The Mystery of Now

Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today I'm going to talk about coming home to the mystery of the now. There's a profound, mysterious and sacred phenomena occurring right under our noses continuously, this moment. And for most people, the present moment is experienced as a snapshot of time, an interval between the past, experience, through memory and the future, experience through anticipation. It's a real sense that you are moving in a linear way through time.

But if you slow down and examine things a little more closely, you can begin to see that this moment of now has no duration. It's simply eternally is. It's always now. And yet, somehow the now contains all the memories from the past and everything keeps arising into it, giving us this experience of an ever emerging future. The phenomena within the now are continuously arising and passing away, moment by moment.

But then now itself is always present. It's eternal. One way you can more fully enter the timelessness of the now is by taking a step back from seeing yourself as an object, the person who's moving through time. And instead exploring what it's like to be the ever present awareness through which everything's unfolding. So you don't have to do anything special to be aware in the now because you're always already here.

So it's more about letting go. Letting go of thoughts about the past, anticipation of the future and just allowing yourself to be fully alive to the mystery and the fullness of now. So in today's meditation, I'm going to guide you further on this ability to abide in the timeless now. But also in your day-to-day, see if you can take a little pause every now and then just to come home to the mystery of now. Because as Alan Watts once said, "There's never anything but the present and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere." As always thank you for your practice and your presence here with us.

And inviting you now to settle in for today's meditation.