Aliyah Marr: Surfing the Sea of Awareness

I try to focus on what I am not, not what I am or what I want to be or what I was; this is called "erasing personal history" by the practitioners of Tensegrity. The purpose of erasing personal history is to be about to slip away from my own thoughts and to the traps that they all cause me. The biggest one is self-importance, and it wears many disguises.

I'd like to tell you a story about how I discovered the trap of the past and the future. I call it a warrior story, not a story of personal history, but rather, a story about how I made a permanent gain in awareness; I remember it to encourage myself and others on a similar journey.

One day on vacation at the ocean, I found myself surfing with my nephew. We had rented out one of those big blue foam boards. Neither one of use knew how to surf, but my 10-year-old nephew, being a natural athlete, could sure look good at whatever he tried. He truly had the surfing look, but he was standing on the stationary board in the middle of the sea, looking over his shoulder in anticipation of the wave to come.

I was cracking up with laughter, while I tried to tell him that he had to paddle in order to catch a wave. Meanwhile my mind was telling me that soon this moment would be gone, my nephew grown, and this day only a memory. I had a condition that I humorously called "crippling nostalgia". I had taken an ordinary emotion to an extreme in my life. I even had "future nostalgia" for everything and couldn't enjoy anything for fearing its inevitable loss.

So right there in the middle of the ocean, I decided I would be free of my dis-ease. I reasoned that if nostalgia is longing for the past, the opposite of this feeling would be, not longing for the future (another crippling disease), but allowing myself to be fully present.

I won't say that it happened overnight, but within a few weeks I had broken myself of a habit of thinking that had limited me. Since then, I have discovered more and more ways to be present. I am truly happy for the first time in my life, and bliss is not a stranger to my mind, just a welcome guest.

Aliyah Marr is a multimedia artist, interactive designer, published author, teacher, transformative coach, personal trainer, and motivational speaker. She is the author / artist of the Transformational Tarot.

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