Present Moment

This is a beautiful piece of writing from my friend Adriana. I hope it resonates with you as much as it did with me, my immediate gut response was, this is true. The ability to feel is a priceless gift and feeling our feelings is one of the kindest gifts we can give our self. Enjoy!

Everything we think and feel reflects who we are. To dive deeper into myself and, hopefully, to get to that place where I am love, compassion, trust, and truth, I have to follow the path of my present responses.

Someone who feels unloved can still find love in its purest form, but will have to work through the layers of resistance that block the feeling of pure love. My present emotions reflect the present state of my nervous system with all its past imprints.

Whenever I have an experience, these imprints enter into my responses, which means that most of my reactions are echoes from the past. Then one finds that; I am not really living in the present.

However, at least I am reacting in the present, and that is where the search for my true self begins. My emotions are the most present-centered thing I have. An emotion is a thought linked to a sensation. The thought is usually about the past or the future, but the sensation is in the present.

My mind quickly links sensations with thoughts, but when we were infants, our first experience and emotions were much closer to physical sensations. We had no inhibitions or second thoughts about crying when we were wet, cold, lonely, frightened, etc. Our minds didn’t know those powerful words bad and no. Conditioning teaches us that certain thoughts are shameful; no teaches us to resist our own impulses.

More complex words and interpretations came later. As adults, when we deny ourselves the immediate experience of an emotion, a screen of words is put up by the mind, and this throws us out of the present and into either the past or the future. To feel an emotion fully and completely, to experience it and then release it, is to be in the present, the only moment that never ages. ~ Adriana Ochoa