We continue to live in intense, complicated, high-pressure times. These current challenging dimensions thrust and move us to a different set of requirements to be able to live and best respond to what life offers, fully present.
It is one thing to be fully present when “life is a breeze” – something else when it seems life is more like a hurricane. Here are my top six guidelines to being fully present when you feel like you seem to be in one of those tornadoes:
Six Directions to Stay Balanced
1. Be the observer of your own life
It is a paradox to be fully present and understand that this requires you to be able to, on an ongoing basis, watch all that you literally see going on in your life. This requires objectively noting the real facts, which can most easily be done by asking yourself “who, what, where, when, why and how is this going on?” It is necessary to not only pay close attention to be able to well answer these questions, but step back, or let go enough to “see the larger picture”. Then your intuition, larger vision, and key insights can appear to guide you to your best possible choices.
2. Release expectations
Expectations are only reflections of old agendas that are coping constructs, which are the ego’s band aids to cover past unhealed traumas. They get in the way of being fully present and able to respond, a “reverse twist” of the word “responsible”, interestingly enough.
3. Dare to vision – but keep it clean
Visioning engages your creative imagination to offer you a picture of what, in your heart of hearts, you really want, and you’re entitled to that – it is how we manifest, or co-create, our experience. Examples of what would be illegitimate additions to visioning would be putting all your heart and soul – and corresponding actions – into making someone do something or be something whether they want to or not. That is a violation, and also sets the stage to twist you into becoming codependent.
4. Look to put the serenity prayer into daily practice
A foundation of all twelve-step recovery programs to break addictions, the serenity prayer says, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” I highly recommend including meditating on, or deeply reflecting and considering, the meaning of this prayer and how it applies to living and best surviving what I’m calling “the tornado”.
5. Put yourself every day in the “eye of the storm”
Strangely enough the eye of the storm is the place of serenity and inner stillness, or all I understand being centered offers. Find your inner center, and make sure that several times a day, you spend thirty uninterrupted seconds or more there. It will miraculously balance, even alleviate or transform, the challenges you face.
6. Accept the challenge of trusting yourself by fully being yourself no matter what
Be Courageous to Transform
When life’s tornadoes force us to let go of all external sources of security to which we are, whatever the reasons, attached, we have only ourselves left. That is all we ever have anyway, because that is all we can ever be – no one else, no thing else.
Then we are in our full potential power, which allows us to be fully present in these challenging, complicated, fast-moving, intense times. May your corresponding life journeys be uplifting and fruitful ones that even more greatly support the greater You.
Courage provides the lift-off – well worth the seeming risk to move you toward a transformational, better outcome. Bon voyage!