Where are you right now? What are your surroundings like? What do you hear? What do you see? Can you smell anything?

Feel your body. Feel your toes, your legs, your torso, your chest, your arms, your neck, your head. Are you in your body? Where are you?

The exercise above is a simple way of getting back into the present moment. For a few seconds, you may have noticed that you were completely immersed in your experience. There were no thoughts of past or present.

You were simply Being.

Most of us spend the majority of the time in our heads. It is rare for us to be in the now. Unfortunately, this is the reason many of us suffer from anxiety and lack peace. We are constantly avoiding our experience and instead living through the illusion of the mind.

“What would happen if..?”

“Remember that time when..?”

“What is that person thinking of me?”

The mind never rests.

Which is why if we want to get any peace in our lives, we have to escape the chatter. Peace rests in the now. Unless we are being threatened, our suffering is probably due to our identification with the scenarios created in our heads. And even if we are being threatened, we wouldn’t lose time in mental torture. We’d just act.

Our mental chatter is a prison. It prevents us from acting with intuition. It prevents us from experiencing the life around us. How many times are you waiting to speak instead of truly listening to someone? How much time do you really spend inside your head?

I invite you to do an experiment with yourself. For a whole day, write down every instance that you catch yourself daydreaming. If you’re like most of us, you’ll find out that it’s an extremely high percentage! Also, write down the emotions that come along with those daydreams. Do they make sense to your actual experience in the moment? Or are they outcomes of your mental illusion?

Only awareness can save us.

The mind is a tool, but we have become tools of the mind. Remember where you are. Remember who you are. You are not the experiences of the mind. You are not the past. You are not the future. You are here, now, living, breathing, Being. Come back to your experience. This is all that there is. This is all that will ever be.