.  Staying in the moment frees us from longing. Staying in the moment allows us to experience life's great losses without fear. 

For the next few days,‭ ‬make a mental note to stay in the moment. Whenever you feel yourself wandering into that place in your mind where painful memories linger,‭ ‬or remembering the happiness of the past with yearning for what is lost,‭ ‬pull yourself back to the present. If you find yourself in fear,‭ ‬wondering if the pain that you feel today will linger into tomorrow,‭ ‬come back to the moment. Sit with your present and watch it unfold‭; ‬experience time as it moves from this moment to the next and then the next and watch your emotions shift. This moment to moment living is where healing takes place. 

Journaling exercise:‭ ‬As you work to focus your awareness in the present moment,‭ ‬pay attention to where your mind tries to take you instead. 
Is it pulling you into the past,‭ ‬to places where old wounds still ache and old resentments linger‭?  ‬
Or is it drawing you into the unknowable future,‭ ‬conjuring up nightmares or daydreams that will never come to pass‭? ‬
Whatever the answer-the force that is drawing you away from this moment is your subconscious pointing you towards the answer to your suffering. Don't ignore it. Stay present,‭ ‬and write about what it is telling you. Then use these insights to explore new ways to find healing in your life. 



As anyone who has taken a course in basic human behavior can attest, the field of psychology is replete with theories-many of them conflicting- about how and why people think, act, feel and relate to each other and their environment in the ways that they do.)  While our cave dwelling ancestors began wearing clothing for purely utilitarian reasons, one need only take a short journey through history to uncover how quickly the human race began to view clothing and other accoutrements of style as a means of creating a unique identity, aligning oneself with a group or class, projecting social status, attracting the opposite sex or myriad other reflections of personal values, choices and status.  Despite the amazing preponderance of readily available, rigorously collected, tantalizingly detailed data on the subject, even the most respected “experts” cannot explain with any degree of certainty how or why each of us develops the specific set of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual characteristics that –taken in their entirety–define who we are and how we express our “self-hood” to the rest of the world. 

Yet while modern psychology does not yet and may never have a complete and detailed explanation to our behavior, it is an accepted tenet in virtually every school of psychological thought that the physical aspect of how we present ourselves to the world is a clear and often remarkably forthright reflection of who we are (or who we want to be.