Do you know how to quiet that voice in your head and stop its constant chatter. Are you aware that voice is not you, but your thoughts,some call it ego, masquerading as you.
As humans, we seem to travel a wacky backwards path to learning life's lessons.
Take, for instance, learning how to live in the present moment - the only moment there truly is. Most of us have to go backwards and forwards to learn how to get right back to where we are - the here and now. We try to live in the past, or we try to quickly get to the future.
The million-dollar question is why do we do that? Why, for so many, does it take a lifetime to learn that the only place we live, and the only time we can create or change things in our life, is now - the present. While it would take many books to explain this human phenomenon, the very short answer is we do it because we think we are not happy right now. We think, or actually our ego - that incessant voice in our head-thinks rhat the past was better, or that the future will be better.
Our ego is always trying to avoid living now. The ego can live only when we are thinking about the past or the future. When we live in the present, when we quiet that voice in our head, the ego has died. The reason it dies is because that voice is not who we really are. It is masquerading as us, but it is not us.
In truth, we are not that voice in our head. In truth we are spirit. When we are able to quiet the voice in our head and eventually control it, we move into the present and see everything that is around us under a new light. We connect to our true self- spirit. We are, as some religions talk of, born again. Born to our true identity - spirit not ego.
There are many ways,to travel inward and experience the present moment.
One way is by following Zen teachings.
The essence of Zen teachings is to open our consciousness, taking our awareness deeply into "NOW". Current and past sages, saints, gurus, and teachers have tried to get us to understand one basic truth: to eliminate pain and suffering from our lives we have to shift our consciousness from the past and the future to the now.
One Zen master named Rinza, in order to move his student's minds and thoughts out of past and future, would raise his finger and slowly ask, "What at this precise present moment is lacking?" A powerful question designed to push his students into contemplating the reality of now on a spiritual rather than mind level. He wanted them to be aware that in each precise moment of now, nothing is truly lacking.
Rinza was trying to teach his students that what we identify as lack, pain, desire, anxiety, and worry reside only in our egos. He was leading his students to the awareness that "past" and "future" have no physical reality; there is only the present moment, the "now".
Mastering Zen is a lifetime devotion. However, to help you get a good understanding in a short period of time about the limiting beliefs created by our egos and how to reach your full potential, I suggest the seminal book on living in the now by Eckhart Tolle, titled The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment.
The sooner you stop trying to live in the past or race off to the future, the sooner you will enter the "Now." And the sooner you enter the now and live in the present moment the sooner you will be able to control that voice in your head and stop its incessant chatter.
Controlling that voice, your ego, will then, and only then, allow you to create and manifest the life you were born to live.
Steve is founder of Total Wellness Living, an online Network for health, nutrition and self improvement.
Total Wellness Living Network http://TotalWellnessLiving.com