Many spiritual and religious traditions talk about a human tendency to spend too much time outside the present moment. According to a Harvard University study, we spent almost 50% of the time we are awake, not thinking about what we are doing. So what are we thinking about instead? Well, we either ruminate about things that happened in the past.

Or we worry about things that yet have to come. The latter often goes hand in hand with fantasies about negative outcomes. This is not only time consuming, it also evokes emotions that might cause unnecessary pain. I think it's clear why the Buddhist and stoics tell us to live in the present moment. Now, the big question is how.

In this video, I will present you eight ways to enter the present moment.

First of all, thank you Marilyn and Dylan for your PayPal Nation and thank you Rex for supporting me on Patreon. Very much appreciate it. Let's dive in. If you find yourself lost in mental cheddar, there are ways to get out of this. These are often simple tricks that, however, take discipline to pull off.

I'll start with the first one. Breath meditation. An easy way to find relief from overthinking is watching the breath and how the body and mind reacts to it. The Buddhist called this Anna Panas, which means mindfulness of breath. This is not the same as breathing exercises and which one purposefully controls the rhythm of the breath based on the Buddhist tradition.

We can do breath meditation in several stages. The first stage is the contemplation of the body, thus watching the breath and sensations of different body parts. The second stage is the contemplation of feelings like anger and how they linger in the mind. The third stage is focusing on thoughts and how they come and go.

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