Mitch Blum

One of the beautiful things about yoga practice is that each and every day represents a fresh start. It truly doesn’t matter what you did yesterday or what you’d like to do tomorrow. The only thing that matters is what you do right now.

This idea is captured in yoga cliché # 37: that only the present moment exists. Like all of the popular yoga clichés, there’s both truth and fiction in its generally accepted meaning. ‘Living in the present moment’ has become a rallying cry for the celebration of the senses, for experiencing life fully. Carpe diem.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

But ‘living in the present moment’ has a much deeper meaning that can be successfully applied to our lives. It actually hearkens back to Patanjali’s definition of yoga as the “cessation of the fluctuations of the mind-stuff” (yogash chitta vritta nirodhah YS 1.2), or as I like to call it, the state of no-thinking.

You see, Patanjali was telling us that we’ve just got to stop thinking. He knew that our biggest problem as humans is that our minds just don’t stop. They think and they scheme and they daydream and they create drama. And our lives are lived in service to that mind-generated drama.

Unchaining ourselves from the past and the future is a necessary step towards achieving the state of no-thinking.

The past is damaging because there are no possibilities. All of the decisions have been made. When we obsess about the past we are giving power to false perceptions of ourselves. We take thoughts and we turn them into who we are. We say: “I acted this way because that is who I am and how I will always be.”

But it’s not true. It’s just a fluctuation of the mind stuff that we choose to accept as truth.

The future is damaging because there are too many possibilities. Our minds cycle through all of the potential outcomes attached to projected actions and we get stuck on the most horrible scenarios. We allow our minds to generate suffering about things that have not happened and most likely will not happen. The suffering exists independently of the actual situations.

You see, it isn’t the past or the future that we have to worry about, it’s thinking about the past or the future that’s troublesome. And that’s why we’re urged to live in the present moment.

But the present moment is no walk in the park, either.

When dealing with the present moment the goal is for direct perception of reality. We want to see things as they actually are, but we seldom do because of the layer of static that separates us from the world outside our heads.

This layer of static is comprised of the subtle thoughts that we have accepted and embraced so deeply that we don’t even recognize them as independent thoughts anymore. They have become who we are. And they affect how we see everything around us.

The field of static includes philosophy, beliefs, perceptions of self, religion, yoga dogma, everything really. And they are all distractions, they’re merely fluctuations of the mind-stuff and they take us further away from the state of no-thinking.

Yes, paradoxically, yoga practice can actually take one further away from the state of yoga.

So, the bad news is that it’s hard to get rid of this layer of static because it’s so subtle and deeply ingrained that we don’t recognize it as being separate from ourselves.

But the good news is that once you realize that nothing about you is set in stone – that everything you perceive about yourself is just a bunch of uppity thoughts run amok – then you are free to change anything and everything about yourself, at this very moment. Every day is an opportunity for a fresh start.

Stop thinking about acting differently.

Stop talking about acting differently.

Just act differently. Right now at this very moment.

Yoga is all about fresh starts because it truly doesn’t matter what happened yesterday or what might happen tomorrow– unless you let it matter.