“You cannot suffer the past or future because they do not exist. What you are suffering is your memory and your imagination.”
This idea feels unsettling at first. If the past and future don’t exist, then what exactly hurts so much? Why does pain feel so real, so heavy, so present?
Because the mind is powerful. And it is almost never where your body is.
Most suffering does not come from what is happening right now. In this exact moment, you are likely safe, breathing, and intact. The pain arrives when the mind leaves the present and begins to travel—backward into memory or forward into imagination.
The past survives as memory. It replays moments that are long gone, but emotionally alive. Regret, shame, grief, embarrassment—none of these exist in the present moment itself. They exist as mental reconstructions. The mind revisits what cannot be changed and treats it as if it is still happening. The body responds accordingly: tension, sadness, heaviness. We suffer not the event, but the remembering.
The future, on the other hand, lives entirely in imagination. Anxiety feeds on this. The mind projects scenarios that have not happened, may never happen, and yet feel urgent and dangerous. We rehearse conversations, failures, losses, and disasters in advance. The imagination, meant to create, becomes a source of fear. We suffer outcomes that do not exist.
What’s difficult to accept is that the present moment is often neutral. Not euphoric. Not terrible. Just here. Breathing. Sensation. Awareness. The mind resists this neutrality because it thrives on narrative. Silence feels unfamiliar. Stillness feels empty. So the mind fills the space with stories.
But awareness changes everything.
When you begin to notice thoughts instead of obeying them, something softens. You see memories arise like images on a screen. You notice imagined futures forming and dissolving. They lose some of their grip when they are seen clearly. Not fought. Not judged. Simply observed.
This doesn’t mean pain disappears instantly. It means you stop adding unnecessary layers to it. You stop reliving what has passed and stop pre-living what hasn’t arrived. You meet life where it actually is.
Returning to the present is not dramatic. It’s subtle. A breath noticed. A sound heard. The feeling of your feet on the ground. These small acts of attention anchor you back into reality—out of memory, out of imagination.
Freedom is not found by fixing the past or controlling the future. It’s found by realizing you were never meant to live in either.
You are not suffering the moment.
You are suffering the mind’s refusal to stay with it.
And once you see that, even briefly, suffering loosens its hold.
TheSpiritualExplorer 