I attribute this anxiety-producing struggle partly to living backwards. Most people experience the present moment as a byproduct of their past experiences, including all the stories and judgments that they have told themselves over the years about who they think they are and how they either fit in or don’t fit into the world. Most of what our minds associate as the “self” is actually a complicated and often paradoxical mishmash of unconscious thinking created from our half-assed attempts to make sense out of the world from the time we were born. But what if we have it backwards? What if we are not actually who we think we are based on our past creating the conditions of the present moment? What if we are actually our future selves, yet to be created, pulling us in the direction of greater self-realization?

This puts an entirely different spin on the nature of reality, because, while we have no control over what has happened in the past, we do have the ability to consciously shape our futures.

Let me use a personal experience to illustrate what I am referring to. A few years ago I had to undergo several surgeries and spend two months in hospitals and an additional two months bedridden at home. This was not the first time I’d had an experience like this. I have been bedridden for over three years of my life, two of which were in hospitals. Without going into unnecessary detail, suffice it to say that I was not only physically, but emotionally, challenged. I was married and I was in the process of creating a business which was just getting off the ground. This was going to put an enormous amount of pressure not only on me, but also on my wife. The situation was devastating. The first thing that happened was I began to be haunted by all the insecurities I had thought were behind me about how my entire life might be destined for failure. I acknowledged the fact that this might destroy both my marriage and my career. I felt stupid and weak, like this was something that I should’ve been able to avoid.

After this initial stage of remorse and self-pity, it became clear that I needed to step up my game in practicing what I preach about the power of intention. Our lives are shaped by intention. So what kind of intention would have me going through this personal hell? I realized that this was not something that could be explained to me by God, but something that I actually had the power to decide for myself. I turned my attention towards the three main areas of my life, namely, my personal health, my relationship with my wife and my career. I made myself commit to the intention to use this challenge to improve all three areas of my life. In essence, I imagined where I wanted to be in the future and let everything that was happening in the present moment be framed as an opportunity for growth in that direction.

While being hospitalized is not typically associated with building a career, I made it so. I decided that this was going to be continuing education for Zen Warrior Training. I coached nurses and other patients while I was hospitalized, honing my skills at supporting people in challenging situations while going through my own challenges. I set a clear structure with my wife, Meghan, about how she could and couldn’t support me. For instance, I told her that she was only to visit me in the hospital if she did so completely on her own volition without feeling some kind of pressure to do so when she didn’t have the time or energy to be present and supportive. And I committed to taking even better care of myself through nutrition and exercise, which was going to be essential for making me healthier in the future. I let my intentions for the future create the context for everything that I was going through, and the more powerfully my mind was committed to that direction, the less I suffered and the more I learned. These intentions created structures that were necessary for me to get to where I am today.

When I was finally given the doctor’s approval to sit in my wheelchair and go out again after four months of bedrest, the first thing I did was go to lunch with a couple friends. They remarked on how unbelievably healthy, vibrant and present I was after going through such an intense ordeal. Without minimizing the challenge, I pointed out that it was now all in the past, and my reality was not being created by my past, but by my future self.

If I had not chosen to choose how I wished to perceive the circumstances of my life by intentionally framing them in a positive context for the future, things would’ve turned out quite differently. The suffering that I would’ve gone through would likely have set me back months or even years.

I suggest we all take a look at whether we are living backwards.

For a few minutes or at the very most a few hours, we feel the aliveness that we felt in our youth, connected deeply to our vitality, perhaps even closer to God. But as soon as the activity is over, the buzz begins to wear off and we are back to our normal lives, dreaming of the next time we can have a similar experience. After a few reliable highs from doing what we most love to do, our minds begin to create neurological pathways to hardwire in the association between the activity and the subsequent high. In other words, we start to convince ourselves that it is only through doing this activity that we can feel this way. Because this happens at an unconscious level, we never even realize that it is occurring.

If these types of fleeting experiences of joy are all you know, you are like most people. It is rare that someone even questions this way of experiencing the world. But throughout the ages, a few among us have recognized this tendency and deeply committed themselves to challenging it. These deeply devoted souls have undertaken the seemingly impossible task of discovering this pleasure in regular, otherwise unnoteworthy moments. These are not exceptional beings any different than you or I. They are ordinary people who recognize that the feelings that are created during these experiences are actually something taking place internally, inside our own bodies. The activities simply serve as a catalyst to activate more of our own native energy, which otherwise remains dormant.

There are numerous practices available for those who wish to tap into this energy on a more regular basis. Yoga, meditation, breath work, qi gong and tai chi are disciplines which were created specifically for this purpose. Those who dabble in these practices may get little more than a good stretch and a bit of temporary relaxation. But those who powerfully commit, who are willing to take the dive into their bodies and psyches and stay the course day after day, week after week, year after year, no matter what happens, tend to unlock something far more profound. Some may describe it as “enlightenment,” a poorly understood word, and others may describe it as a remembering of their authentic selves. Most begin to regularly embody the boundless energy of their youth but with the groundedness and maturity of adults and with deep insights into the nature of the human experience.

Somewhere along the way, we learn that pleasure is contingent upon certain activities which “give” us our thrills. This generally begins to take place sometime in early childhood, and by the time we are adults, we have spent decades slowly and consistently denying ourselves access to our own spontaneity and joy, believing that this type of freedom is a product of innocence and youth, rather than who we really are.

For those who wish to break free of their own inner prison and regularly experience joy, a lot of unlearning must take place. We must be willing to discover the pain, trauma, and insecurities that we learned to identify with and unknowingly allowed to fester over the years. Recovering one’s freedom is not for the meek of heart, as it requires consistently allowing oneself to feel one’s own unconsciously self-imposed limitations. After all, the blocks that we create become part of our self-image and our personalities. This is what’s meant when people describe “ego death.” It is the shedding of the layers of protection that we have put on ourselves. While brief moments of satori (sudden enlightenment) may happen, fully transforming requires years of dedicated practice in self-awareness.

The reward for the committed soul is the ability to access deep joy and freedom even in some of the darkest and most challenging situations. That is something that no amount of money can buy.

Most people know at least something about forgiveness. Breakups, divorces, being picked on and getting fired from jobs are all pretty common experiences, after all. Some people forgive reluctantly because they feel that it is something they “should” do, which, in my opinion, actually isn’t real forgiveness. Others genuinely forgive and move on. Some even forgive for the most extraordinary atrocities imaginable (don’t take my word for it, watch the extraordinary story of Eva Kor, Auschwitz survivor, here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxqQbXoDtIc)

Eva Kor’s story is beyond what I or anyone who is likely to read this can relate to. That being said, I have definitely earned my title as an authority on the subject of forgiveness. My life was permanently altered at the age of twenty-four, when a drunk driver caused me to become paralyzed from the waist down. There were two directions I could have gone – unimaginable suffering, or towards the power of forgiveness. I say towards because, in my experience, forgiveness rarely just happens all in one moment. Our hearts have to gradually learn to make more space for the feelings we harbor.

My process of forgiveness started shortly after my accident, when I first saw the perpetrator (who wasn’t harmed, everyone always asks) in the hospital. If I hadn’t been on morphine, I might not have had the courage to forgive him, but since I was, I did. At least I began to. My forgiveness of him was a process that took many years. It was much easier to forgive him when I was having fun with friends or sit skiing in Colorado. It was much harder to forgive him when I was spending over two years collectively in hospital beds.

What I have come to discover about resentment is, like anything, it exists as a phenomenon of energy within our physical and emotional bodies. It is part of us, but only as much as we relate to it as being a necessary part of our experience. In its purest form, anger, sadness and resentment are simply raw energy. For me, my practice of meditation and breathwork forced me to experience this raw energy firsthand. In the beginning stages of my meditation practice, the feelings would be so intense that I would lose focus and space out and fall asleep. This was my mind’s way of protecting me from the trauma. Everyone I’ve ever worked with does this to a degree to avoid feeling their own traumas.

With time, I learned to take this raw energy and move with it, let it move through my body and filter through my breath. What I discovered is that when this raw energy is circulated, it could actually be used productively and intentionally for creating more of what I desired in my life. All that was required was for the energy to move through my energy centers (or chakras, as they are called in yogic traditions). When the energy moved through my heart, at first it was painful, but eventually, it was met with love. When the energy moved through my head, it initially created nightmares, but, eventually, it began to open up my intuitive channels. Now, I am in no way implying that this has been easy. It has been the challenge of a lifetime. But it is possible, and that’s why I feel so compelled to share this as a learnable skill.

In this year of 2017, there is a tension in the air that people seem to be feeling around the world. Many people feel that human civilization itself may even be on the brink of total collapse. If you’re following the news, you may feel that the hope you still have is being eroded every day. This naturally leads to anger and resentment towards those who are causing the greatest harm. If this anger is allowed to fester unconsciously in your mind and body, you will inevitably seal off your energy centers in an attempt to protect yourself. This will then diminish your capacity to experience love in your heart, groundedness in your being, and intentional focus in your mind. However, if you learn to harness the power of this raw energy and transform it with forgiveness, you can take the necessary steps towards creating the world your heart envisions.

This type of self-reflection is not without its merits. Sometimes, we can get a clearer picture of how our minds were influenced and conditioned by experiences outside of our control and how we adopted certain patterns of thinking as a result. Shedding light on the past can help us to rewrite our present moment thinking and avoid some of the pitfalls associated with adopting these dysfunctional patterns in the future.

However, if we are only to examine the past through a new lens, we often end up in the same basic dilemma. Even with a clearer picture of the past, we can think, “well, now what?” Having more clarity alone will rarely solve the problem. A lot of the time, people find themselves ruminating on the same issue just as much but from a slightly different perspective. Even if we find it in our hearts to forgive ourselves and others for the ways in which these impressions have affected us, we can still feel stuck.

This is when we need to remember that our bodies and minds are still having a present moment experience, it’s just that we are using that present moment experience to relive the past and maybe considering different hypothetical outcomes for what might have been had the past been different.

Our present moment experience will never be constructed entirely of thoughts. In fact, our thoughts will always be related to the remembered past and the predicted or hypothetical future. What is actually present is the sensory experience of the body and the body’s energy. It is the sensation of breath flowing through the body, the heart beating, etc.

Let’s use the analogy of a sailboat for the physical and energetic body. When the sailboat is sailing effectively, it is doing so because the sales are taut and the wind is able to push it along. There is what we could refer to as a “positive, intentional stress mechanism” at work. Without this mechanism in place, the boat is drifting listlessly at sea.

When we experience excessive stress in our lives, this positive, intentional stress mechanism suffers. We may develop rips in our sails or the sails might begin to loosen and have too much slack. The next thing we know, the sail is no longer functional. There is no longer a positive, intentional stress mechanism working to guide the boat in its intended direction. The boat is now adrift at sea without direction and it is at the mercy of whatever waves hit it.

The waves, in this analogy, are the outside circumstances of our lives; the phone call with bad news we weren’t expecting, the relationship issue we’ve been struggling with, the pile of paperwork that just showed up on our desk at work.

Without the sail functioning properly (remember the “boat” in this analogy is the physical body), the boat just gets slammed by every wave, taking on water and going nowhere. As this happens, the sailors (our minds) are in a constant state of reaction just trying to keep the damn thing afloat, never mind going in a positive direction. The longer this happens, the more exhausted and directionless we become.

Now, here’s the good news. There is a new sail down in the cabin. Rather than try to fix the tears in the old sail (reviewing our thoughts about the past and trying to think differently), we have the option of just tossing the old sail off the boat and grabbing the new sail. But in order to get that new sail up and taut so that it can function properly, it needs our physical energy. If you’ve ever cranked a sail up on a mast, you know that it is really hard physical work. It takes a lot of energy to get that sail up. It doesn’t just go up easily. It is physical work, not mental work. It involves breathing deeply, engaging our muscles and not stopping until the sail is all the way up.

Once the sail is up, we can aim the boat in the direction we intend to be going, but we have to remember to keep the sail taut. Every new challenge is a potential threat to the integrity of our sail, but if we keep breathing fully and engaging our physical bodies, we can keep the sail taut and keep moving in the direction we want to be going.

When the boat is functioning properly, we can examine our patterns of thinking and behaviors from a more neutral and less emotional disposition, allowing us to assess our thinking without losing site of our goals.