At the heart of being on The Path is your ability of being in the moment. Primitive Gestalts are the neurobiobehavioral patterns established as the result of early survival learning. PGs are reinforced and maintained by our ongoing tendency to live life on automatic. We go through life doing things the same way day in and day out. We become entranced to go through each day the same way we did the day before. We love the familiar. We gravitate to what’s comfortable, to what we know, to what we’ve done time and again. Living life in this manner will continually yield the same results you’ve gotten in the past and up until this point.
Right now, notice who is behind the eyes moving across this page—the “I” that is doing the reading. Be aware of yourself right now in this moment. Focus on your breathing and watch your breath as you inhale and exhale. The part of you that, right now, is watching; the part that is observing yourself following my words. That’s the part of you that we need to call on to begin living more in the moment. WAKE UP! This is what gives you the ability to make choices. And only by making choices can you begin to step out of the old patterns and step onto The Path. When I was a kid in school I was fascinated by the concept of compounded interest. I remember a teacher holding up ten dollars and demonstrating how much you would have in ten years if that money compounds once a year. Then she recalculated, based on once a month compounding; then once a week, and once a day. In her last example, she compounded the interest once an hour. With each example, the same ten dollars, over the same period of time, turned into larger and larger amounts. When she compounded the money each hour, those ten dollars turned into millions. Wow, the more frequently you compounded, the greater the growth. I got it!
It’s the same thing with awareness and presence. The more moments of your life you are present . . . the more frequently you WAKE UP to life . . . the greater the choice points for change and growth, and the greater the growth.
Dr. Stephen Sideroff is an internationally recognized expert in resilience, optimal performance, addiction, neurofeedback and alternative approaches to stress and mental health. He is Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA’s School of Medicine, as well as the Director of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Ethics. www.drstephensideroff.com