Your Life Is Now: Divine Guidance

Expert Opinion
It’s insightful of you to link your desire to control your future with your inability to stay present in your life. Trying to control the future is a by-product of anxiety about how it will go. Your worries about the future are yanking you out of the present moment of your life. The good news is that you can use your future-focused anxiety to catch yourself not being present. In this way, your anxiety becomes your wake-up call, reminding you to be here now.

Of course, you don’t have to be anxious to find it difficult to inhabit the present moment. Our world is in a hurry and we’re always “connected” to work, loved ones, or friends, via email, cell phone, or Blackberry. This leaves little chance to be alone, or to experience peace and quiet without your attention becoming fragmented, off and running in a million different directions. Former Apple and Microsoft executive, Linda Stone, coined the term continuous partial attention, where so many demands are being made on our attention that, at best, we are able to only partially attend to anything.

Research shows that we only experience real pleasure when our attention is focused on one thing at a time, whether it be listening, going for a walk, making a presentation, or cooking a meal. From your letter, it seems likely that a lot of demands are made on your time and simultaneously compete for your attention. Consciously connecting to your breathing throughout the day can help ground you in the present moment. Simply place your attention on your in-breath and your out-breath. Cultivate awareness of your breath and let it help anchor you to the moment.

Since issues of control seem to be making you a bit uncomfortable in other areas of your life, make sure that you don’t try to control your breath when you bring awareness to it.

Spiritually attuned people have always understood the tremendous impact that the quality of your present moment awareness has on all aspects of your life, including your future and the way you hold your past. Patanjali is often called the father of yoga for his seminal work, The Yoga Sutra. His first sutra, or thread, directs us to “still the thought waves of the mind.” Trying to control the future causes mental and physical agitation, i.e., a mind that is unstill, not grounded in the present moment.