196 months

by 201monthsblog

Month of Now

Last month, I discovered the Now.

It started with a name, given to me by a friend. That name is Eckhart Tolle.

If you have never heard of him, I recommend plundering YouTube and watching videos. I’ve also picked up a copy of his book “The Power of Now”, which I’m working my way through.

The biggest message I have heard so far is to practise living fully in the present moment. Not easy, when you have a mind as active as mine. But I do practise, at least several hundred times a day. And it’s something I intend to practise for the rest of my months.

Now I am watching my thoughts, I am amazed how many of them I have had before. When these come up, I dismiss them the same way I would dismiss the idea of re-watching an episode of a soap opera from the 1980s. [It was a waste of time the first time round – why sit through it again?] What this does is free up the time I would have spent re-watching this thought – leaving my free to actually live in that moment.

I won’t try and explain Tolle’s teaching here. He does a far better job than me.

No fear?

A couple of weeks ago, I got on a plane. I’ve had a fear of flying since watching a film with a plane crash sequence at the start (“Alive”), and then having a dream I was in a similar crash above a city.

Using my new-found living-in-the-present skills, I was able to enjoy flying for the first time in hundreds of months. I realised that my previous fear was all focused on what might happen, not what is actually happening right now. So I stayed with what was actually happening, and enjoyed the beauty of the clouds as fully as possible. They really are beautiful. I also played with directing my attention and successfully made a small cloud vanish. But that’s another story.

I wonder if I can use this to combat the vertigo I had in the previous blog post…

Now what?

Over the next month, I am going to get busy. Spring is happening where I live. And most of the things I do for money are done between Spring and Autumn. I will try and keep more of a diary, so I can remember what I did. Although, obviously, I don’t do much remembering now.