"You're stuck in the idea of the future instead of understanding the now."
Said directly to my face. By a monk. While I knelt on the floor in front of him.
I had nothing to say back.
He was seated in an elevated chair, surrounded by four women dressed in white who had dedicated their entire lives to understanding what he called the art of awareness. I sat with them in that room and felt something I was not expecting to feel.
Intimidated.
What did I know about peace when I wasn't even feeling it in that moment? I felt overwhelmingly humbled. All five of us sat in meditation for thirty to forty-five minutes. The instruction was simple. Keep your focus on the front of your tongue. One spot. The entire time. Stay in the present moment and do not leave it.
Before we began, my ego showed up first.
I had been practicing daily meditation for over a year. I told myself thirty minutes of silence focusing on the tip of my tongue would be easy.
It was the opposite of easy.
Think about the last time you tried to do nothing. Really nothing. No phone. No music. No task to complete. Just you, sitting with yourself, fully present.
How long did it last?
For most people the answer is seconds. Not because they are weak or undisciplined. But because the brain was never designed to stay still. It has a default mode — a background hum of thought that activates the moment external stimulation disappears. Scientists call it the default mode network. You probably just call it your thoughts. And the moment the room goes quiet, it gets very loud.
That is exactly what happened to me on that floor.
Shortly after we began, anxiety took over my body. The intense stillness of the room, the high spiritual arches surrounding me, the complete absence of noise except for the subtle sound of leaves falling outside — all of it collided with the chaos running through my head and sent me into a spiral. My tongue went cold while my body heated up. My legs went numb. I started to sweat.
Sitting in silence was harder than anything I had done in India.
And I had walked into chaos in Jaipur.
Here is what that moment was actually showing me.
Your nervous system is conditioned by your environment. When you live in a world of constant stimulation — notifications, noise, conversation, movement — your baseline state shifts. Stillness stops feeling like rest and starts feeling like a threat. Your body interprets the absence of distraction as something being wrong. So it creates its own noise. Anxiety. Racing thoughts. Physical discomfort. Anything to fill the silence.
What you are experiencing in those moments is not weakness. It is withdrawal. Your nervous system reaching for the stimulation it has been trained to expect and finding nothing there.
The monk was not asking me to relax. He was asking me to stay present through the discomfort of having nowhere to run.
That is a completely different thing.
I quickly realized I did not know the art of the now.
Understanding the now is listening to yourself when there are no distractions standing between you and the truth. It is being honest about the person you currently are. Not the person you are planning to become. Not the version of yourself you are waiting for the right circumstances to reveal. The one who is here today, making the choices she is making, for the reasons she is making them.
That is harder to sit with than any physical discomfort.
Most of us are unknowingly living our lives in limbo.
We place our awareness on the past or the future and call it thinking. We put ourselves in the waiting room of life — waiting for the door to open, for the timing to be right, for the version of ourselves that has it together to finally show up. We build our identity around what is coming next. Around achievement. Around the quiet hum of chasing approval we have never fully admitted to ourselves.
Think about how much of your mental energy right now is living somewhere other than today.
The conversation you are rehearsing that hasn't happened yet. The version of your life you are waiting to start. The decision you are holding until conditions are perfect. The past moment you keep returning to, editing and re-editing in your mind as though this time the outcome will change.
That is not planning. That is your nervous system caught in a loop it was never meant to sustain.
The art of awareness is deceptively simple.
It is asking yourself honestly who you are right now. Not who you are trying to become. Not who you were. Who you are today, in your daily actions, in the choices nobody sees, in the way you treat the present moment when nothing is asking you to perform.
And then asking yourself the harder question — do those actions align with the person you say you want to be?
The monk didn't give me a philosophy. He gave me a mirror.
The room stayed silent. The leaves kept falling outside.
And for a few minutes somewhere in that stillness, between the numbness in my legs and the sweat on my skin, I stopped waiting.
I was just here.
It was enough.