What does living in the present moment mean to me?

For many years I have been listening to wise advice to learn to live in the present. My therapist recommended that I read Eckhart Tolle's book: “The Power of Now”, which I read with a lot of resistance and at that time I was not able to understand the message it offers us. I learned a lot from the book, certainly, but I didn't fully understand it as I am now beginning to see.

As I learn about constant awareness, or full consciousness or as they say in English, mindfulness, the message that stands out the most is "living in the present moment" (at least for me). I have to confess that I heard it and it got stored in the back of my brain, as I call those seed messages, which arrived and are deposited in some dark place of my consciousness but have not yet bloomed.  The idea got the power to draw my attention to it once the seed is sown. That's what happened to me with this concept of living in the present. For a long time it sounded like empty words that didn't make much sense, but the seed had already been planted and little by little it’s been flourishing In Myself.

Today I am beginning to understand what it is about. Recently, it clicked on me, it means stop reacting from my childhood wounds and desires. Those that I learned and formed in me, in order to be able to cope with the things that were difficult for me in my childhood.

For now I am understanding that living in the present is being aware of how I react from my inner child, identifying the emotions that have been stored in my body, and to choose to respond from my adult self, and from my present needs and desires.

It's a whole process actually, a beautiful process that the more I exercise it, the more it helps me be in the present. It begins by recognizing what I am feeling in my body and what the emotion is, followed by a series of questions, but starting with recognizing if the intensity of the event corresponds to the intensity of what I feel. If it corresponds then I am in the present, but if my emotion is much more intense than the event warrants, then I become aware that my emotion is from the past. When that happens, I know I need to attend to that part of me from the past, with curiosity, acceptance, kindness and compassion.

I am also learning that living in the present means letting go of anxiety about the future, that intense need to want to control everything in order to achieve something that I will never achieve, because all I have is now.

I have not reached this point alone, I have done it with the support and guidance of several people, my therapists who have provided me with a loving and compassionate witness, but also many virtual guides and teachers, books that I have read or listened to, multiple online talks, whether podcasts or videos, yoga classes, spiritual exercises, writing in my notebooks, conversations with dear friends. 

But I think what has helped me the most is a little seed that has been growing little by little in me, which is the conviction that I want to be happy and that it is worth it, I am worth being happy. Today I feel that it is no longer a seed, but a beautiful tree that is getting stronger and stronger, which will continue to grow as long as I continue to nourish it.  And of course the emotional hurricanes of the present and the past will continue to hit my tree, as long as I am alive and as I learn to be in the present.