I have discovered that whenever I am less than happy and full of joy, I am pretty much always lingering in the past or fretting over the future. While contemplaating how to drag my attention back to the present moment I had the presence of mind to ask spirit for instruction. The following technique was the result of this request.

Take a deep breath. Feel yourself drawing in your own spirit with the inbreath. It is pure God stuff, filled with love and joy. Draw it deeply into your body and feel it penetrate right out to the tips of your fingers and toes. As you breathe out, let this spirit flow out into the world as a pure expression of who you are. Use this breath to really feel who you are in the moment, all your physical feelings, your emotions and your thoughts. Make it as mindful of this moment as you can. Being so in the present releases thoughts and feelings from past and future which drag you away from the joy which is rightfully yours. Here, in the present moment, you are fully whole and your true self as much as you now know. Each time you do this technique, you will come to know more of who you are and more of joy.

How simple eh? Still, it works like no charm I know. No prayer can be more joyful than to breath in God and share God with the outbreath. You don't need to understand why or how, just revel in the fact that it works. Play with it and let it become your own. It will change and grow as you practice it and it will let you step aside from your pain whenever you wish to.

An adjunct to this technique (it is too simple to just let it stand on its own right?), is extending it out into our every waking thought. Do we need to be so occupied by each breath then? I asked for guidance in just this matter and asked how to stand in my power as a being all the time. The response that rang out from deep inside me was this:

Pay Attention!

Look for the messages within each life occurrence. Apply all of your senses, physical, emotional and mental, to really experience each event. This makes all of these senses more acute. The data they collect will integrate on its own, no effort required. Instead of having to wait 20 years to understand the messages in your experience, you will find them becoming increasingly clear. You will automatically respond to those messages in ways that augment and increase your acuity.The nice thing about holding the faith that you are safe in this universe is that as the intensity of your experience increases, so does your joy. Faith lets you cease to fight the flow so pain ceases too. By setting aside the cultural context of your experience and seeking to be aware of and a part of the flow of nature, all of creation becomes your playground.