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Lately it seems like every time I check in with an old friend, I hear about how they’ve been going through some extraordinarily tough life experience during the last six months or so.

I’m not sure what’s in the air or stars, but I think a different way of approaching life is in order right now… different from what we keep being told by the mindfulness trends.

Most of us will endure periods where we feel taken, swept up, jostled, and massively destabilized by life. The conventional wisdom is to breathe, arrive fully in the present moment, cultivate mindful awareness, just take one step at a time.
 
In my experience, that just doesn’t cut it for the big things that really throw us off for a while, whether it is pain, emotional turmoil, or other intense experiences that arise from uncertainty and discomfort.
 
Rather, I have lately taken to visualizing into a broader picture.
 
To imagine my life in years instead of days, not days instead of years.
 
To imagine my life in months instead of moments.
 
In these moments, I choose to expand—forwards and backwards—the frames and phases of a lifetime, rather than to feel them all condensed and collapsed onto where I am today, right now. For, that is a heavy load to bear, particularly when things are feeling anguishing.
 
There’s very little about “being in the here and now” that offers a soothing balm when things in the here and now are unavoidably troublesome beyond our control.
 
When this very moment feels utterly intolerable, we might need a way to access something that feels inaccessible: perspective from a different state of consciousness. And the shift in perspective I’m suggesting does not necessarily require us to become enlightened masters in order to access it. We just have to tap into a version of ourselves that exists under different circumstance in some future place.
 
There is a future me that will see the present me in a different light, with different glasses on. Her life is at least a few steps forward from where I currently stand. When I connect with her, I find a little more space to breathe and be in my own skin during the waves of immense struggle. She helps me see me in the context of the larger narrative arc of my life’s story. She helps me remember what I have to give and feel when it seems like everything has been taken away.
 
I can’t have that if I’m just here, now, in my panic or worry or fight. Future me lives in a different condition, things have shifted for her, she knows something I don’t. At least that’s the feeling I’m able to conjure.
 
Try it.

There is a future you that sees you now in a different light. That version of you is a few steps ahead of where you are now, and is living under different circumstances, capable of seeing your circumstances now in context and in proportion to the grand story of your life. That future you knows something you just can’t right now.
 
Sometimes life requires us to live in the span of years, not in the jostling wild ride of the present moment-to-moment. We can more readily tap into the undercurrent of the entire stream of our existence that way, including how interwoven it is with the whole of life, with the cosmos, earth, culture, and history.
 
This might be a reason why people in crisis have so much trouble utilizing tools like meditation and mindfulness, which are the common modern prescriptions for such states (aside from pharmaceuticals). I rather like to think of various forms of meditation and mindful practices as just that, practice. They build up our fortitude and strength for the storms. But in a storm, they might not be a helpful place to start.
 
So practice now. Imagine your life in years instead of days. What shifts? What changes? What tension decompresses just a bit?
 
A point of caution with this approach is that it can be seductive to think that our circumstances will magically shift and change on their own, without our participation, for that future self. When you feel into years, not days, it creates the space for you to take some small action today. To let go of something. To initiate something else. To free yourself from an attitude or perspective. To find trust. To reach out. To feel deeply. To start fresh.
 
Creating that space is a radical act. Then you must act radically.
 
In radical love,
 
Erika

 
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