by Richard C. Michael, Ph.D.

But what does it mean to live in the moment? It means to experience a peace that surpasses all understanding, where love overshadows fear and fear steps aside for love. When you live in the moment you dwell in the presence of peace and experience the absence of guilt and anxiety. In the moment, you dwell with fear, love, and truth working as one on your behalf to guide you through your challenges.

You may wonder how does fear dwell in the place of love and truth? Fear and love have always worked and lived together, just as yin works and lives with yang. Wherever you find fear you will find love and vice versa. Just look around you and observe your world. It is a direct result of the intimate interaction regarding the checks and balances that go on between love and fear as they work together in order to assist you in your creations.

In the myriad of individual moments you can choose either fear or love as your reality. When you choose love your world expands, opening up to countless probabilities and endless possibilities. When you choose fear your world contracts causing you to live in the past or future where you experience hopelessness through guilt and anxiety. In the moment, love predominates and a beautiful transformation occurs. Problems yield to solutions, guilt yields to joy, anxiety yields to peace, and fear submits to love.

Learning to live in the moment is a process that comes from managing your mind, body, and spirit. First you must learn to manage them, then you will eventually progress to mastering them. Managing your mind, body, and spirit is a great accomplishment that brings forth your power. Once your power returns to you in consciousness it will never leave you unless you choose not to manage them.

The return and resonation with your power will lead you to reconcile with fear. This is where you begin to experience a new freedom and develop a joyous relationship with love and fear. When love becomes your reality, fear merges with love and they both work together on your behalf.

As love becomes your reality, so does the power of truth. This is when you know that you are not only the manager but also the master of your mind, body, and spirit. These are just a few of the benefits you will derive from learning how to manage them and living in the moment.

For you to create the reality you want, you must recognize your power and how it is acquired. This power is your life force. The Chinese call it Chi, the Japanese call it Ki, and the Americans call it energy. Whatever the terminology or culture, it is still power. You require power to create. The more power you have to create with, the more powerful your reality. Power comes from managing, not controlling. To manage your life, you must take back your power from the people, places, things, and situations you gave power to.

When you continuously give away your power, the life force that supposedly should govern your body begins to leave your body -- soon symptoms of fatigue and aging arise. These symptoms, expressed by the body, are an indication that it is time to make changes. And they will persist, or possibly get worse, until you do. You can cover them up by taking a drug, or something else to alter your reality. However, sooner or later the cold reality will surface.

You have to change because you have accomplished nothing -- only delayed the inevitable. Once you do, the life force or power will subtly begin to return to your body, renewing and regenerating what was degenerating. As soon as you come to the awareness that it is time to make changes, you begin to heal. You are now beginning to access life from a new and different perspective, causing you to evaluate and sequentially reprioritize your life.

This is where the realization regarding the importance of managing begins. Learning how to manage your mind, body, and spirit gives you power. To learn how to manage them efficiently you must define and clarify what they are and what they are not. Once you learn what they are, you begin to realize that what you have bought into was not truth. This will lead you to an awareness that you do not have power. The things and people you thought were truth, are not and cannot be truth. Because if love is not present, neither is truth.

You look up to, identify with, and model yourself after certain individuals who you think have made it in life. In your eyes, they have done miraculous things, sacrificed themselves and their happiness for others, they have won the big games and climbed the highest mountains. They have made money you can only dream of, and are held in high regard.

But what is the result of all this admiration on your part? The result is you give away your power through adulation, respect, or worship. You think you are the lesser and they are the greater. When in truth there is no greater nor lesser.

It does not matter if you gave power to those who meditate, levitate, or commune with their god. It doesn't matter if you gave power to those whose palms drip with blood, drink blood, or walk on water, nails, or hot coals. It doesn't matter if you gave power to a master who taught you or didn't teach you, or to a school where you attained the degrees after your name. It doesn't matter if you gave power to those who want to save the whales, dolphins, trees, environment, themselves, or others, or to those who have a cause, live by laws, or make the laws. It doesn't matter if you gave power to the homeless, helpless, speechless, or to missionaries working with those the world considers to be the poor and unfortunate. It doesn't matter how you gave your power away.

What matters, is you can take back your power right now, at this very moment. You can live the life you intend to live, instead of living your life through other people and what they have or haven't done with their lives. You have become dependent on others to lead you through the darkness, instead of accessing light for yourself.

Living your life through other people will not bear fruit. It will not bring forth the joy, peace, happiness, love, productivity, prosperity, and health that you are searching for. You find yourself giving power away to people, things, and situations that glitter, only to realize that once the glitter fades, you are still in darkness and those whom you followed, idolized, and worshiped have left your life and gone on with theirs.

When you do not access your own power, you become dependent upon the power, or the illusion of power, you receive or take from others. This is because you have not come to the place within yourself where you are able to access power from life and its processes. You have not yet learned how to manage your life. This keeps you from living and enjoying the moment.

Are you aware that once you learn how to live in the moment, your past and future no longer exist? It may exist in the worlds of those that you have had a past with, but it will not exist in yours.

Think of the peace and joy you will experience once you learn how to live in the moment rather than the past or future. To live in the moment you would have had to heal those unresolved issues that took your power and you have held onto from your past. Try this simple exercise. Close your eyes and imagine this is your last moment on earth, before the moment is finished you will die. Are you now thinking about the past or future and the worries and problems you may be presently facing? I seriously doubt that you are. This is what it means to live in the moment.

This is my true reality. I, at this moment, will no longer live my life through other people and their accomplishments. I have my own life to live and they have theirs.

"Attempting to get your power back without learning why you gave it away is as futile as trying to put a forest fire out with a garden hose"