I Created My Own Suffering Without Knowing It. Here's How.

Watch a video version at my Youtube Channel.

For years I thought the answer was somewhere ahead of me.

I spent the first part of my journey dominated by the past. Shame, guilt, regret, and a constant loop of things I wished I had done differently. My anxiety lived there. I was almost entirely in what had already happened, feeling like a victim to it, feeling powerless over myself.

Then I started to heal. I learned to look at myself with less judgment. I started accepting who I was and what I had been through. And that acceptance was genuinely transformative. It freed something in me.

But I didn't find the present moment. I just traded one mental prison for another.

I moved into the future.

As I began to accept myself I started to see what was inside me — the passions, the desires, the things that felt most alive. Music. Entrepreneurship. A vision of who I could become. And I put everything into it. All of my hope, all of my energy, all of my focus went into the future version of my life that I was trying to build.

I thought that was growth. I thought seeing the dream and going after it was the answer.

What I didn't realize was that I was creating my own suffering.

I spent three years rejecting the present moment without knowing it. I was treating an imaginary projection of the future as if it were more real than where I actually was. And slowly, unconsciously, I started losing myself into that future. The dark night of the soul I have talked about in previous videos — I now understand that a significant part of it was self created. I was living somewhere that didn't exist yet and wondering why nothing felt real.

Then Something Cracked Back Open

I have been reading and listening to Eckhart Tolle recently. Specifically his Power of Now material. And what it did was put language on something I had experienced but never fully understood.

Back in the fall I had a week where I felt the oneness of everything. God emanating from the trees, from the desk in front of me, from everything around me. I was so present, so aware of only the current moment, that I could see the essence of things. I had that experience and didn't have language for it.

Reading Tolle I realized — that was the now. That was what it feels like to actually be here.

And these ideas are not new. Ram Dass has been saying be here now for decades. Jesus talked about a peace that passes all understanding. Buddha pointed to it. Every wisdom tradition has a version of this. What Tolle does is put modern, accessible language on something ancient and real.

The Past and the Future Are Illusions

Here is what I have come to understand.

The past is memory. And memory is not perfect — research shows that what we store about our experiences changes and morphs over time. It is not a recording. It is a reconstruction.

The future is projection. And projection is imagination. I have no idea what is going to happen in the next minute. Neither do you.

Tolle offers a simple exercise. Quiet yourself and try to predict your next thought. Guess what it will be before it arrives.

You cannot do it.

And in that moment of waiting — that is a taste of the now. That is what it feels like to be present. Not thinking about the past. Not projecting into the future. Just here.

The Only Place Real Change Happens

I talked in a previous video about the in-between moment. The present is exactly that. It is the only place where anything can actually change.

The more time I spend in the past or the future the less capable I am of making real change in my life. I can see this clearly now looking back. When I was living in the future, doing things right but not doing them from the now, nothing was working the way I expected. I wasn't seeing the returns. I felt stuck even while being busy.

Since returning to the present — even imperfectly, even going in and out of it — things have started to shift. Real action. Real change. Because it is coming from here instead of from somewhere I haven't arrived at yet.

A Question Worth Sitting With

If you really monitor your thoughts throughout the day — how often are they in the past? How often are they in the future? And how often do you have moments where you are not actually thinking at all?

Those moments of non-thinking are your access point. That is the now. That is where the peace that passes understanding actually lives. Not somewhere ahead of you. Here.

You do not have to get anywhere to find it. You just have to stop leaving.

If this resonates I would love to hear what came up for you.

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