How to Live in the Moment if the Moment Sucks

Over and over we’re hearing an almost universal message from the spiritual leaders of our time, and that message is to live in the moment.

Eckhart Tolle calls it the eternal now, and says, “Realize deeply that the present moment is all you will ever have. (Cause it’s always the present moment, get it?)

Abraham, through channel Esther Hicks says, “Life is a series of delicious moments.”

Wayne Dyer adds, “You have everything you need for complete and total happiness right now.”

And a lot of us scratch our heads and say, “Huh?” Because let’s face it, sometimes, our “right now” stinks on ice. So how do we go from a present moment that is rather miserable, to being happy in the moment? What if our “now” includes a horrible disease, or the loss of a loved one, or something awful like that? How does anyone find any sort of contentment in moments like those?

And why would anyone want to?

Well that’s the first thing to tackle, isn’t it? Why would you want to find contentment, peace, even happiness, in the horrible moments of your life? I’m going to tell you why, and the short reason is this. Every single experience in life comes to us for vital reasons. The bad times come to teach us. They come to push us forward to where we’re supposed to be. They come to bring clarity about what we really want. And they come because they have to come. The reality we live in this moment is the only way things can possibly be in this given space, in this given moment, in this particular reality. And everything that happens fits together like the pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle. If one piece was shaped differently, the entire puzzle would fall apart.

So the bad moments, the challenges, the losses come because they can’t not come. But these moments can last for as long or as short a period of time (time being an illusion) as we choose to allow. The more miserable we are in the bad moments, the longer we’re stuck