Living in the “Now” Through Mindfulness and Meditation
Our world is defined by the word “go.” We spend our lives running from one event to the next while our minds move from one agenda item to the next in the endless pursuit of getting everything done. We try to break the cycle by wasting hours scrolling the newsfeed or social media on our phones. But what if there was a life to be lived outside of the constant cycle of “next”?
Mindfulness and meditation are practices that people have used throughout time to ground themselves in the moment of “now.” Through mindfulness, we embrace and experience the moment rather than trying to fix the past or plan the present. In meditation, we consider and process our lives to see where God is amid the chaos and what He might be speaking to us.
Mindfulness is living in the moment of now. We don’t run back to the past or forward to the present. We take time to be where we are, looking at the world around us and experiencing what God has for us in this present moment. Mother Teresa encourages us to “be happy in the moment; that’s enough. Each moment is all we need, not more.”
God’s Word calls us to be people who don’t just let truth go in one ear and out the other, which is done through meditation. In Psalm 1, the author writes that a person’s “delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on His law day and night” (1:2 NIV). Meditation on God’s Word is to think deeply about it. We consider what the Word means, how it relates to us, and how the truth of it connects to our lives. We take time to process, listen, and see what steps the Holy Spirit might be leading us to take. We choose to be in the moment of “now” with the scriptures so God can faithfully lead us to the “next.”
Mindfulness and meditation both require an intentional stepping away from the busyness of “go” to enter into the importance of “now.” We need to remind ourselves to step away from the “go” to experience the “now” and mindfulness and meditation are great practices to help us begin to take that step. In her book Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation, author Sharon Salzberg challenges us “Mindfulness isn’t difficult; we just need to remember to do it.”