It’s not as consistent as I’d like, but most mornings I make an effort to find a few moments of quiet before I head out into the noise of another day. I have a space in my room devoted to this – a shrine, of sorts – dedicated to my spiritual practice and my continuing effort at healing and growing. Some days, I use a guided meditation app that has collections devoted to various topics such as anxiety, joy, and compassion. I often turn to the meditations for releasing anxiety. Part of my spiritual practice is working hard to remain in the present moment, and many of these meditations attempt to bring the listener back to center through this idea. At some point during my spiritual development, one of the meditations helped to redefine my perception of what being in the present moment is really about. I think for a long time, my ability to be in the present moment hinged on how much I could shape the present moment into something pleasant. I could be present only if I was happy, healthy, or joyful. Being present while angry, hurt, or shameful was not something I felt could happen. I felt that these types of emotions, among them sadness, disappointment, and heartache negated the ability, power and pleasure of living and being present. I was very wrong. During one of these meditations, the guide reminds us to think or say to ourselves, “Just allow the feeling to be there as it is. This moment, it’s like this.”
Something about that really turned my personal philosophy on its head. Most of my experience and guidance about learning to remain in the present moment had come from situations in which it was very easy for me to be present – yoga class, symphony rehearsal, etc. The harder moments came when I was alone. They came when I didn’t have a guide, mentor or spiritual guru in a prayer room to assist me into a place of ease. They came without the warmth of a summer sun to make life easier or a romantic relationship to distract me.
For me, so much of what I thought about being in the present moment was associated with my ability to be content or happy. I associated the ability to be present with the necessity for a sense of ease. What this mediation added to the equation was this idea of acceptance and surrender to our emotions. The guide says, “There’s no need to change anything or make it any different right now. We’re just letting it be... being curious about where it is and how big it is: naming the emotion.” You see, by this point in many of my previous meditative endeavors, I was already well on my way to trying to force my emotions into a box of “happy” or “sad,” and if “sad” was the case, well, it better become happy, damn it! I did not yet understand the purpose of meditation or of being in the present moment. I learned, from not only these meditations but from people in my spiritual community, that if I am spending my time trying to shape the moment, I am not being present at all. Trying to shape these moments into something more manageable is a fear, a fear either of what the emotion implies for us and our current dilemma or of what it says about ourselves and the people involved in the situation from which the emotion has arisen. I particularly like the part about learning to name the emotion. This asks us to be reflective, to look inward, and to think on our current condition. It forces us to acknowledge our emotional transience. Beyond acknowledging it, we must accept our emotional transience. We must accept that each emotion is as valuable and important as the last one and next one, even if we don’t understand it perfectly or it is uncomfortable to bear.
Fairly recently I went through a gnarly breakup. It was the type of parting where one loses not only a cherished love but a cherished friend, which makes the loss all the more confusing and painful. In these past few months, I have been confronted by a state of rapid, intense emotional uncertainty. Every day is different. Three years ago, if someone would have told me to love my sadness, I would have told them to kick rocks, but now if I wake up and it hurts, I let it hurt. I name the emotion. I write it down in my journal and ask myself how it feels because some days, sadness feels different than it did before. Some days, sadness is hollow, but other days it is incredibly heavy. I thank the Creator for this feeling. If you don’t believe in a Creator, thank yourself for the emotion. And if you do believe, still thank yourself. You pump out blood and love and triumph with every breath, even if your breathing is labored. There are mornings when I wake up and think of how much I miss the sound of his voice on the other end of a telephone and I will name the broken feeling but I allow for transience: in the next moment I am grateful that there was a time when I heard his voice often. I am grateful that I can remember it. By naming the emotion I can explore it. I can understand where it came from and why. Naming the emotion, being present with it, and exploring it means I can grow to understand it, and through understanding I grow.
Each present moment becomes more beautiful as I learn to live in wholeness, and I mean wholeness as living fully, not living without brokenness. In acknowledging our brokenness and resolving to soon be unbroken, we are living fully. By burying it and turning the other cheek, we are not being authentic or responsive to what our experience is asking of us. I’ve mentioned before that I really admire the social activist Ruby Sales and her idea of asking of one another, “Where does it hurt?” Being in the present moment is about asking that of ourselves. It is about finding out exactly where it hurts and loving that place within our spirit more than any other.
Being present is daring to swim in our feelings without a thought of letting them drown us.
