Practical Steps to Anchor in Presence

Welcome to the Happiness Podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff . Are you waiting for the next big thing ? Perhaps at vacation to Europe ? Perhaps at promotion at work, perhaps graduating from college and finally beginning your life, perhaps fighting cancer and waiting for the results where it's all clear, or perhaps finally finishing your divorce so you can start living or the one that's so many of us think about when we retire and we can finally start living the good life . As humans, we live on a horizontal timeline . We're always waiting for the next thing, the next weekend , the next vacation , the next milestone , secretly hoping that when we finally get there, we'll feel complete. But if you've lived long enough, you've probably realized that living horizontally is exhausting because horizon constantly recedes . The moment we achieve our goal, the mind infuriatingly invents a new one. What if we look ed at it differently ? Eternity is not a long time . Eternity is right now . When we become completely absorbed in a single breath , a taste of a meal or the feel of the sun on our face . Time completely stops . We step off the horizonal treadmill and drop vertically into peace . I want to explore with you today a mystical perspective viewing life from an eternal point of view. There's innumerable why souls have lived through history sharing their wisdom about what life is about. One of my absolute favorites is Platinus. He was a Greek slash Roman philosopher who taught that the ultimate goal of the human soul is to return to the one , the absolute , unified, perfect source of all existence . But to do this, we have to shift our vision. Plotinus understood that we don't reach the one by traveling through space or waiting for the afterlife . We reach it by shifting our perspective . When we look at life from an eternal point of view , we stop seeing ourselves as a separate, stressed individual, fighting against time , we realize we're already deeply connected to the integrate fabric of the universe. When we adopt this eternal view, the frantic urgency of our ego completely dissolves. We realize there's nowhere else we need to be except right here right now . A couple years ago I went to the Getty Center here in Los Angeles and they had a traveling expedition about William Blake. I don't know if you've ever seen his artwork before, but it's stunning . Besides being an artist, he was also a poet, and many consider William Blake's masterpiece the Auguries of Innocence . Here's what he wrote to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower , hold infinity in the palm of your hand in eternity in an hour . I love this poem . Blake wasn't just writing pretty words. He was describing the exact psychological state of mindfulness . If you look closely enough at a single tiny wildflower and truly pay attention to an ordinary hour on your Tuesday , you will find that it contains as much beauty, complexity , and all as the entire cosmos . And this vertical drop isn't something that we can hope for. It's something that we can actually do . I'm sure you're familiar with Eckhart Tolly and the Power of Now . For the first twenty nine years of his life , Eckhard lived in a state of nearly continuous, crippling anxiet , constantly agonizing over his past and dreading his future . He was entirely trapped on the horizontal timeline, but then there was a shift . One night the suffering became so intense that his ego completely collapsed. He woke up the next morning and went for a walk in the city . For the first time he wasn't thinking about yesterday or to morrow he just looked at the light bouncing off a bird and the shape of the buildings . By dropping vertically into the absolute now , he found a state of joy so profound . He spent the next two years just sitting on park benches , voliscerally watching the world go by . He touched infinity simply by paying attention. Have you ever heard of the concept called mindful artisans who get into the flow state ? Think of a master watchmaker leaning over a tiny, complex mechanism or a dedicated Yobi moving through a demanding sequence . When we as humans engage in deep, focus flow , the part of our brain that tracks time actually shuts down , we aren't trying to push to the end of the task . We're entirely consumed by the present action . In that state, three hours can feel like three minutes . We can escape time . One of the most famous museum s in Europe is called the Reich Museum. It's in Amsterdam . It's a beautiful museum , and if you ever get a chance, I highly recommend you go there. In the museum they have a famous painting by Rembrandt called The Jewish Bride . When I was standing in front of it, I remembered the story of Van Gogh . In october eighteen eighty five, shortly after the museum first opened the doors , Vincent Van Gogh visited and found himself completely transfixed, essentially frozen in place by Rembrandt's masterpiece. Rembrandt was so profoundly moved and entranced by Rembrandt's thick emotional breastwork and use of color that he famously told his friend , Atan Kershama Kers I should be happy to give ten years of my life if I could go on sitting here in front of this picture for a fortnight with only a crust of dry bread for food. He later wrote to his brother Theo that Rembrandt was a musician who went so deeply into the mysterious that he said things for which there were no words in any language . If you ever find yourself wandering through the halls of the Reichs' Museum , you can stand in the exact same spot where Vincent had his breath taken away . So how do we learn to step off the treadmill of our egoic life? The first thing we can do is practice the one object meditation . For just three minutes today , pick a single ordinary object , perhaps a piece of fruit , a smooth stone or leaf , give it a hundred percent of your attention . Notice the texture , the color , the weight , let it become the entire universe for those three minutes . You will physically feel your heart, Rate Begin to slow down . The second thing we can do is be careful of the next habit . Pay attention to your internal dialogue today . How many times did you think I just need to get through this and then when you catch yourself wishing away the present moment , pause , take a deep breath and remind yourself this exact moment is my life . I choose to be here for it . And then the third thing we can do is take a deep vertical breath . The simplest way to drop vertically into the present is through our body . The mind can travel to the past and future , but the physical body can only exist in the now . When we feel rushed , take one slow , deliberate breath and focus entirely on the sensation of the air filling our lungs . In conclusion, the universe is not withholding peace until we reach some imaginary finish line in the future , the peace we're looking for is already here hiding in the depths of this exact second when we release the grip of the future and choose to anchor our soul in the present moment , we'll embrace the infinite peace of the right now Thank you for joining me on the Happiness Podcast. If you'd like to learn more about the podcast, please go to W WW dot happinesspodcast dot org that's happiness podcast dot org until next time , accept what is , love what is