“There is only one time that is important – NOW! It is the most important time because it is the only time that we have any power.”
Leo Tolstoy

“I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.”
Albert Einstein

“The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.”
Buddha

I have written quite a bit about being present and how it can help you.

Today I’d like to list seven of my favorite benefits of being present. Many of them relate to or blend into one another.

Now, being present is quite hard to keep up. You slip back into not being present. And that’s OK. Don’t beat yourself up.

Just accept that you are not present and you’ll feel better and more relaxed. Then it will be easier to slip back into the present moment again. Just like with anything, going for perfection often just leads to anxiety, self-doubts and beating yourself up.

Going for consistency and improving your consistency gradually –  slipping back into old habits less and less – is more useful.

Also, being present isn’t a magic pill that will solve all your problems or “fix you”. But like regular exercise, it can be helpful in several ways.

1. Improved social skills.

This may be one of the first things you discover when you start experimenting with being present. It was for me. If you have the problem that you get nervous/shy and don’t know what to say in a conversation then presence is one solution.

When you are present your head is no longer filled with past scenarios (“what did she mean when she said that?”) or future scenarios (“what will they think if say this?”). You let go off self-consciousness.

You are just here. With your attention focused outward towards the person(s) you are interacting with. You just let things flow out of you.

And in a way tip of assuming rapport is a way to tap into your presence in conversations. Assuming rapport means that you pretend that you are meeting one of your best friends. Then you start the interaction in that frame of mind instead of the nervous one.

When you’re with your best friends you are probably not thinking ahead that much. You are just enjoying the interaction, the present moment and all of you just let things flow naturally.

Presence can also help you with listening. It helps you to decrease the bad habit of thinking about the future and what you should say next while trying to listen.

If you are present and really there while listening then that will also come through in your body language, which gives the person talking a vibe and feeling that you are really listening to what s/he has to say.

Being present also improves your focus and allows you to better tune out possible interruptions or distractions in your surroundings.

2. Improved creativity.

If you write or do some other creative work you may have found that your best work flows out of you when you are not thinking that much.

You just write, paint, play.

You enter a state where things just come to you. Then later you can come back and edit your work.

This one is similar to the first reason. Writing is for instance similar to a conversation.

When you are present in a conversation or while writing things it’s often best to not think to far ahead or you start to get self-conscious and second-guessing yourself. You create mental blocks that stop your creativity from flowing unhindered.

3. You appreciate your world more.

One of big advantages of becoming more present in your everyday life is that you decrease the amount of analyzing and labeling you do to the things/people in your surroundings. You don’t judge as much.

This might sound strange but in the moments when you are present the ordinary world becomes more interesting and wonderful.

Colors can seem brighter. Your see more aliveness in trees, nature and in people. You see the wonder of all your man-made gadgets and stuff. Things that most often seem common, routine and boring become fascinating and something you can appreciate.

It’s like you are observing your world with more clarity and curiousness. Like a little kid again, discovering things while they still feel fresh. Before they have just become walking, talking and growing labels with years of associations and thoughts attached.

Before you actually use this tip though – if you just think about it in your mind – it may not make that much sense.

4. Stress release.

When you are present there is a certain stillness and centeredness inside. You calm down. If you are feeling stressed during your normal day then one of my favorite ways to let that go is to take belly breaths and just focus on them for a minute or two.

This pretty much always calms me down. The breathing with belly seems to calm one down in a physical way. And by focusing just on the in and out-breaths you connect to the present moment instead of the past or future scenarios that are making you feel stressed.

5. Less worry-warting and overthinking.

If you are a chronic overthinker that goes round and round in circles in your mind before you ever get anything done then being present is a great release from that habit. I’m not saying that you won’t slip back into overthinking.

But being present just for a while can help you. It can allow you to stop worrying about what may happen and just take some action to get started. To actually see what happens.

6. Openness.

This is perhaps the best benefit.

Being present removes the labels you put on people and things –  temporarily – and opens you up to see and experience things without your preconceived notions. I think this is a big part in how being present helps you in conversations and with your creativity.

You are open to new things as you are without many of your barriers within your mind. Things can flow easier through you without all that stuff in the way.

You make things easy on yourself in way. And you often get better results at the same time.

7. Playfulness.

As you are present you may feel a playfulness arise. This makes it easier to just do things. When you see things from a playful point of view things become less of a struggle created from within. You let go of that heavy, overthinking frame of mind.

Everything won’t become super easy to do. But many things become more enjoyable and easier to do. They become lighter. Less of a burden.

Kids are often more present and playful. You can return to that playfulness by connecting with the present.

The top 3 ways to slip into the present moment

There are quite a few ways to return to the present. You can try a bunch of them out and see which one(s) that works best for you. My three favorites at the moment are:

Focus on your breath.

I mentioned this one above.

Focus on what’s right in front of you.

Or around you. Or on you. Use your senses. Just look at what’s right in front of you right now. Listen to the sounds around you. Feel the fabric of your clothes and focus on how they feel. You can for instance use the summer sun or rain and how it feels on your skin to connect with the present.

Pick up the vibe from present people.

If you know someone that is more present than most people then you can pick his/her vibe of presence (just like you can pick up positivity or enthusiasm from people).

If you don’t know someone like that I recommend listening to/watching cds/dvds by Eckhart Tolle like Stillness Speaks or The Flowering of Consciousness. His books work too.

But cds/dvds are better than books for picking up someone’s vibe since the biggest part of communication is voice tonality and body language.

Note: This is a guest post by Vic Vosen – a writer, reader, and slam participant – of Eye of the Storm.

“You need nothing more to write poems than bits of string and thread and some dust from under the bed”
Marvin Bell

“Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.”
Eli Khamarov

“Appreciating poetry is probably like appreciating anything else. It means having the generosity to let a thing be what it is, the patience to know it, a sense of the mystery in all living things, and a joy in new experience.”
M.C. Richards

You have a flash of insight, a metaphor for understanding electricity as water, a parallel to existence or just an inside reflection on what is wrong/right with the world.   I’ve sat at this lake before the waterfall waiting for hours for more to follow, but that’s it and I start thinking about something else or worse, nothing at all, and then I forget what helped put the world in perspective.

Like journal writing, poetry can help record those thoughts and special insights in helping forge your feelings into a perspective so that you can start coming to terms with it, rather than having it subvert back to the inertia that carried the feeling or idea to consciousness to begin with.   This can help you come to terms with the idea/feeling itself, to move forward with your growth as living human being.   How? you ask?

1. It builds your brain.

The power of the metaphor, simile, parallel… figurative language is not only a good way to put things into perspective, but metaphors are easier to remember than a complex set of interactions.   This is a way to grasp deeper meaning from perhaps a very mundane, or complex identity.   It builds an understandable identity with which to contrast that is easier to grapple and engage in, in the process building pathways in your brain that would have been stopped cold otherwise.  

And poetry exercises this muscle by encouraging figurative language providing a sounding ground for your ideas, feelings, reminiscences by putting them into a concrete perspective.

2. It’s therapeutic.

A dialog of one is still a dialog, and like journal writing provides an amiable outlet to vent our feelings.   Not only that but we end up with something that is tangible and durable product of the struggle while coming to terms with it.  

It is something we can show off, or keep around for a rainy day to either entertain ourselves, work on, or reminisce what you were thinking that day when you wrote it.   It’s a little snapshot of your soul and what you were thinking when writing it.  

This can grow into something new as you revise and/or write more as a poem can be never really finished.   Thus it has the possibility of being exhaustless, while providing a forum for expression & understanding.

3. That tool you’ve developed is versatile.

Once you get the hang of writing poetry, there’s almost nothing you can’t do with it.   It is an alternative form of communication.   If you don’t believe me just look at all the greeting cards out there with this wit or wisdom scrolled up in Gothic lettering on every subject.   It is a font of the English language, it’s just up to you what you want to put it up to.  

I’ve written poems to magazines urging articles, I’ve used them to barter services and better grades in classes, I’ve written them to girlfriends.   I’ve gotten people to laugh.   They can be as complex or simple as you want to make them into, and I’ve found any place that required a logical argument, could always be appended with a poem in favor/or against something as well to clarify the position/picture, because after all, it’s just communication if on a more deeper level.

4. It encourages deeper intrapersonal relationships.

As you write, not only do ideas bloom, but you do also.   Your vocabulary gets broader, your understanding about relationships between ideas grows and how this affects you and the world comes closer together.   My biggest problem in dealing with people was not knowing whom I was, somewhere between egoless and consumer.   Writing poetry enables the I in Identity, from which you can clearly communicate the you to the you in someone else.

People aren’t always going to be able to understand you, but writing poetry gives you an opportunity for personal space in which to critically think while expressing yourself to others in a coherent picture.   Doesn’t mean you’ll come off all-knowing and wise, but that you’ll be given an opportunity to effectively communicate at your own pace which can come at a premium in this busy world.

5. You are opening yourself up to a wealth of human knowledge

By writing, you are doing the legwork in understanding other poets. There are as many ways to read poetry as there are people, but when you start thinking in a language are you more easily able to understand another in that language. There are thousands of poets and each of them write to different aim. Figurative language, prosody, sonics, description, narrative are all a language unto themselves and some will come easier for you to write than others, as well as understand.   Poetry is a forum for exchange, not a universal language.

Writing poetry strengthens your reasoning and in so doing, your comprehension in just what that author means when he claims, all was mimsy in the borogroves. Best of all, it’s a free exchange of ideas.. there are thousands of websites and forums on the web and each have groups of people to interact and engage, both dead and alive, across the centuries from ancient Rome to the current Poet Laureate of the United States.

Vic Vosen is a writer, reader, and slam participant currently bonded in slavery as a mudlogger to the petroleoum industry from his education costs. He posts on Usenet forums, a blog, and various poetry web forums in his exploration and development of metaphor and sound.

Note: This is a guest post by Lori Jewett.

We have all launched ourselves on the road to happiness. We are obsessed with the pursuit of it, but all too often, we become discouraged. We struggle and bumble our way along, but somehow happiness continues to elude us.

Part of the problem is that the term, happiness, is kind of vague. We set off on our search for it before we know what it is or how to obtain it. Many of us have created a monster with our relentless pursuit of happiness. We’ve chosen this broad and mighty goal “HAPPINESS” and then we set about trying to achieve it by eliminating all of the negative aspects of our lives, identifying our one true passion, divining our life’s purpose and setting out to achieve our life’s dreams…all before lunch. Then we wonder why it isn’t working.

And yet, it is true that the pursuit of happiness is worth the effort. Research has shown that positive emotions have not just the benefit of momentary pleasure, but of long-term well-being also. Positive emotions bring us pleasure, counteract the damaging effects of negative emotions, build resilience and promote long-term physical and emotional health. (See my prior post on The Power of Positive Emotions) We don’t want to give up on happiness, but we do need to find an easier way.

As we all know, when we have a big goal, it helps to break it down into smaller pieces. If we think of happiness as an overarching emotional state that is created by the presence of other, positive emotions, the process of achieving happiness becomes less daunting.

Joy, contentedness, love, interest, and satisfaction are some of the positive emotions that lead us to feel happy. The more we experience these positive emotions, the happier we’ll be.

Easy so far, right? But how do we cultivate positive emotions? That’s easy too, if you’re willing to let it be.

When we engage in activities or spend time with people (or animals) that we like, we tend to feel positive emotions. You might experience joy when you tickle your baby and make him smile, or feel interest when you read the editorial section of the paper or feel content when you snuggle up with your husband to watch a movie. There are many things in our lives that generate positive emotions. Simply put, the more time you spend engaged in activities that induce positive emotion, the more positive emotion you will feel and the more likely you will be to achieve an overall sense of happiness.

To get you started I’ve included a very generic list of ideas for ways that you can invite more positive emotion into your life. You will, of course, put your own, personal spin on these and identify the specific people or activities that will bring about positive emotion in you. These are just ideas to get you started thinking:

Exercise.

Okay, no groaning now. Exercise, beyond making you more fit, also brings about the release of endorphins. This is a “feel good” chemical that is produced in your body. Now come on, who doesn’t want to feel good? You might like lifting weights or running or prefer to join a local basketball league. Any moderately strenuous physical activity counts.

Spend Time With Others.

Time spent with people (not just any people, but upbeat, positive people) can bring about feelings of joy, love, interest etc. Go out with your friends, visit with family, chat with the mailman. Don’t feel like talking? Just smile at people once in a while…when they smile back, which they will do most of the time, see if it doesn’t make you feel good.

Don’t forget your animal friends either. Playing with the dog, watching the birds or rabbits in the back yard or even chatting with your son’s pet hamster can make you feel more content or even make you laugh. (Yes, I do talk to my son’s hamster and my daughter’s as well…is that a problem?)

Quiet Your Mind.

Formal meditation, prayer or even just sitting with your eyes closed for a few minutes can bring about relaxation and a sense of inner peace.

Spend Time in Nature.

I’ve written ad nauseum about the benefits of time spent in nature over at BetweenUsGirls. Suffice it to say that nature, whether a hike in the woods or simply gazing at the river from your office window, can bring about relaxation, feelings of connectedness, and even spark creativity. While there is much research to prove that time in or near nature has a positive impact on mood, I am sure that you don’t need proof. It isn’t often that I run across a person who hasn’t experienced the soothing effects of nature for his- or herself.

Express Yourself.

Creative expression of any kind (art, crafts, cooking, decorating, writing) can bring along a great deal of positive emotion. Your work doesn’t have to be good…you just have to enjoy doing it.

Have Fun.

This might mean making more time for your hobbies, taking up a new hobby, spending more time with friends or quick-and-easy activities like seeing a movie, going to a concert or texting back and forth with someone who always makes you laugh. Anything that engages your interest or makes you laugh or smile.

Volunteer Work.

Quite often, doing things that help others, brings feelings of joy and accomplishment. Making someone else feel good often makes us feel just as good.

Now, there you go. Seven very good general ideas that can be made into a multitude of specific ones for generating positive emotion. I’m sure that now that you’re thinking, you’ll come up with some other original ideas. If you do, share them with us…please!

The older I get, the more that I realize that it really is the little things that make us happy. Becoming a happier person doesn’t have to be hard work. Remember, one step at a time. Have lunch with a friend, take a walk in the woods, play with the dog, see a funny movie. Every time you engage in an activity that peaks your interest, makes you smile or gets your endorphins flowing, it’s like money in the bank. A little laugh here, a loving hug there and before you know it you’ve become the happy person you’ve always wanted to be without hardly trying.

This post was written by Lori Jewett from BetweenUsGirls. Visit BetweenUsGirls for wit and wisdom on a variety of topics including personal growth and development, midlife struggles, spirituality, health and more.

Note: This is a guest post by Michael Miles of Effortless Abundance.

Henry David Thoreau said that “most men lead lives of quiet desperation,’ and Miguel Torga, the great Portuguese writer, said that “life has the meaning we give it — our richness, our enthusiasm, our pride — or our cowardice.’

The search for meaning is a constant theme in our lives and we try to find it in many different ways. I believe that meaning can be found in the way we add to the world. Let me explain.

Step One: Take control

Austrian psychiatrist and survivor of the holocaust Victor Frankl tells us in Man’s Search for Meaning that between stimulus and response there is a gap, and in that gap lies the whole of our experience. Unlike Pavlov’s dogs, we are free to choose our responses to the things that come our way. Many – perhaps most – people go through life on autopilot, reacting in the same habituated ways they have learned over the course of their life, often rehearsing the scripts they developed as children.

In adult life, many of these scripts are maladaptive and only serve to impoverish our experience and damage us and those we love. When we react defensively to a criticism, when we start to get angry because we are stuck in a traffic jam, when we keep on smoking despite knowing how bad it is, we are ignoring the gap and abdicating our freedom.

But the truth is that we are free – we are not robots, we are not like dogs salivating when a bell rings. We are pulling our own strings and when the stimulus comes we can take control, change our response and hence change our life.

Of course, the power of our habits is strong and keeps pulling us back, but the gap is always there, even after a long lifetime of unconscious behavior, and over time we can expand the gap and become more free. In The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, Steven Covey calls this being proactive, the first step towards a life of meaning. In truth, we have always been in control, but we need to realize this before can move on.

Step Two: Adding Value

Once we have seen that we can change our own life and construct our own experience, we are able to orchestrate things so that we experience greater meaning.

But what gives meaning to our lives? Is it money, property, a successful career, a big car, an attractive spouse or partner? I’m sure most people would agree that these things in themselves do not add lasting and profound meaning to us.

Albert Einstein said that “only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile,’ and I believe that a life of service to others is what truly brings meaning. I prefer to use the term adding value, since this describes what I mean more accurately.

The term “service’ suggests that we have to give up our jobs and money to go help the poor and destitute. I know several people who have done just this, and they have certainly found happiness and peace in their choice of lifestyle. But a life of adding value does not mean abandoning your own needs and desires. It is not the same as sacrifice. Far from it – when we truly add value to the lives of others, we cannot help but receive value ourselves.

Examples of this kind of synergy abound in nature. For example, tree roots are often surrounded by fungal growths that take nutrients from the trees. Having no chloroplasts of their own, the fungi cannot synthesize the precursors of respiration, and so they piggyback on the trees’ ability to do this. In return, the tree gets to use the fungi’s vast subterranean network, extending its own reach and sucking in more nutrients from the soil. The soil, of course, gets this all back – and more – when the tree dies.

Our own body is, perhaps, the ultimate example of synergy in nature, all organs and system working together to create a wonderful entity where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Adding value is the only real way to live a meaningful life. Victor Frankl said that we must detect the meaning in our own lives, and I think what he meant by this was that we need to figure out the best way of adding value.

Step Three: Do What You Love

So the question remains, how can we add value? I believe the answer to this is surprisingly simple.

To quote Steve Jobs in a speech he gave in 2005, “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking.

Through Apple, Steve Jobs has undoubtedly added immense value to the world. He did it by following his heart and has been richly rewarded for it. The same can be said for many famous, successful and wealthy people.

The formula is simple. Find what you love. Do it. Add value. Be a success. Perhaps the first step is the hardest. Do you know what you love? There is little more important in life than finding out.

Finally, some food for thought. In Making a Life, Making a Living, Mark Albion cites a study carried out by Srully Blotnick. The careers of 1,500 business school graduates were tracked from 1969 to 1980 and were split into two groups: group A said they wanted to make money first so they could do what they really wanted later, and group B said they would follow their interests first, regardless of financial considerations. At the end of the study, there were 101 millionaires. All but one came from group B.

Michael Miles writes at effortlessabundance.com. Subscribe to his rss feed here.

Image by gutter (license).

What is stopping people from getting the results they want?

Well, for one I’d say a pretty common and self-imposed roadblock is thinking too much.

In fact, one of the best tips for getting things done that I have learned so far is simply to stop thinking and start doing.

I think this problem of overthinking things is nothing that I’m alone with in the personal development community. I think it may be one of the problems that draw people to books and websites on self-help and one of the things that still keep them from achieving what they want even after they have picked up on a lot of helpful advice.

Because after having read five books you think and plan and think a little more. You get lost in thinking. At least that’s what I did. If you’re an overthinker then getting your hands on personal development information becomes just another way to creatively procrastinate. But now you can label it as making progress and get an emotional kick out of it.

Now, I’m not saying that educating yourself or thinking is something bad. But overdoing it won’t help you either.

Here are a couple of good reasons why.

1. Thinking can’t replace action.

I sometimes think there is some kind of wish when overthinking that thinking will somehow replace action. A wish that if you just think enough you can find some easy way out or get what you want without having to actually do something.

Without taking action you’ll most likely not get what you want. Thinking is however seldom as scary or uncertain as taking the leap into the unknown and taking action.

So it can become a place where you hide from taking action and then rationalize to yourself in different ways how all this thinking will help you. Even though you know deep down that what you really want and need is to take action and get going.

2. You may overcomplicate things.

Are things hard and difficult? Yeah, they might be. But you may also want consider that it’s you that are making them even harder.

By overthinking things you make them more and more complicated in your mind. You can turn something fairly simple into a really complicated and big mess. And so it goes from something you can do with some discomfort and persistence into an epic battle where you keep moving inch by painstaking inch.

A problem here is that when what you are doing is difficult and complicated then you and others think that it must be important. And so you feel important. You derive a sense of importance from making things into big struggles.

Such a thing can form into an identity where you are struggling and keeping on moving forward while you imagine other people lying at home in the sofa lazily watching some TV. It can strengthen you. It can make you feel negatively about other people. It may feel good in a sort of way to feel like an outsider or some kind of misunderstood underdog that’s up against so much. So it has its upsides.

However, you may also want to consider not making things to so hard for yourself. You don’t have to be a rebel that’s going against the world. You can just accept what you choose to do. And that other people choose to do other things.

Upsides such as a feeling of importance or of being the underdog may make it hard to give up the notion that what you are doing may not be that difficult and complicated. But I have found that when I do that then I become more relaxed and things tend to be easier to accomplish.

You can to some degree control how difficult something will be. Much of your struggle is up there in your head. Just try letting go of the notion of how awfully difficult something is and see what happens. You may be relieved. And surprised at how you have been making your life more complicated than it needs to be.

3. You’ll perform worse.

If you overthink things you may overcomplicate them. And so you become nervous and start to second guess yourself all the time. It also becomes harder to focus on doing something when you have a have a habit of thinking a lot. You may often slip into possible future scenarios in your mind instead just focusing on what you are doing right now.

All of this can cripple your performance and produce results that are worse than they could have been.

How to stop thinking so much

So, I used to be a big overthinker. Still am. From time to time. But I have made progress. Here are three things I use to cultivate a habit of not overthinking things.

Be aware of the problem.

The most important thing is to be aware that you tend to overthink. And to keep being aware of that in your everyday life. You can for instance do that with post-it notes that say “Don’t overthink things. Act!” or something along those lines.

By just being aware of your habit you can often pick up on when you are doing it, stop yourself and do something more helpful instead. Over time it also becomes easier to step out of the loop of thoughts and not get stuck back in it a half an hour later.

Set deadlines for decisions.

Instead of thinking about something for days, tell yourself that you have – for example – 30 minutes to think. Then you will make a decision.

Be present.

Focus on what’s in front of you instead of flying off to the past or Tomorrowland for long periods of time. A tennis player will for instance not think much while playing. She just trusts in her own subconscious and stays with flow. Her body will – after years of practise – know what to do automatically.

The same goes for many things in everyday life. You don’t have to think a lot about everything. You can just stay present and let the right actions naturally arise.

This may sound a bit wonky, but if you just do things while being present you may discover that the results are often better than if you put in a lot of thought.

Like the tennis player, you know what the right thing to do is and how to do it well from years of experience and practice. You just have to let go of all that thinking that can cripple you. And have trust in your capabilities.

For tips on how to be present have a look at 8 Ways to Return to the Present Moment.