The Grasshopper asked an interesting question yesterday: “Are you living in the moment or attempting to manage it?”

It immediately occurred to me that attempting to manage a moment takes you out of the moment and into a mind based scenario where you are trying to “get one over” on the moment.

Perhaps a parallel discussion about self hypnosis will illustrate the point. Most people think, including most hypnotists, that you get yourself into a hypnotic frame of mind and then give yourself some suggestions. The problem with that belief is the minute that you began to give yourself the suggestions, you would come out of the hypnotic frame of mind because a hypnotic frame of mind contains no thinking, just space between your thoughts.

It’s best to start your self hypnosis session with the goal you have in mind and then do your progressive relaxation. In other words, you set your intention before you go into your relaxed frame of mind, not after you’re there.

Back to the moment. The minute that you think something has to be managed in the moment, you’re no longer in it. Perhaps an example would be helpful.

Let’s pretend that you are having a conversation with someone. If you begin to think about what you’re going to say in response to what they just said, you have come out of the connection and retreated inside your head. You have come out of the moment and the communication will suffer.

To be in the conversation, you can’t come out of it. That means that your attention has to be given fully to what’s happening in the moment for you to stay in it. The minute you retreat, you are no longer in that moment.

Retreating from the moment is what I’m calling “managing the moment.”

Moments don’t need to be managed; they serve you best when they are experienced.

Being in the moment means to be with what’s right there, not with what’s on the horizon.

Being in the moment takes trust that you’ll know how to respond to whatever the moment has to offer, rather than coming out of the moment to search for a crafted response.

Staying in the moment takes practice because we have been highly conditioned to manage moments – meaning we are trying to control reality which is always a losing strategy.

Quoting my friend Jerry Stocking: “If we can’t be present to what we don’t want, then we aren’t likely to be present at all. Fair weather presence isn’t really presence at all, it is a dash of happiness on an absent canvas.”

All the best,

John