Dropping into the Present Moment

At one point soon after I was separated and on my way towards divorce, while I was embarking upon my own journey of self-improvement and self-awareness, I found myself contemplating what codependence meant to me. Like a lot of people, my ex-wife and I had blurred the lines between healthy emotional interdependence and partnership into a confusing miasma of a singular dynamic. This made it difficult for me recognize what my own personal emotional needs and responses were in any given situation, independent of hers - and vice versa. I was journaling about this concept one afternoon, attempting to stream of consciousness contemplate why I was having a certain emotional reaction do some incident or other, following an interaction with my then soon-to-be-ex-wife. I noticed in that moment that every time I attempted to contemplate my feelings about her my thoughts would immediately shift to something random, sometimes tangentially related to the incident, sometimes connected to seemingly nothing at all - but consistently my brain kept telling me that it simply didn't want to go there.

This was my first conscious experience of dropping in to the present moment to notice what was happening with my thought process, quasi-removed from the distractions of my thoughts; I found myself journaling confusing words along the lines of “my brain isn't letting me think about this!” Over time I came to recognize this aspect of how my own mind tends to work: that when I am in the present moment, aware that my thoughts are scrambling or that I'm suddenly flooded with a deep contemplation of something intellectually “important” when, a moment before, I was attempting to think about something difficult or emotionally challenging in my life. This is a defense mechanism of my brain; there is something underneath that sudden jumble of thoughts and contemplation worth uncovering and experiencing. For me, this tends to be fears and insecurities that make me uncomfortable. And even though my brain is helping me by giving me intellectually stimulating trains of thought to consider I know inherently that if I continued to allow these fears and insecurities to reside beneath the surface and I don't experience them it will be very difficult for me to achieve the level of serenity and balance in my life that I personally hope to experience.