ground, you can feel your legs keeping you there, and you can feel that you are what exists, not others’ image of you.
Practicing meditation can be difficult, but it is even more difficult at times to apply it to real-world scenarios. When you are especially hurt, your instinct might be to escape the pain rather than absorb it and transform it. Regardless of what you choose to do, however, you should always know that you have the strength to get through it as you continue to breathe, and this is not something anyone can ever take away from you.
Let this bring you peace over time—recognize that the choices and words of someone else are how they felt at the time, and that the feelings they carried don’t have to come with you—you can choose to let them go.
Let’s also imagine that you’re preparing for a big exam in school, the kind of exam that can make or break your final grade for the class. You’ve spent a great deal of time studying for this test, but you still feel nervous about taking it because you don’t know what to expect. The idea of how the experience may feel continues to play in your head in a loop, and you feel helpless to think otherwise.
Before your test, you can practice mindfulness to help you resolve the stress that thoughts of the future moment may be causing, and all it requires you to do is to return to the here and the now. In this very moment, you are not taking your exam and you are not studying for it. You are existing in the very present, where there is no test to complete but rather a test to let go of. The reason why you may be worrying about it is because the test starts to take shape in place of who you are. You see your worth as how well you will perform on the test, and because of this, you lose sight of your identity, your body, and your breath.
Sometimes when people are studying for a test, they forget to eat, they lose out on sleep, and they let it affect all the other aspects of their life. The test becomes your present moment, and it’s only by practicing mindfulness that you can see that you are not your exam. All you are is someone who exists right here. You have a greater purpose. If you close your eyes and focus once again on your breath, you’ll start to see that what’s to come is not what is; all you can control is what you have access to in this moment.
The next challenge is to take your exam and then to wait for your grade to see how you did. This can also create a sense of anxiety and can lead you back into projections of the future. You hope you did well but worry that you got questions wrong or should have chosen a different answer for a few of the questions. It’s in these moments that it serves you best to let go—you cannot know the outcome of the test until it has been graded, and thinking about the grade will not make it come about any faster. So what can you do while you wait? You can practice mindfulness.
Whenever you feel like your mind is leading you to worry about your grade, remember that no matter what may happen, you will still live past it. It can be easy to feel like moments like these can totally ruin our lives, but as long as we can return to our breath, as long as we are alive, and as long as we possess the ability to keep moving forward, nothing can prevent us from doing so. Putting the mindfulness practices we learned earlier can help us return to a place of calm and can allow us to step outside of our worrying for a moment in time.
Being in the here and the now is a matter of accepting what is real, and accepting what is real can feel counterintuitive to what our brains may be telling us sometimes. But with practice, we can work on implementing mindfulness training into different aspects of our lives, not just the ones where we feel awkward, powerless, or hurt. Mindfulness should be practiced when we are happy as well because it can allow us to fully experience the joy of the moment and take all of it in while it’s happening.
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“If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people.”
Walking a path of mindfulness is a lifelong process that can be started as soon as right now. Nothing is required to start being mindful; there are no degrees you have to obtain, and there is no place in life you have to get to. Where you are, as you are, is all you need to start experiencing the world in the present moment. For some people that moment of realization can come as a spark, a change that just takes over your mood and sense of being and propels you to start noticing things you’ve never noticed before.
My own journey into mindfulness started when I was in college. Looking back, I wish I had prepared earlier, I wish I’d had someone to propel me in a direction that would not only match my personality and interests but would also align with my skill set and what I was good at overall. I was sad because I had let myself down, but I felt even worse because I had let my parents down. They were so proud of me for going to college, and even though I knew that the direction of computer engineering wasn’t the right one for me, I just couldn’t bring myself to tell them I wanted to switch. If only I had realized in the very beginning that my life path could only be determined by myself, I would have made my decision more critically. None of my growth afterwards would have happened, though, had I not had my breakthrough and had I not found my reason for existence.
To some people the whole idea of finding yourself may sound like a strange concept, maybe even a cheesy one, but it’s so important to stop and reflect on the person we want to be by taking a moment to tap into who we are right now.
Living a mindful path is possible for you as long as you’re open to slowing things down, taking a breather, and being in the moment. As I passed through college and then going forward, I felt more awake than ever. Whenever I would walk to class. I would really see things as they happened, not just on the surface, instead observing them in a way where I felt the interconnectivity of myself and the world around me. In one particular area of my school campus, there was a pathway through the woods that you could walk through as a shortcut; on one side of the road was a tall stone that pointed upwards, seeming to symbolize rising up from the ground and reaching for the sky. On the other side of the road was a dead tree, fallen and rotten, an icon of death and decay, the end of all things. Every time I walked in between these two symbolic trees, I felt a renewed sense of energy and the realization that I could reach as far as I wanted. We are either growing, or we are dying. We can choose. Even though we have a limited time on earth, we can all make the most of the time we have been given.
All of this was simply the start of my mindful path. With each passing year, I learned more and more about myself, my connection to the world, and how I played a role in all of it. I started to realize that my body was the only one I had and that I needed to treat it right, or else I wouldn’t have a vessel to live in to continue forward. This led me onto the path of exercise; I felt so connected to exercising because I knew that by training I was doing the one thing that no one else could do for me. While education was mandatory, only I could make myself healthy and strong with exercise—and it was up to me to be successful at it. For a lot of people, fitness is seen as something we do because we aspire to look better or gain muscles. We rarely see it as a way of loving our body, taking care of it, and shaping it so we can be ready to be to tackle any challenges that come our way.
When we exercise, we aim to take care of ourselves. As I exercised more and more, experiencing my new strength led me to ask myself how much more I was capable of doing. My goal had been to work toward helping other people. Now that I was more equipped to tackle any physical challenges, I had to put that into play. It wasn’t until much later on, however, that I also discovered a second aspect to nurturing your body—maintaining good health. Growing up, I had never had a single desire to drink alcohol, smoke marijuana, or try cigarettes. The idea of taking anything
