Every morning when I wake up, usually before dawn, I ask myself the same question: “is it good right now? Is it good today?”

And if the answer is yes, I give thanks and get on with my life.

I don’t look back, and I don’t look forward. If it’s good right now, it’s good. My mind will go where it pleases; my life will go where it really is.

That’s all I need to know for today. Spirituality, like health, is a discipline. The more I do it, the more I experience it. And understand why so many people seek it.

Like exercise, the reward is great.

The power of now is the most important spiritual lesson I’ve learned in years of searching and thought. My mind is one thing; I am not the same thing.

The spiritual world is full of chants, mantras, poems, meditations, positions, and wisdom. I’m heard most of them in my own searching.

One of the most profound and important spiritual ideas for me has been the idea of living in the now. For those people who live in fear, rage, and uncertainty, this idea is profound; it is transformative.

It is transforming me.

The past few years have been emotionally challenging for me, as Trump and Trumpism have often threatened or assaulted many of the things that were dear to me – civility, charity, compassion, the refugee and immigrant experience, and above all, the idea truth.

Blaming the poor and the vulnerable for being needy is the opposite of spirituality for me.

Trump is a big deal; he is about much more than politics. He and his followers have spread fear all over the land and throughout our consciousness.

He is a life-changer and deserves to be taken seriously.

This becomes clearer by the day after he is gone. His absence reveals much.

Spirituality offers me the greatest safety and peace of mind.

The ability to stay in the now, the present, has enabled me to stay ground and offer a more positive vision of what was happening.

This was profoundly helpful to me, and I believe, to others. The idea of living in the now was why I could do it. The anger, grievance, and rigidity were infectious.

His is an aspiritual movement for all the talk of Christianity. Spirituality, not anger or hatred,  was my response.

Over the years, and especially over these past five years,  I’ve learned to listen to my thoughts and observe them, not just react to them.

I’ve paid special attention to fear since fear was the club that beat me and held me back for so long. Unchecked power is frightening, so is the sense of being hated for the labels put on one by others.

It is human nature for most of us to live in a community with compassion and peace of mind. It isn’t very comforting to be without those things.

Almost every great spiritual thinker or program talks about the idea of living in the now as a way of transcending fear and isolation. It’s an important idea, a kind of liberation.

I learned to experience it.

I came to see that I was mired in two traps that shaped my mind and my thinking – judging the present in terms of the past and the future in terms of them both.

Most of the fear and confusion I felt had to do with the future. Would I be okay? Could I pay my bills? Could I find love and meaning? Would people read my blog? Support my work? Could I help the hungry refugee families?  Would Trump destroy our democracy? Will, his followers? The Mansion residents on the edge of life? Could I find hay for the winter? Pay for enough heating oil? Was my heart all right? Could I sleep better?

But the past has no relevance to an open mind, and the future is unknowable. I understand that I had to transcend, allowing my mind to scramble and overwhelm my identity.

At some point, I realized that if I could free myself from the imprisonment and fragmented thoughts of my own mind, then I could be liberated from the fear and confusion that tormented me for most of my life.

I was right.  And I was surprised. It worked for me. That was not who I needed to be. I could be so much more peaceful and still. I could do good and not argue or live in fear.

The first step was to listen carefully to my mind, but from a distance, as a scholar, not a victim. I paid special attention to obsessions, repetitive thought patterns, and anxieties, recurring resentments, and worries.

I realized my real tormentor was my mind. I learned to listen to my mind impartially, as the reporter I was once, as a witnessing presence, not a helpless one.

In Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now, he writes that “many people live with a tormentor in their head that punishes them and drains them of vital energy,” and peace of mind. “It is,” he wrote,” the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease.”

Once I became a witness and observer of my mind, I was aware of my thoughts and found a new dimension of consciousness., a new way of understanding it.

I was a witness to the thoughts, not a prisoner. My writing became calmer, more peaceful.

Thought has a different relationship with me.

It has lost much of its power over me and subsides and takes the mind to a place with the many other thoughts that run through it. When a thought subsides,  as it does when I pay attention to it, I feel the silence, a quiet space.

I see it almost like a troubled child, undisciplined and erratic, and not always in reality.

The worries and fears took on a different dimension; they were there but no longer dominant or taken seriously. I began to be anxious less and more peaceful.

“At first, the gap will be short,” writes Tolle, “a few seconds perhaps, but gradually they will become longer. When these gaps occur, you will feel a certain stillness and peace inside of you.”

Tolle was correct, and I am happy to share this with people who might care to understand it.

The more I practice this way of understanding my mind, the deepening the sense of stillness and peace. I’ve not yet experienced the depth of it.

It is not for me to tell other people what to do or how to feel; it is for me to share what I do and how I feel. People can take or leave what they wish from it.

It is not extreme or dramatic; this peacefulness is not like being in a trance or even a deep meditation or contemplation. I would never give up an inch of my consciousness or my sense of vitality; even peace of mind would not be worth that.

It is a weight off my soul, freedom, a path to hope and calm.

In this state of being, I am more alert more awakened.

The present has come to define my sense of self,  my identity.

My past thoughts are not reliable, and no one can foresee the future or predict it. The only thing I know about the future is that it has never once been what I expected or thought it would be or what others predicted it would be.

Life is not foreseeable, period.

More and more, I realize I can enter what I call a state of pure consciousness, so different from the traps of nostalgia and worry.

The only way I can describe it is that being present allows me to feel my own presence with such intensity and joy that all thinking, emotions, and concerns about my health or body or income, or well-being become insignificant and small.

I am me, but I am more than me. I am me but shed of so many of the distractions and alarms and fear that coursed through an unobserved mind almost all of the time.

Since we know the present, we rarely have to fear it, recall it or anticipate it. I respect my mind, but I am not my mind. That is perhaps the biggest spiritual step I have yet been able to take.

The single most vital step towards awakening, says Tolle, is to learn to “disidentify’ from your mind. Every time we create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of consciousness grows stronger.

I often catch myself smiling at the voices in my head as if I’m hearing them for the first time. Sometimes it is shocking, sometimes amusing, always enlightening. But it is not always me.

For the first time, I realized my mind is not all that I am. I no longer take my mind so seriously that my sense of self, my peace of mind, depends on it.

I’m on the path to something important.