Life is meant to be lived in moments.

We are made to experience the fullness of joy, love, and of pain.

In those moments, we find purpose and reason.

practicing presence is important.

Practicing presence is making deliberate efforts to train all of one’s focus on one activity at a time to experience the fullness of it.

Practicing presence is refusing  to permit oneself to be pulled away by distractions of thoughts, competing interests, or future responsibilities.

“We have to pay attention to this very moment, the totality of what is happening right now. And the reason we don’t want to pay attention is because it’s not always pleasant” (Beck).

However, experiencing the fullness of hurt helps us to savor the sweetness of love.

Tasting the bitter fruit of grief and loss helps us to celebrate life with a robustness of spirit.

Knowing that falling is possible helps us to appreciate the strength to stand.

Lack teaches us the lesson of plenty.

Lessons can only be learned if we are willing to sit still and attentively listen.

“it is only when the student is ready, that the master appeareth.”

Few can embrace such.

Our experience with pain has conditioned  our thinking. Rather than  awakening within us  respect, a resolution, a sacred understanding of our proneness to frailty, it catalyzes deep-seated; fearful thoughts.

Our fearful thoughts tell us to avoid, to run, and to turn.

The fear lodges itself within the brain disallowing free thought, reason, and rationality.

“Clearly, all fear has an element of resistance and a leaning away from the moment. Its dynamic is not unlike that of strong desire except that fear leans backward into the last safe moment while desire leans forward toward the next possibility of satisfaction. Each lacks presence”. –Stephen Levine

Essentially the pent up fear causes a bottleneck.

“The bottleneck of fear isn’t caused by the conditioning, but by the decision about myself I have reached based on that conditioning” (Beck 36).

It is difficult to break free from these patterns of thinking.

It is our thoughts about ourselves, our situations, our experiences, and our connections that must be addressed.

The truth is, some things in life are hard.

Some things take a lot of effort.

Simply thinking about change, or hoping for change, or even pledging change, is ineffective.

It does not work. You have to put in the work.

The work never begins during times of ease but always in the face of harsh realities. This is when we are tried and tested.

Let’s face it, in the presence of pain is hard to think of anything else.

It is hard to think of the lesson beneath.

If we want to live our best lives we cannot afford not to think beyond the pain.

” We do have to be  aware of our thoughts and actions; we do have to be aware of our false reactions to life. Only by doing so can we see that from the beginning the bottleneck of fear is an illusion” (Beck 37).

The illusion works to suppress one’s reality,

Fear paralyzes and keeps us from learning from our experiences.

“A thought in and of itself is just pure sensory input, an energy fragment. At first we feel our thoughts are real, and out of that we create the self-centered emotions, and out of that we create a barrier to seeing life as it is because if we are caught in self-centered emotions we can’t see people or situations clearly. But we fear to see thoughts as they are” (Beck 49).

When we grow, when we get understanding, we can learn to separate our thought life from reality.

We can bring our thoughts under subjection.

We can control our thoughts and not let our thoughts control us.

We can experience life as it was meant to be experienced.

This means that one  learns to look at life as it is.

There are no bad experiences only our thoughts concerning those experiences.

All experiences exist to teach us.

Knowing this, we can be resolved. We can be expectant.

After the test passes comes the reward.

In every situation, whatsoever we find ourselves we will be content.

“Trust in things being as they are as the secret of life”(Beck 48).

There is nothing one can purely rely on in the earthly realm.

At some point or another all things have the potential to fail us.

This is merely the byproduct of materialism.

It is the blight of being temporal and temporary.

“Life is always going to be the way it is”(Beck 48).

It is we that must learn to find peace and contentment with that.

Beck, Charlotte. Everyday Zen: Love and Work. Harper Collins. print.