Hello.
I was sitting in a traffic jam,
A queue of traffic,
Bumper to bumper,
A while ago here in the UK,
In a city in the UK,
And I just happened to look to my left towards the pavement,
The sidewalk,
And I noticed a woman walking along and texting on her phone.
Nothing wrong with that,
Most of us do it.
And I turned back and I was tapping the steering wheel in my car to the music and I glanced again.
And I noticed that she was leaning forward,
Texting and rushing.
And I played with the word texting and the word nexting came to mind.
And I thought that that's what we do.
We spend far too much of our life nexting.
We are nexting out of this moment into the next one.
We assume or we we feel that this moment as it is isn't enough and it isn't it.
It's not satisfying,
It's not fulfilling because it doesn't fit our picture of how we think it should be.
We always want to be in the next moment.
It may be doing the washing up,
It may be walking up the stairs,
It may be filling in your tax returns or walking the park.
Most of the time we are nexting.
We're actually not here,
We're already in the next moment.
So it's a sort of horizontal life.
We skim across life wanting to get to the next thing,
The next month,
The next activity,
The next dream,
The next fantasy.
And that horizontal life,
A life of nexting is unsatisfactory.
It makes us unhappy because there's no depth to it.
What we want is verticality in the sense we want depth to our experience.
Put another way,
What we want is to be present with life whilst it's happening.
But we rarely do that.
For example,
You're doing the washing up.
You are there physically,
You're doing it,
But your mind is doing something else.
It's next,
Most of the time it's nexting.
On to the next thing.
Our latest preoccupation,
Our latest fad,
Our latest regret.
And so most of us spend most of our life living this way.
We are masters at it because we've been doing it a long time and nobody shows us any other way of living until you come across some spiritual teachings,
Maybe a good meditation teacher or some mindfulness which is taught in an intelligent way.
So if you notice or rather let me put it another way.
What is it,
Let me pose a question to you,
What is it that creates this kind of nexting?
In your actual experience what is it?
It's thoughts.
Thoughts about this,
Thoughts about that and we sort of lean into the future.
So how do we work with this?
What can we do about it?
Well,
If we do have a meditation practice,
What we can begin to do is to,
Quite often we have a an assumption about meditation that it's getting somewhere,
We're going to achieve something.
That's not it.
What we're doing in meditation is having a look at what is actually happening.
So we sit down on the cushion or the chair and what we can do is start to,
We may listen to sounds or feel the breath and we then we can notice what takes us away from this present moment and it's thoughts.
I need to do this,
I want to do that,
Oh that's nice,
Oh I'm not looking forward to that.
It may be about the past,
Probably in all likelihood more is about the future.
So most of it's nexting and some of it's pasting and so we we can notice our nexting and all that's all we need to do we just need to label those thoughts as either nexting or even better just label them as thinking.
All those thoughts about all the things we can do and then we return back to the present moment,
To just the activity,
The feeling,
The breath,
Listening to the sound of the traffic or the birds.
What we do,
We take the energy out of this mortar,
It's like a mortar,
Like a you know this momentum that we have,
This force to be out of the present and into this world of thought.
Everything needs nourishment to survive and this tendency of ours to be nexting,
To believe our thoughts,
That needs nourishment too,
To stir life and it's our belief in the whole process.
What creates this busy mind or what maintains this busy mind of ours is the belief in thoughts.
That's their food,
That's what they feed on,
So it keeps them alive,
Keeps them strong.
So we find we're forever nexting.
So that's all we do,
We just label those thoughts as thinking,
That's all it is and we can do that whilst we're doing the dishes,
Walking up the stairs,
Having a shower,
Having a cup of tea,
Because we don't need to think when we're having a cup of tea unless that is our intention and when I have ten minutes where I'm going to brainstorm or just think about x,
Y or z,
That's fine.
But see a lot of our thoughts and the nexting thoughts are imposters or invaders,
They invade our peace,
They're agitators.
Functional thinking or creative thinking is fine,
We need to do that,
We need to do that for our work,
For planning.
So on the courses we lead I always ask people to notice,
And this is their home practice,
To notice when they are nexting.
So they notice those thoughts and I ask them to label them as thinking,
But they will also notice a corresponding feeling,
Sensation in the body,
Like a rushing,
A forcing forward energy.
See this tendency to be nexting isn't just to do with thought,
It's an energetic thing.
We have an impulse,
A movement,
An urge to be out of this moment,
Because if we can be lost in thoughts we can be creating another world,
But there's no peace in it,
There's no contentment there,
And we all want peace in our life,
We all want contentment.
So keep your practice,
If you do practice meditation,
Your mindfulness,
Keep it simple,
Notice your thoughts are thinking,
And then bring yourself back in to the breath,
To whatever activity you are doing.
We have to weaken that,
The whole system,
The whole mechanism of nexting,
Of being in our head,
Get out of your head,
Get into your body and get into your life.
That's what we're doing.
Come back to what's really happening,
You are really washing the dishes.
You're not,
What's really not happening is the next holiday,
Is this and that,
That regret,
That hope,
That fantasy,
That's not really happening.
That's the false world.
Come back to the real world.
When you need to think about your holiday you can think about it.
It's where the joy is in being here now,
But we don't recognize that joy at first.
We have to familiarize ourselves with it.
So don't spend your life nexting it away.
Come back.
Thank you.
