Meeting the Moment

Every morning when you wake up there is often a feeling waiting for you. A quiet sense of how you are meeting the moment. What life, work, family, or the world itself may be asking of you today. Sometimes we welcome that feeling. Often we avoid it. Sometimes we dread what we imagine is coming next.

Many people know the Sunday night blues. That creeping anxiety as the weekend fades and another working week edges into view. I used to feel it deeply. Around 4pm on a Sunday the mood would begin to shift, tightening slowly through the evening as Monday approached.

But what if the problem is not the day ahead, but the way we are meeting it?

Most of us are living slightly ahead of ourselves. Mentally rehearsing problems that have not yet arrived. Carrying yesterday into today. Resisting what is already here. Yet life only ever happens now. This moment. This breath. This conversation. This step. Change can only ever be shaped in the Now, not in some imagined future place or event. Discovering how to be present, fully here and now, is the key. It changed everything for me.

Try this simple affirmation often:

I am exactly where I am supposed to be, doing exactly what I am supposed to be doing. At this moment there is nowhere else to go, nowhere else to be, nothing else to do. This is it.

I sometimes use this in my guided yoga and meditation classes. It is simple but powerful, helping to shift perception and quieten mental agitation and distraction. I used it every day at work and still return to it now, although far less than I once needed to. At first glance it looks a little submissive, like you have no personal agency at all. In fact it’s the opposite. It’s a letting-go where your whole identity or orientation shifts toward getting outside of your head into the real world. 

That is because yoga and meditation do not remove challenge or uncertainty. They simply help us arrive more fully in the present so we can meet life with greater clarity, steadiness, and trust. When we stop fighting the moment, something changes. Energy returns. Space opens. What once felt heavy begins to move.

Meeting the moment is not about having everything sorted. It is about showing up awake enough to respond instead of react.

Yoga is sometimes described as the art of skilful living. Real practice is not about escaping life, but learning how to meet it.

Read more in my book A Modern Way to Meditateand discover how you can manage — and perhaps even eradicate — those Sunday night blues.