What Are You Hungry For? (26 page)

As an experiment, shut your eyes and tell me what your next thought is going to be. If you try it, you’ll find that your mind goes blank. You can’t grasp the present moment until it arrives, and if you try to force it, there’s a mental blank—the present moment refuses to be caught in a net. The mystery of the “now” isn’t just a philosophical riddle. It’s practical, because in the “now” only two things can happen:

You are fully present. Your true self is you. You feel free and alive.

Or

You aren’t fully present. Old memories, habits, and conditioning block you. You are trapped in a mental fog.

Being able to experience the first state is highly desirable, because the best life is lived as your true self. The second state, sadly, is where almost everyone lives. They only imagine that they are present. To illustrate, I recently saw a woman named Nina who was in her forties and had been married for fifteen years. She had become overweight, and her husband no longer found her attractive. I was surprised to learn that he had come with her but decided to stay in the waiting room while she saw me alone.

“He doesn’t think I should bother with all this stuff,” Nina said. By
stuff
she meant her constant battle with her weight.

“Did he tell you that today?” I asked.

Nina shook her head. “He didn’t have to. I know what he thinks. We don’t talk about it.”

“Do you talk at all?” I asked.

She shrugged. “We’ve been married a long time. We’ve run out of things to talk about, I guess.”

“You’re clearly unhappy about that,” I pointed out. Nina hung her head. I suggested that her marriage had reached an impasse, a block that was holding everything back. Nina nodded, and she told me more about their home life, which revolved around meals, watching TV, and their kids. Between her husband and herself, almost nothing was happening. It was obvious that they were dragging each other down.

She was stuck in a familiar place, which is known as the past. The present moment didn’t really exist. It couldn’t exist as long as she and her husband filled it with debris from the past—old arguments not settled, emotions not expressed, opinions quashed, and so on. They had “solved” their problems by turning the present moment into a dead zone. It felt empty, but at least they weren’t feeling much pain.

“You can get out of this trap,” I said. “No one set it but yourself.”

Nina protested. “You don’t have to live with him.”

“You’re right. I’ve never even met your husband. I’m sure you have a lot of grievances you could air. If you told him everything that’s wrong with him, your marriage, and all the rest of it, we could spend hours here. But the answer really does lie with you,” I said. “You are absent right now from your own life, when what you desperately need is to be present.”

I asked Nina to close her eyes and sit quietly. Then I led her through a simple exercise.

“Ask yourself if you are being aware right now. Are you?” Nina nodded. “Okay,” I said. “What are you aware of? Don’t put it
into words. Just check yourself. Check your body. Do you feel any sensations? Check your mood. Look quietly at your mind. When you’ve finished checking in, open your eyes.”

After a moment she was looking at me again. I asked her to describe her inner inventory. Nina said that her mood was down, and yet her body felt pretty good. There was something even nicer. It was a lovely spring day, and I had the window open. A sea breeze was coming in, and with it the faint smell of the ocean.

“I was so caught up in my problems,” Nina said, “that I didn’t notice how nice a day it is. But once I felt the breeze over my skin, I began to relax, and then I noticed.”

“Perfect,” I said with enthusiasm. “To be in the present moment, you need to be present. Everything that life has to offer comes to us through our awareness. When you are present, you drink in everything that your mind, body, and environment are telling you. Without awareness, your life tells you nothing, because you are only aware of the habits and rituals that get you through the day.”

There was more to say, but the key thing is that Nina left promising to repeat the simple awareness exercise she had just learned. Her marriage could improve—along with a host of other issues—only if she started to be present. Nothing would change, however, if she kept being an internal defector.

Your true self wants to connect with you. If you couldn’t contact your true self, there would be no magic in the present moment. It would be just another tick-tock on the clock, another silent numeral on your digital watch. What tells us that the present moment contains magic is that you can only love, feel joy, and be inspired here and now. The intensity of life happens only in the present.

Don’t regret the fact that you haven’t been living in the present. The universe is set up to exemplify a truth stated by the great quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger: “The present is the only thing that has no end.” This is more than an interesting point in physics; it’s
the doorway to a kind of practical immortality, the timeless domain where every possibility exists here and now.

The present moment requires you to be aware of it, but is that enough? People who have lost their memory to Alzheimer’s disease or amnesia can’t connect with their past. They live in the present, it could be said, and yet they suffer. It’s true that blank awareness has nothing to offer. You have to participate in your own consciousness. Most people spend hardly a minute dwelling in the deep silence and peace that exists inside them; it is totally foreign territory. But the world’s wisdom traditions discovered that awareness possesses hidden advantages. These advantages are tucked away in silence, and yet we all have them.

If you delve into our own awareness, you will notice the following:

You alone are the explorer of your inner world. To test whether these advantages actually exist is the path of self-awareness. The
feedback loop may be weak when you start. You haven’t thought about how to grow and evolve—too much time was gobbled up by earning a living, raising a family, and exploring the world “out there.” Even so, you have been building a self all your life, and the process took place in awareness.

Now you can become skilled at building the self you actually want. It will expand everything on the list:

You will favor moving forward every day.

Your personal growth will accelerate.

The better you know yourself, the more you will cherish your life.

You will become more positive as self-judgment falls away, and this positivity will be reflected in your outer life.

You will feel connected to a higher vision of life and a higher power that makes your vision come true.

These are practical things, markers on the spiritual journey that you reach in real life. I measure my progress by them every day. I am moving forward if I feel more compassion, less blame, and greater calmness. My personal growth is accelerating when a goal that I thought would take years—such as dropping the need for anger—arrives much sooner. I firmly believe in being as down-to-earth as possible. There have been moments when I was sitting on the fast train from New York to Boston and gazing out at the gray landscape whizzing by; I merged into it, feeling as if Deepak had vanished and there was only Being, the peace of pure existence. These privileged moments are the kind of markers I’m talking about.

Spirituality has languished too long as a set of beautiful ideals. Only the type of spirituality that creates real change is useful. By its nature, awareness is life-supporting—miraculous as the mind is, arising from an organ that weighs 3 pounds and is the consistency of cold oatmeal, it is responsible for basic needs like sustaining the body
and ensuring your survival. The greatest gift you can give yourself is to be present, because then the perfect match between awareness and the “now” is made.

I’ve painted a glowing picture, but in practice, what should you do?

Once you see the value of being present, you can acquire the skills necessary to get there. These skills train your brain to be present, and as you reinforce new pathways, being present gets easier and easier, until one day it feels completely natural—indeed, to be present is much easier than surrounding yourself with the fog of illusion. Dwelling on the past or anticipating the future is totally illusory. The past and the future don’t exist. Only the “now” exists, and therefore it’s the home you were born to live in.

Your brain was designed to respond to spiritual experiences. When you feel inspired or filled with wonder, that experience is processed in the brain. But you can also train your brain to be much more receptive to spiritual input. We’ll cover four of the most important skills in awareness:

Being centered

Paying attention

Holding focus

Diving deeper

Skill #1:
Being Centered

Being centered is the most basic awareness skill. Most people can’t be in the present because they are too busy being somewhere else.
They are distracted by the world “out there,” which is filled with constant activity. But haven’t you noticed certain people who have the following qualities?:

They know who they are.

They focus sharply on the task at hand.

They seem self-possessed and comfortable with who they are.

They listen closely.

They don’t crave the approval of others or fear disapproval.

They grow calm in a crisis rather than flustered or panicky.

Such a person is centered. They are comfortable being here instead of being somewhere else. In a society that lavishes everyone with distractions of every kind, being centered takes effort. You must train yourself not to be distracted. If you don’t, there will always be something new—a phone call, a movie, a crisis at home, a deadline at work—to pull you out of yourself. But if you remain in yourself, you will handle your life better, including those aspects “out there” that need answers and solutions.

Does all of this run the danger of being self-centered? There are critics who think so, although I think the specter of the “me” generation isn’t hovering over us here. Being self-centered is the same as rampant egotism, where what counts first and foremost is myself and what I want. Ultimately, such a state is a form of insecurity, while being centered is the opposite. People who are secure in themselves tend to be emotionally flexible and caring of others. Egotists have brittle boundaries; they can’t reach out to others (and therefore pretend that reaching out isn’t worthwhile).

Being centered saves a lot of trouble. Here’s a recent real-life example. A friend of mine went to get cash from an ATM, only to discover that she was overdrawn on her account. She was baffled and a bit shocked, but she was late for an appointment, so she rushed home, found the checkbook from another account, and hurried back
to the bank, which was now closed. She stuffed the check into an ATM envelope and dashed off to make her appointment.

The next day she went to the ATM for cash, only to discover that she was still overdrawn. Fuming at the bank’s mistake, she confronted the manager, who showed her the check she had deposited. She had forgotten to sign it. Embarrassed, she added her signature, and the incident was over. It seems normal enough to be shocked by an overdraft you didn’t expect, but if my friend hadn’t been so frazzled, she would have signed the check and avoided all the stress and wasted time. She lost her center. A small incident, but multiply it by all the times that you find yourself thrown off your center—for most people, everyday stress will do it. They don’t even notice what has happened, because they are so used to having their awareness be jerked here and there by external events.

Being centered comes naturally once you put your mind to it. First, stop doing the things that defeat being centered:

Avoiding these missteps and bad habits will go a long way in your relationship with others. But you also need the positive experience of
being centered. It begins when you are alone. In a quiet place, close your eyes, take a deep breath, and go inward. Place your attention on your heart, in the center of your chest. Sit quietly, and easily let your attention remain there. If it is pulled away by random thoughts, re-center as soon as you notice what has happened. After a few minutes, open your eyes. For the next half hour or so, observe yourself to see if you remain centered. Don’t instantly throw yourself into external demands.

If you repeat this practice several times a day, you will start to learn the difference between being centered and not. With repetition you train your brain, and in turn your involuntary nervous system, to prefer a calm, quiet, centered state. This preference brings along lower blood pressure, decreased stress response, and slower heart rate. You aren’t inert and unresponsive; nor are you forcing your attention to stay in the middle of your chest. The state you want is more responsive, in fact, because your awareness is closer to home, allowing you to access answers without outer distractions.