The all-pervading unease

Stress, busyness, fields of tension, conflicts, being exhausted, physical pain, emotional imbalance, fits of temper, panic, fears, addictions and unbalanced relationships — these are just a few symptoms from a broad range of life’s challenges. Often you try to avoid the unease that is present in your life continuously as background noise or in acute form. Yet you find that the unease — in whatever form it presents itself — follows you like a shadow.

Your unease follows you like a shadow.

Strong emotions as a survival strategy

It is not that you are making no effort, but you may well ask yourself whether it is effective. The factors mentioned above often go hand in hand with strong emotions. They have the property of pulling you into your unconscious field and taking the lead away from you. You identify with these emotions and you act them out in all sorts of different ways. You have then ended up in an unconscious pattern of reaction, a memory of an old survival strategy that takes you far away from your true self.

Trapped in your own life drama

You identify with your pain and with the life stories that give you a sense of identity and justify why you are who you are. In your thoughts your repeat button is switched on. Time and again you relive your adventures and the words that were said. The symptoms disguise themselves as an invitation to heal from your addiction to drama. Your dramas begin and end, one hundred per cent certainly, in pain. There is an unconscious refusal to face your own pain and to grow beyond it, because you are afraid that your own drama will come to an end. For who are you, then, without pain? You have no idea yet.

You are afraid that your own drama will come to an end.

In the pitfall of time

Everybody does it. You are no exception. You too have fallen into the pitfall of time. You live from time-consciousness and not from the NOW. It starts the moment you get up. Your thoughts wander off to events and people from a distant or recent past, or leap forward to a more ideal future that you hold up before yourself. This train of thought is accompanied by strong emotions that manifest themselves through discomfort in the body. It is a compulsive process that you seem only barely able to escape. Of course, because you see nothing else around you. You live from memories (the past) and from imagined desires (the future). In doing so, though, you miss the great gala of the NOW. You are losing your precious time.

Do not miss the great gala of the NOW.

The resistance troops fall into line

The moment you decide that you would like to change something in your life and you take steps to feel better, your resistance troops turn up. You feel resistance and judgements, orchestrated by your reason. You are right, the other is wrong. You are here, but you want to be there. You feel the stress rising. You come into conflict with yourself or with the people around you. Your conflict is a collision between the demands and expectations your intellect imposes on you and that which IS. This is a movement to evade life. You are completely out of the NOW.

Stress = You are here, but you want to be there.

The NOW rescues you from the bottomless pit of the past

Imagine an hourglass as a metaphor for the passing of time. The sand that ends up in the lower half symbolises the time we have already spent. The sand that still has to fall through the narrow passage stands for the future. You have no idea at all how many grains of sand you have left, how much time you have been granted. Yet you spend a lot of time diving into the bottomless pit of the past, which is not really a past at all, but a thread of memories about previous NOW moments. Because you are afraid the past might repeat itself, you worry about the future, which does not exist either, but is a thread of longed-for NOW moments that are still to come. And so you miss the narrow passage of the NOW. The only moment that counts. The only moment you need.

The NOW is the key to yourself

In the NOW there is an absence of time-consciousness. Your problems, your worries and your painful suffering cannot possibly survive in the NOW. They disappear. You perceive without the spectacles of your intellect. You awaken into life. When you are in the NOW, everything becomes brighter and more alive. You perceive that life literally flows through everything. You experience a deep love for all that life. An intense feeling of peace is the experience you radiate. You are present. You are at one with your being.

In the NOW your pain disappears.

Listen to the sparkling silence between each breath.

It is so easy that we make it difficult. A few tips.

In itself, being in the NOW is not that difficult, but by surfing along with everything that distracts you from this precious moment it can seem fiendishly hard. A few tips may help you:

• Learn to go inside. Practise looking deep inside. What are you experiencing? What is happening inside you? How are you dealing with it? Perceive yourself. Every day.
• Listen to your inner body in your everyday activities, not only during your meditations. Every day.
• Become aware of your body. What signals is it giving? What is it telling you? Do you experience yourself as present or absent? If the latter is the case, adjust. Being present in your body gives confidence. Every day.
• Do everything you do with your full conscious BEING in the moment. Be there with your attention, your care and your love. Everything you touch takes on a deeper quality. Bring your attention to the action itself and let go of the expected result. Every day.
• Let the Light of your conscious BEING shine on themes, situations and relationships you find difficult. What happens then? Every day.
• Practise inner acceptance for everything you have come across in your life. You are not reading it wrongly. Everything! Accept everything that is happening now. Everything. Do not go into argument, defence or reasoning. Accept. This is a powerful and liberating movement. Every day.
• Feel gratitude for life, for all your experiences and adventures, for who you are. Every day.
• Give more attention to the silence than to the sounds. Let the sounds pass through you and experience the silence behind them. Make silence a priority. Listen to the sparkling silence between each breath. Every day.
• This one certainly must not be missing, because it is the thread running through this blog article. Avoid every worrying thought about the past or the future. Shift your focus if it happens anyway. Come to the NOW, this narrow passage that brings you into an immense empty space. Every day.

One more nice one to finish with

• Sit down quietly.
• Let your thoughts come in calmly.
• At a certain moment, of your own choosing, ask yourself the question: ‘I wonder what the next thought will be.’
• You wait…
• What happens?
• If all goes well, you will be surprised.

The NOW is always there

Your presence in the NOW is the key to freedom. A group of people who are present in the NOW together create a powerful field of creative intelligence. Together you bring about a collective transformation. The NOW is always present. Enjoy it to the full.

Hilde Van Bulck

• Consciousness architect, Speaker, Writer
• Systemic constellation facilitator and advisor
• Ambassador for Belgium and Director of the Scientific Department for Education and Constellations at Constellators International.