Past Future Present

Working with the technology of the mind to be more present

A detail from Georgia O’Keeffe’s Abstraction White Rose, 1927.

The mind is not your enemy.

This perspective differs from many other teachers and thought leaders. While the mind is not synonymous with your consciousness, mind is not inextricably linked to your ego.

The mind is a technology, connected to our earthy human existence.

Yes, it can be used by the ego, the false sense of self overly identified with our embodied experience.

This happens unconsciously. It has become our natural state of existence. It doesn’t “trap” us, however. Any reasoning along those lines leads into a version of victim consciousness. It does perpetuate our attachments to patterns of thinking and ways of being that detract from, rather than lead to, the state that we desire to exist in.

Joy, peace, fulfillment, contentment, connection - these are all octaves of the same vibration, the “thing” we are all wanting to experience and be: Love.

We can choose to use the mind’s technology as food for the soul to bring us closer to the Love that we are.

Yes, Love is found in the present moment.

The mind may not be able to literally bring us into the present moment, to bring us to Love, but by working with the mind we can make it easier to alchemize what is arising in our embodied experience to ease our inner pathways.

The easiest and fastest path to presence and love is letting go.

Letting go is discussed a great deal in spiritual circles, and when we can do it, it feels like heaven, even when the presence that follows is fleeting. Often times, what we are carrying feels like a lot to let go of. It’s a heavy burden to drop, cold-turkey.

The great thinkers and seers tell us that time is an illusion - and they are correct.

Objectively, as far as we humans can tell, mathematical models point to reality being a “block universe” meaning that all time and space exists simultaneously. If that is a lot to wrap your head around, that’s natural, because we humans, and all earthly beings have our own version of time that goes by many names. Sometimes it is called psychological time and it is the arrow of time pointing from past to future.

The Divine has the best sense of humor because, there is *technically* no mathematical proof of the present moment. Puzzling at first, the why behind this is very simple: the present moment is transcends time.

When we think of it as “being present” we are automatically putting it into the framework OF time. This is how we start to understand it, we can’t help ourselves! It’s the limitation of language - and our human subjective awareness.

The “present moment” is not a moment at all - it is transcending time to connect with the always.

This is why the “present moment” when you truly are fully and completely present is naturally a state of joy, a state of Love, because it IS the Love that IS all there is. Some call this Source, I like to call it the Divine, and it is the same thing as Life or Creation.

I believe the technologies of time and the mind are sacred and holy, specifically designed to initiate and drive the alchemy of this human experience.

If you didn’t already know this, or begin to understand it from the concept of the block universe, it’s essential to dispel the myth of (what I call) the “ticker tape” of time.

It does not exist. There is no movie, no objective record, of every single moment of your life, of all of our lives, of all of human existence, of all of the Universe’s existence. This is what our modern schools of science and history spend all their time attempting to recreate, puzzle piece by puzzle piece! It’s what we obsess about within our own lives - what happened when, what we thought about it, how someone else perceived it, and so on.

You know how your memory works? That’s how the past and future actually exist. You don’t have a poor memory, memories are designed to be fractal in nature. Grasping for a ticker tape will never get you anywhere because objectivity doesn’t exist in the human experience and neither does a concrete, linear record of existence.

If we can hold the past and future in our hands gently, then we can work with our minds from the soul’s perspective (vs. the ego’s) to create powerful alchemy to bring us towards the “now”, the Love that we always are.

Here’s a practice I affectionately call Past, Present, Future.

It’s one of those things I’ve instinctively done for years and only realized later it was a process unto itself. Here I’m reverse engineering to share with you (and better understand myself - as always).

Time and time again it helps me become more present in the now moment, and essentially it’s about two things: finding gratitude in the past and cultivating hope for the future. Gratitude and hope are a recipe that eases us into the present.

The Past

Oh the past! The past has so much beauty for us, and that is the purpose of this part of the practice.

Mine your past for the gold it holds. Sit and think - yes, using that brilliant technology of the mind - back to your past. Moments of goodness can catalyze a feeling of gratitude - and that’s what we’re going for here. Bonus points, (as in, an even deeper sense of connectedness), when you can sift through for the past times when you were strong.

When did you listen to your intuition, and you were right? When did you feel weak, but persevered? When did you rise, no matter the circumstances? Can you recognize your own brilliance?

One specific question that works well for me is when I say to myself, “What would 18 year old or 25 year old Kelly think of me now?” Immediately, it brings me a sense of wonder and amazement at my Self and my Life. Not because it’s been perfect, but because I can recognize my own bravery in all of those twists and turns. It brings me a sense of awe.

It’s not just about bringing us to the present, now, during this exercise, it’s about making it easier for us to get there going forward.

When we start to find the brightness, to see the beauty in our past, we naturally begin to rewire that narrative. We build new stories - stories with a little more lightness, a little more pride, a little more gratitude than we had before. (Sometimes a lot more!)

Not only does this practice elicit gratitude, it cultivates self-trust. Self-trust is the key to faith. At least a faith that is resilient, a faith that withstands the turbulence of the earthly realm and its myriad of experiences. Self-trust is the ultimate tool to being present, or to being always.

The Future

We spend so much time worrying about the future - this is how the ego uses the technology of our mind in a way that does not serve us.

Let’s take that technology and use it for our good, to bring us closer to Love, by flipping the script and dreaming about how incredible our future will become.

I saw an article recently someone shared about how daydreaming is so powerful psychologically (and most of you reading this know that already). Our imagination - fueled by the technology of the mind - is easily one of our most potent tools for creation and aliveness.

Since past and future don’t exist, our bodies don’t know the difference between what they feel now and then. This is why past traumas and negative experiences can feel so awful and make us very sick in the now, but this is an aspect we can flip. Many teachers talk about this, from Abraham Hicks to Joe Dispenza, in the context of manifestation. But even before we get that far, we know that our bodies only feel in the present (and our bodies only ever tell the truth).

By dreaming about positive experiences, ones that elicit positive emotions, whether or not that manifests and creates the future we want, it quite literally feeds and fuels our bodies with the health, love, and presence we desire deeply.

What is the wildest future you can imagine? What if ANYTHING were possible? Can you imagine this from a soul place rather than an egoic place? Remove ALL narratives of lack - I know this isn’t easy, but I give you full permission not only to try, but to hold an awareness of when the “buts” come up while you’re dreaming. Take the HOW out of it completely. Just allow yourself to dream, dream, dream about the future potential.

To build on the prompt I shared above, that I use most often, is I love to think about how I could never have dreamed up the twists and turns of the last 10 or 20 years, and how if I project that out on to my future, what a wildly mysterious and FUN experience I have to look forward to! This may not be helpful if you’ve had a deeply difficult experience of late, I honor that. I would ask - is there any other time period in your life where you can have that positive lens of past to future and project that out forward? Even if it exists only in your childhood - or in your imagination.

Further, you can actually use all those hard experiences to your advantage - your mind already is! This is called post traumatic growth, and what we know is that there is a bell-shaped curve to suffering - as in difficulty leads to tremendous growth, especially in terms of our sense of faith and purpose. You can listen to Episode 3 of my podcast Ancient Future Heart How Meaning and Purpose Make Us Whole.

Examining the past before imagining my future bolsters my confidence and self-trust. even if I don’t know whats ahead, because I have looked behind and seen what Ive navigated thus far. This is how I cultivate hope from within myself.

The Present

For me, there is something about using the technology of my mind to find the goodness in the past and the future that allows me to sink more deeply into the present.

It’s like exercising a dog that has an immense amount of energy. Your mind is absolutely brilliant. It is an incredible technology. It wants you to LOVE it and to use it wisely. It all goes wrong - as in, we get anxious, disconnected, and preoccupied - when we’re not using our mind, but letting it be used by the lower aspects of ourselves, often called our ego or unconscious.

The mind wants to play with the soul.

When we exercise our mind by rewiring our past and future stories, it eases the tension that is there. The burden of our thoughts become much lighter and therefore simpler to place down. We are no longer wondering, subconsciously, if we’re going to drop the boulder on our toe and somehow injure ourselves. Jokes aside, our desire to grip to our old, negative narratives that weigh us down is purely derived from a very sweet, if ancient, desire to keep us safe.

We are in a new time. We are in a new space. We can use the technologies around us, within us, in the ways that they were designed - but that our consciousness was not yet ready for. All the work our ancestors have done has been preparing us for today. We do not need to fully and completely reject these human technologies like the mind, our thoughts, time, past and future, we can work with them harmoniously to ease our path back to the Love we’re so excited to remember.