Do you know what it is like to feel tormented?
To face Christmas with the anguish of financial difficulties and to be torn between increasing your debt or treating your family?
To wonder whether the symptoms you are experiencing are hinting at a serious illness?
To ask yourself whether you will ever move past the pain of a failed relationship?
To be desperately concerned for the safety, well-being or health of a loved one?
Yes, those things can feel like torment. I’ve experienced them all over the years.
It’s quite possible that absolutely nothing can be done to take away the life circumstances that are causing your current torment, but a great deal can be done to ease your suffering.
The answer is in the present moment.
The other day I was sitting in the doctor’s waiting room, at rather a low point, considering all the impossibilities in my life. In a matter of seconds, I rounded up my health, business and family situations and labelled them all as ‘impossible.’ I concluded that things were bad. Does this sound familiar?
Then, a little bit of wisdom found its way into my consciousness and I asked myself, ‘Harriet, can you just breathe in this moment?’
Of course I could. I could breathe in that moment, and then the next and then the next. The present moment which contains all of life, all of existence, all that is. However bad things might seem, they were not with me in that waiting room, in that moment. It was just me, sitting there, and I could just breathe and be.
Sometimes the torment contains a gift because it wakes us up. When it all becomes too much to bear, to contemplate, to carry, we discover the exquisite balm of the present moment. Someone suggests to us, or we read, or we intuitively know that the answer is Now.
If you are in torment, my heart goes out to you. I know your pain. In our shared consciousness, as part of humanity, it is our pain. And I offer you this: please, breathe in this moment, then this one, then this one. Life may seem impossible, but you can do this, and after all, this is all there is.
Harriet xx
In the present moment, the best answer you could give to all those worrying questions :)