A “moment” is of course an idea of the mind where it looks at reality in a “time based” manner, but it’s useful to use this idea to understand your relationship with your life. Your moment to moment relationship with life is what accumulates into your life experience. If you sense that you are in a state of conflict, with the present moment, during most of your waking state, it’s a given that your experience of life presently is one of lack, frustration, struggle and strain. When you start shifting your relationship with each moment, into one of peace/joy/love, you will see your reality shifting towards one of well-being, abundance and ease automatically. The truth is evident, but the mind finds it difficult to put into practice.
How to change your relationship with this moment?
At this moment, just take the time to sense your inner space. What exactly is going on within you? What are the thoughts your mind is occupied with, what are the feelings passing through your body? Your thoughts are indicative of your relationship with life (which is always this moment) and your feelings are just an “indication” of how this relationship shows up in experience. When your relationship with life is one of alignment you feel good in your body, and when you are in conflict with life it feels bad in your body. The feelings in your body work as a “truth meter” to tell you what your relationship with the present moment is.
When you bring Awareness into your inner space, you now have the choice to make a shift in your relationship with this moment. Only through awareness/self-observation can you detect the negative thought patterns that operate in your mind, some of them so deeply embedded that you take them to be the truth. Remember that negativity/negative thinking is always in conflict with the movement of life (life is pure positive energy), and hence will always create suffering in you. Awareness of negativity is enough to bring forth a transformation, because awareness by itself is a transformative agent.
Whenever you sense that you are in a state of conflict (indicated by negative feelings), bring awareness to the thoughts in your mind. Just bringing in this awareness is enough to cause a “dis-identification” with the negative thought movement, and it creates an invitation for the intelligence of life to take over. Staying in this state of awareness will bring in a space of silence/peace, and it prevents your attention from being dragged into believing the negative thought cycle of your mind. This shifts your relationship with the present moment from one of conflict to one of peace/alignment. Awareness always brings you in harmony with the present moment.
Moving from peace to joy, getting more aligned with life
Peace is what you should be aiming for when your present state is one of agitation. Bringing in a deep awareness to your mind’s thinking pattern allows you to become more spacious and peaceful, since you don’t get dragged into the mind noise totally.
Once the mind noise starts fading away under the influence of this “relaxed” awareness, you are now in place to move towards “joy” by consciously moving your focus towards thoughts that bring you a feeling of joy, or using your senses to create good feelings in you.
Joy is a much higher vibration than peace/calm but you can only move towards joy when you are able to first transcend the vibration of conflict and move towards peace (it’s like shifting gears in a car). Joy/exhilaration is the highest vibration you can rest in, and it’s possible to have this vibration during the majority of your waking state, once you are able release the momentum of negativity that might be present with you through your past attention to negative thinking.