Gina Lake is a spiritual teacher who is devoted to helping others awaken and live in the moment through her books, online courses, and intensives. She is the author of eight books, including Loving in the Moment, Embracing the Now, Radical Happiness, Living in the Now, Return to Essence, What About Now? Anatomy of Desire, and Getting Free. The focus of her writing and teaching is on helping people be in the present moment and live the happy and fulfilled life that is possible and on shedding light on the programming that interferes with awakening to one's true nature. She is also a gifted intuitive with a master's degree in counseling psychology and over twenty years experience supporting people in their spiritual growth. Her website offers information about her books, free e-books, book excerpts, a monthly newsletter, a blog, and audio and video recordings: http://www.radicalhappiness.com
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About Being in the Now
Your hands are alive, and this aliveness can be felt. Take a moment and just feel the aliveness. It’s experienced subtly, like a vibration or tingling or warmth. Notice how this aliveness is not only in your hands but throughout your body. Can you feel it in your face?…your scalp?…your feet?…your arms?…your thighs?…your chest? Every part of your body is alive, and this aliveness can be felt subtly by you when you pay attention to it. Paying attention to it will automatically bring you into the now. Experiencing life brings you into life and brings you to life, you could say.
This experience that you are having right now is it. This moment is life—it’s what is real. And it’s just what it is. You can pile all the thoughts, feelings, and imaginations into it that you want, but it still is just this. And no matter how much money you have in the bank or don’t have, how youthful or old you are, how talented or untalented you are, how successful or unsuccessful you are, you still have just this. No billionaire has any more or less of this. People try to dress it up in ideas, but it still comes down to just this simple moment. You can love it or hate it, but you still just have this.
The mind is always trying to improve on this moment, but instead, it ruins it with its dissatisfaction. It tells you that this moment would be better if…. (Fill in the blank: you were richer, prettier, thinner, more successful, in a relationship, not in a relationship, etc.) That’s a lie. None of those things changes your experience of this moment unless you believe this lie. If you believe this lie, you won’t enjoy this moment. You won’t really let yourself fully experience it. If you don’t believe this lie, you discover that you have everything you need to be happy. You need nothing more than this experience. It is enough. It is plenty. It’s perfect just as it is. It was designed for you—given to you for your experience. All you have to do, and all you have ever had to do is accept this gift. Take it and let it in. Let yourself experience this moment just as it is. It doesn’t get any better than this.
What makes the choice of being in the moment difficult is that you must surrender your need to know. The ego gives you a false sense of knowing, which is comforting, even though it doesn’t really know where life is going or what will happen next. So, all you really have to surrender is the pretense of knowing, not actual knowing. The truth is that you don’t know what the next moment holds. That’s both the challenge of being in the now and, actually, the true joy of it. To be in the moment, you have to be willing to just be and to respond naturally to what arises out of the flow, without pretending to know what to do next or what will happen. The thing is, you have never known what was going to happen or what to do next. Admitting this allows you to move out of your egoic mind and into the moment, where true happiness, peace, and alignment with essence and its intentions are possible.
Every moment is an opportunity to love. Of course, the ego doesn’t see it that way. It sees every moment as an opportunity to try to get what it wants. It focuses on its desires and needs and sees the moment through this lens. Is this moment giving me what I want? The answer is usually no. Even when the moment is giving the ego what it wants, it worries that it will stop or it imagines how it could be even better. To the ego, the moment isn’t an opportunity to love but an opportunity (hopefully) to get. The ego has it backwards, which is why it is never happy. It doesn’t do what will make it truly happy, only what it imagines will make it happy. It believes that happiness lies in getting, not giving, and that is the great misunderstanding.
About happiness
So much of what makes for true happiness is free—available to rich and poor alike. What gives essence joy, and therefore you, is experiencing life, expressing yourself, and serving others. For instance, it costs you nothing to experience the beauty of nature, to sing, or to speak kindly to others or in other ways serve them. Many of the things you can do for others don’t cost anything but perhaps time and energy. There’s great joy in experiencing, expressing, and serving. Furthermore, these are things you can do again and again. You can’t do them too much and you won’t run out of opportunities to do them.
You know what it feels like to have both feet in an experience. These are the times when you feel most happy, most free, and when life feels the juiciest. For most people, these moments are brief, although memorable. Life can be and is meant to be like this all the time. It’s a matter of recognizing that every moment is an opportunity to say yes to life. When you do, you enjoy it, regardless of what’s going on. You enjoy the moment for its uniqueness and unpredictability, and for how it evolves you—because ultimately life changes you when you let yourself experience it, and it’s meant to change you. Life takes you along with it. It’s taking you on a ride. You can go kicking and screaming (which is what the ego does), or you can say yes to it and enjoy the ride. You can relax because Life knows what it is doing. You are in good hands.
Notice how much enjoyment is already possible in the simple things in your life. The more you notice how much you enjoy little things, the more you will realize that it doesn’t get any better, really. You always only have this moment, and every moment has an equal potential for enjoyment, no matter what is happening. Enjoying life is really a matter of choosing to not want something other than what you’ve got. When you stop desiring something more or better, you can begin to enjoy what you have right now.
To learn more about Gina Lake, her teachings, and her books, visit her website at www.radicalhappiness.com. There, you can read free book excerpts, listen to recorded talks and watch videos, download free e-books, and sign up for a free monthly newsletter.