It is quite simple. Pause what you are doing. Find your breath. Find it as it is at that moment. It needs not to be changed, adjusted, improved. It is your breath. Perhaps you choose to follow it all the way up and down your throat, chest, belly… and up again. That’s it! Congratulations, you have just been mindful!
Living in the present does not have to be triggered by a major life crisis. Nor by a series of small disasters. It can, but it can also come knocking at your door while you’re busy having fun, being successful, even being quite happy! For me, it was the consequences of a life changing decision to leave my husband, my prosperous job, all the known places, people and customs and follow the man I fell in love with, barely knowing him. “Crazy”, they said. Maybe, but it has been ten years, and still one of the best decisions ever taken.
But with the good comes the bad, and the ugly. Loneliness, depression, loss of professional status (The Boss – this is who I am, right?), total overwhelm of being a mother of three, trying to run the house and consistently failing… several years of darkness.
And then, a couple of books handed over to me by a well-meaning person, a couple of pauses to just follow my breath whatever it was like back then, (hardly detectable). Finding myself right there where I was, unsatisfied with myself, disappointed with my new life, clueless, powerless.
RAIN. Recognition, acceptance, investigation, non-identification.
Start here – pause, find your breath, recognize where you are right now. Take your time. Do not rush into acceptance just yet. Do not fix anything just yet. Just recognize where you are right now.