Yesterday, I found several indicators of stress in friends' lives. I think covid, lockdown, taxes, aging, news of war and catastrophe, and medical problems can sneak up on a person and cause depression and despair. There are various things a person can do to lessen the stress and one of them is to take refuge in the present.
The National Geographic Society had a project using DNA analysis to understand human change and movement around the earth over millennia. A book about the project refers to "deep ancestry" and various sources use the term "deep history" to mean thinking about history over the time of life emerging on this planet up to the current time.
It can be surprising how deep the current moment, right this minute can be. It definitely takes more than a moment to just mentally inventory the main aspects of my body, my thoughts, my activities just today, my plans and hope for tomorrow and the coming days. I have gotten in the habit of trying to put myself firmly in the present by immediately thinking of my feet first. Most of the time, I don't give much thought to where my feet are or the position they are in, what they are touching, how they feel. Along a similar line, meditators and therapists sometimes use a "mental body scan", thinking and feeling, sensing and appreciating each part of the body in turn. Part of the value of doing such a scan is the placing of attention on the body. Attending to the whole body systematically, one area after another,t can lessen one's concentration of fearful or painful subjects.
Similarly, spending a minute or two just focusing on feeling and appreciating the breath can help in a similar way. Applying Google's Chade-Meng Tan's approach of a single careful sensing of a deep breath can help give the mind a break from worry and fret.
