerism and urban living and a culture that values (overvalues?) psychological wounding in our early family experience to the detriment of life now. The past becomes a fetish we can’t let go of until this velcroing to the past is culturally sanctioned and seen as normal. It’s not: we don’t have to be identified with past wounds, a negativity bias is just that, a bias and when we recognise a bias we can work with it; when we’re aware of our biases we can make distinctions and choices.

Of course, we don’t always do this. We often store up the pain of the past deep inside us, deep in our muscles, our tissues and cells where it lives as tense and unprocessed energy, a not too subtle sense of physical contraction. After years of this we might come to identify with this part-life, this is me, we might say, I am the low one, the anxious one, the hurt one, the one who was wounded in the past and who is still wounded. We live as if we had no choice but to live this part-life, where another part of ourselves is buried deep in the shadows, living this life suppressed and clenched and continually holding back this wave of psychic pain.

So, we often either block our pain or drown it, fearful that we might drown if we allow our pain to be met in other ways. A colleague recently went on a psychological retreat where he was taken back to when he was a 6-year-old boy. A memory, a painful one, resurfaced. He is now haunted by that memory. Only a small amount of the work has been done here, the unprocessed past has risen, but requires learning from and discharging. Our pain and suffering can work to wake us up, wake us up from the trance like dream of the past and the future into the present moment and the life that’s here, but not if we only carry it and identify with it.

Past pain requires not resolving (I might want to go back into the past and address my perpetrator) but perhaps dissolving, by meeting and gradually staying present with the suffering, allowing it to be here instead of banishing it (where do we think it will go?) and laying out a table for it. A table for it? Sit with it, befriend it-it is your pain, your suffering, it’s you, it’s nobody else now. The past is long gone. What you are meeting, this is you, and surely it makes sense to make friends with as much as you as possible?

Once really seen, once really heard, your suffering has a chance to leave, and when it does the past takes its leave and the life that’s here reveals itself. Your identification with past pain and suffering falls away and the day is fresh, vital, new.

We have come to believe that the past is more powerful that the present, that our wounded or psychological time is us. This is untrue: reach out, taste, smell, listen deeply, look without trying to analyse, nothing in the past can take these primal sensations away.

Notice your minds tendency to wander, its compulsive habit to slip into the past and the future, into autopilot and distraction. Come back to your senses, to your body breathing here and now, notice the sheer presence inherent in your felt experience, the simple feeling of being here; the past has fallen away and you live the life that’s here. Bring your attention here. Ask yourself what’s happening right now, inside and outside me? Not yesterday, not tomorrow, but right here, right now. Not your idea of what could be happening-that’s merely a concept or construction and takes away the reality of the life that’s here, but your actual felt experience of right here, right now. Being here is being attuned, aligned to your senses, your embodied living.

You do not need to travel to find it, life is here, you are life, it has already found you and it is waiting with welcoming arms.