Speech Objectives:
Your aims for this speech project are to complement your message with your body during delivery. Specifically, be aware of your:
- posture,
- body movement,
- facial expressions, and
- eye contact.
The Power of Now
What do you feed yourself each morning? Wait..I can
actually guess! Do you read the newspaper each morning? What does it contain?
Content about terrorism, crime, corruption, pain, suffering? So, that means, along with breakfast,
you feed yourself unhappy thoughts of all these negative events. It probably generates
some unhappiness in the thoughts and minds of all those like me and you who are
reading the newspaper.
Let me tell you I also used to absorb a lot of unhappy thoughts from
the media. I was also frequently unhappy because I used to constantly
pontificate over some past negative event in my life, or worry about the
future. Untill I came across one book that began to transform my life. It is a
book called “The Power of Now” by a spiritual teacher called Eckhart Tolle.
One of the Fundamental Truths of Life that I learnt from Eckhart Tolle was
that the primary cause of unhappiness is not ANY external situation, but our
thoughts about it. And we can eliminate a lot of unhappiness from our life by
accessing the Power of Now.
It is very very simple but powerful concept that anyone can
apply their daily life. Power of Now is nothing but “present moment awareness”.
It is about always living in the here and now, mentally and physically. It is
about narrowing down your life to this moment. Because most of our problems
survive ONLY in in our THOUGHTS of the past or future. Think about any any
problem in your life. Has your problem already occurred, or do you fear it might
occur in future. Ask yourself if it is still a problem, right here and now, in
this room, at this very moment? Most problems cannot survive long in the reality
of the “Now”.
A lot of our problems are also due to dysfunctional
thinking. Through the Power of Now you can remove a lot of unhappiness and
negative emotions from your life:
1) Eliminate psychological time. Remove
past and future, from your thoughts. Yes. Use thoughts of past events or
mistakes only for practical learning. Use thoughts of future only for practical
planning. Simply withdraw attention from past and future when they are not
needed.
2) Disidentify with the mind
and thoughts. You are not your mind and thoughts. Your
mind is just a tool for thinking. Use it for specific, purposeful thinking.
Don’t let that voice in your head rule YOU.
You must have a “stop” button to stop compulsive thinking when not
needed.
3) Disidentify with the “ego”
or the “false sense of self”. As
we grow up most of us have a mental image of who we are, based on some personal
and cultural concepts that we imbibe. This is called conditioning of the
mind. My mind is conditioned to believe
that I am an Indian, I am an IT professional, I am a Wadian, bla bla and other
aspects of my physical identity. But this is a false sense of self. It is
called the ego. Don’t get attached to this sense of self. Because you will experience
unhappiness when your “sense of self” is threatened, that is when something
related to “my” or “mine” is threatened. Reduce egoic thinking. Because we are not just
our thoughts or our physical identity. We are much more than that.
4) Observe and accept your
pain-bodies. Each one of us carries some pain-bodies,
which are nothing but accumulation of old emotional pain and suffering from a
negative event. These pain bodies may be individual pain-bodies or collective
pain-bodies of a community of people. Observe when these pain-bodies are
activated in your thoughts, and accept their existence in the now. By doing
this, slowly thoughts-related to pain-body will dissolve.
5) Surrender to the present
moment. Break the old-pattern of present-moment resistance.
Accept what is. Accept what the present moment contains, as if you had chosen
it. Good, or bad, embrace this moment. Then act or take the steps as you need
to.
6) Stay connected with the
source energy inside you. Do
this by focusing attention on your breath, your inner body, and stillness and
space around you. Practice meditation and silence daily. Take out some time to
just ‘be”.
And then you will see how your life is miraculously
transported into a place of inner peace and joy.
