This is the MOMENT!
This is the MOMENT! – Start your Day in the Present, with a Grateful Heart
by Baba Shuddhaanandaa Brahmachari
How You Start Your Day Is Very Important
The beauty and celebration of life that we are seeking is all in the present. How you start your day is very important. If you start the day the way you did yesterday, nothing has changed. Yesterday cannot be repeated today. Today has to be today, it has to be exclusive, unique.
Today is a seed. We must have awareness, effort, and readiness in order to see and receive the seed. We carry the seed within us. There is no yesterday. There is no tomorrow. Yesterday and tomorrow are only concepts of mind. The mind thinks there is a yesterday. The mind thinks there is a tomorrow. The mind is self-deceptive because it doesn’t want to be in the present.
To begin each day, everyone comes out of the dream state. All of the senses were in the deep slumber of unconsciousness. Each night, in your dreams, you dream the unfulfilled desires of your mind. After the dream state, you move to a deeper state – the dreamless state of deep sleep. There you do not dream. You have no perceptions of the external world. For you, the external world no longer exists. You don’t even know who is sleeping next to you. This is when the maximum restoration work is being done for your body.
The restoration is done by Nature. She works throughout the night, silently, inside of our bodies, repairing every damaged cell, renewing them with new cells, breathing life, energy, vitality into us without our knowledge, like a sweet mother whose love for her child is absolute. She does that when we are asleep. Rejuvenation is going on throughout the whole body. After you finish with deep sleep, you move into the dream state again. Then you gradually come back to the world.
Typically you wake in the morning with whatever was on your mind when you went to sleep. If you had deep stress, intense negative emotion, a powerful fear, a tearing anxiety when you fell asleep, you get up with that same feeling and thought. Wherever you left off, you start again the next day, carrying yesterday with you into today’s morning. You cannot start today as today. The burden of yesterday is on your shoulders. The past is a weight.
I want you to start your day in the present. For that, I need you to be present. Without you, your day cannot begin in the present moment.
Practicing Gratitude Can Be a Bridge to the Present
At some point you have to take responsibility for your own life. You have to wake up to accept the multitude of gifts you have been given. They are all around you, working at every instant of your life, waiting for you to recognize and gratefully acknowledge their presence.
