The Power of the Present
The power of the present is the power of today, of the present moment. The reason I think this is important because it's so easy to live in the past. It's so easy to live in these things that have happened to me which makes me who I am, and why I live in the way that I do. Very often, our terrible childhood had a negative implication of how we have a terrible life now. But do we realize that living in the future is very easy? Because well, the real power is right now. How does it work?
All we have is this present moment
There’s a concept that if you look across all the traditions, whether it’s Hinduism or Buddhism, or if you’re looking at Huna, the Hawaian spirituality that I teach, or even if you’re looking at Quantum Physics, all there is actually is now. Every time we reconnect with a memory from the past, we actually change it. We change in subtle ways. We add things, we take things out, but our memory is never the same as the actual event, as it actually happens. All we have is this present moment we are experiencing right here, right now. It’s like when you’re listening to my voice or watching the video, that’s the present moment, that’s the moment you’re in.
Back when I first studied NLP, they would say that we were receiving something like two million bits per second of information coming in through our senses all the time, every second, two million bits. They have upped that estimation now to something like 40 million bits per second. That's a lot of data coming in through our senses, but this 40 million bits per second, we don't have the capacity to process it at a conscious level. Our capacity is very small. It's depending who you read. If it's 125 bits, it's 136 bits per second. It doesn't really matter about the numbers.
The point is, on the one hand, there's a lot of data coming in and we’re not good at processing it at a conscious level. We have to delete a lot of it. We have to find ways to get rid of it, we generalise. We have one experience, and that one experience means that it's true for all time. When I say something to a friend and my friend turns around and says, "Oh, Jane, you're so, you're so difficult to be around." Suddenly in my head, I've interpreted and generalised that I'm difficult to be around, that is now my experience. I start filtering everything by thinking I'm difficult to be around. We generalise, we delete stuff. We just completely delete it, like it didn't actually happen.
I don't know about you, but I've had plenty of experiences where friends have talked, or we've been talking about, let’s say, "Oh yeah, Jane, you said this and you did that." I'm thinking, really? I don't remember that. I don't remember it at all. Even people tell me about events where I was and I don't even remember being at the event. Now, this might just be a 60 plus thing but actually it's been going on awhile. We delete stuff. And we also seem to distort stuff. We change the memory to suit what we expect. If I'm expecting that it's going to be a beautiful day, I'm gonna translate and everything's gonna be seen through the filter, it's a beautiful day.
We change our memories
We do all these things to cope with the fact that there's all this information coming in and we're not really set up to handle it. So, we change our memories. The memory is never the same in the present moment as whatever it was that we experienced in the past. Now, with all this information coming in, with all this data coming in, it's very easy to put interesting filters which determine how we do all this deletion, this generalisation and this distortion, how we get rid of all this stuff that we can't go with.
These filters are our past experiences. These filters are past memories. These filters are the way that we think about time. These filters are the things that we say to ourselves in our head even our physical behaviour can be a filter. The present moment experience, the way we experience things in the present can actually be changed. It is the only thing we've got. We can actually change the way we experience things by changing the way we think about life by changing the way we think about our memories.
There had been an experiment about twins, where they took twins who have grown up in the same household coming from an abusive environment or where there’s a lot of poverty. One sibling will be incredibly successful while the other sibling will be a drug addict. If for example, you ask each of them, starting with the successful sibling, "How come you become successful?". He could give us this answer, "Well, with the terrible childhood that I had, I had to be successful in order to get over it."
If you turn to the drug addict sibling asking how he became a drug addict, he would tell us almost the same answer with a different perception; "Well, with the terrible childhood I had it's not surprising that I'm a drug addict because I just had such a terrible childhood." So, how we interpret those memories, how we interpret that past definitely influences our present moment experience.
Victim present moment or vibrant present moment?
The question is which present moment experience do you really want? Do you want to have the victim present moment experience or do you want to have a present moment experience that's vibrant and that is successful? Whatever that means for you, that is enough, because whatever else we can or can't do, we have the power to decide how we want to react to the past. We can change that at any moment, moment by moment. Of course, that means that you've got to be in tune with what you're experiencing in the present. It's so easy when we get into our stuff, when we get into our baggage. It's so easy to lose sight of that control that we have and to get sucked in by our baggage. It stops us from having our experiences in the way that we want to have them.
I do a lot of work with people around this whole question of this baggage thing, asking me how they can have a different experience. A lot of it is about healing it up, healing up our old beliefs, healing up our old experiences, and forgiving the people who really hurt us. Forgiveness is such a powerful piece in this whole equation. Because as you do that, you start to change those filters that I talked about. You start to change the rules by which you evaluate the world. 'Cause all the time, we're evaluating the world by rules in our head.
I remember, there was a girl that I was at school with and she had red hair. She was called Ann, and I didn't like her very much. For years, anybody with red hair called Ann, I would judge them because I would compare them against this girl at school that I didn't like very much. It wasn't until I actually woke up and realised what I was doing. I thought, "Oh my!" Now I have friends and clients who are red headed and called Ann and they're lovely.
Get conscious of your own rule
I had to make that switch because I've just been running this filter in my head. I'd been running this rule in my head and always evaluating women with red hair called Ann in a negative way. So, we set up these rules. One step is to become conscious of the rules that you run your life by, be conscious of the rules that you're judging other people by. And the more conscious you become, the more you become aware of how those rules are actually affecting your behaviour and affecting your experience. Thus, you should get conscious about how those rules and how you're judging people get on your nerves. Get conscious of what you can change in the present moment that changes your experience.
Apparently, your physical posture can change your experience as well. I've talked about this before on a number of videos but when we physically were closed in or like this, or we're doing a lot of sitting down it affects our energy levels. It affects the way we feel. When we sit up, when we open up, when we move a bit more, when we get outside, it literally changes what's going on in here. Changing your physiology, whether you're being active, changing whether you're sitting around, changing the rules that you've got in here, all these things can change the experience in the present moment.
The real catalyst is awareness
What is it that gives me energy? What are the things that I can do if I'm feeling a bit down and a bit depressed? What are the things that I can do that will give me energy? What are the filters? What are the rules I can change?
Let us hear all these little voices in our heads, 'cause we all do have little voices in our heads. For some of us, there's that little voice, the inner critic, who slaps our idea of setting out to do something or do something new of that great idea in your mind. This little voice would go like, "Yeah, you're never gonna be any good at that. Who do you think you are to be doing that?" We listen to that little voice in your head.
The more you become conscious, the more you become aware of the kind of things that the little voices in your head will say to you or the little voice in your head says to you then you can start to work with that awareness. It changes the voice in your head and changes the whole experience. Then, you could proudly rebut that voice in your head, "You know what? I really appreciate what you're telling me and I'm gonna give it a go anyway because it might just possibly be fun or it might just possibly be a brilliant experience."
Opening yourself up to possibility is another way of changing that experience. Changing what happens in the present moment, and having this attitude of possibility can do wonders in your life. Imagine how amazing it can be when I change the way I think, when I change what I say to myself and when I go, "Yes, that was my past. That was what happened in my past. That was then, and this is now and I wanna live in the now and be empowered and not be held back, not be changed, not be pulled down by the experiences that I once used to have."
If you want to know more, then do get in touch. You can contact me with the secretartofhuna.com/diary to book an appointment. Enjoy the present moment, enjoy the day, whatever it's shaping up to be. Have that awareness, just be there.
