How to Live in the Moment if the Moment Sucks

Jun 29, 2025

Over and over we’ve heard an almost universal message from the spiritual leaders of our time, and that message has been to live in the moment.

Eckhart Tolle calls it the eternal now, and says, “Realize deeply that the present moment is all you will ever have.”

Abraham via Esther Hicks says, “Life is a series of delicious moments.”

Wayne Dyer wrote, “You have everything you need for complete and total happiness right now.”

And a lot of us scratch our heads and say, “Huh?” Because let’s face it, sometimes, our “right now” stinks on ice. So how do we go from a present moment that is miserable, to being happy in the moment? What if our “now” includes a horrible disease, or the loss of a loved one, or something awful like that? How does anyone find any sort of contentment in moments like those?

And why would anyone want to?

The short reason is this: Feeling better will make the bad times pass more quickly.

Every single experience in life comes to us for vital reasons. The bad times come to teach us. They come to push us forward to where we’re supposed to be. They come to bring clarity about what we really want. And they come because they have to come. There is no growth without contrast. If things remained cozy, we’d stay static and content forever and evolution would stop. But that’s not possible.

The reality we live in this moment is the only way things can possibly be in this given space, in this period of time, in this particular reality. And everything that happens fits together like the pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle. If one piece was shaped differently, the entire puzzle would fall apart.

So the bad moments, the challenges, the losses come because they can’t not come.

These bad moments can last for as long or as short a period of time (time being an illusion) as we choose to allow. The more miserable we are in the bad moments, the longer we’re stuck in them. The harder we push against them, the harder they cling to our here and now.

Only by finding contentment and peace within the moment, by pushing for the solution rather than against the problem, can we ever hope to move past it.

So that’s the why, that’s the reason to find a path to contentment and peace in the horrible moments of life: because they’re going to stay with us until we do.

But what about the how? How do we make peace with something awful?

1. Look for the Lesson

There’s always, always a deep spiritual message being whispered to us in everything that happens. There’s deep meaning in the great big, world-altering events and in the immediate, personal ones too.

In the loss of a loved one, something I’ve experienced many times, I’ve found more spiritual growth than at any other period of my life.

But the key to remember in the case of a death of a person or even the death of a system or way of life, is that there are reasons they came, and reasons they moved on when they did.

These reasons involve the fulfillment of their purpose and the furtherance of their journey. And in fact, everything that comes to us in life is a part of our own journey, our own plan.

Everything.

If we can accept that everything happens for a reason, and then begin to seek the lessons within the hardship, meditate on them, peel away the layers and get deeper and deeper, and journal it all, we will in short order begin to realize that this hardship brought a lot of blessings with it.

2. Look for the Joy

There was joy in life before the tragedy or illness or loss, wasn’t there? That joy didn’t come from outside of us, it came from within. Our capacity to feel happiness is our own and it does not go away, even when we’re feeling sad, the CAPACITY for joy remains. We tend to hang it on events and circumstances beyond ourselves, but the truth is, it’s all ours. That capacity for joy is still there, and the earth is still filled with things that can activate it and bring it to the surface once more.

Look for those things. Make it an absolute quest to find things that make us feel a little bit better, that give us a little relief, that take our focus away from the awfulness. The more we do this, the easier it will get.

3. Relax into what is

Do not struggle against the bad thing. (We talk about battling cancer, fighting addiction, beating depression.) But what if we just relax into it? We know that it came for a reason and in direct response to the vibration being offered prior to it. We know that it will stay for as long as it has to, and that it will go when the time and our vibration are able to release it. What’s the point in struggle, then?

100% of the cure is achieving the vibration that releases the bad thing from our experience, and that’s the only way it goes. We can’t get there raging or fighting. We can only get there through alignment, and the moment our alignment changes, the circumstances must change, too.

Relax into that. Really accept it. Trust that there is a plan, and that all is exactly the way it’s supposed to be right now, and the only way it can be given the circumstances that have led to this outcome. But trust too that this reality is temporary and will evaporate when our energy shifts.

We’ll understand the reasons eventually. The more we can stop pushing against our obstacles, the more at peace we are, and the more at peace we become right here and now, the more easily we can expand on to the next phase, and the next.

4. Birthing the solution

As we, BRIEFLY, focus more on what we DO NOT want than on what we do want, we gain valuable knowledge, understanding, and a new level of clarity about what would be better. We begin to see, through this “contrast” (shitstorm is a better term) how flawed things were even before the storm hit. We start to see how the situation pre-storm laid the conditions for the storm itself, somehow. They had to, or the storm wouldn’t have come.

Everything is vibration. What matches, becomes.

To birth the solution:

Once the understanding is clear, try to shift toward spending more time thinking about how good things will be on the other side, than thinking about the problem of the moment. How will it look? How will it feel? Rehearse living in that new reality right now. Have imaginary conversations there. Describe it to your invisible friend, or write it in your journal. What will it look, feel, smell, taste, and sound like?
Begin working toward those good things, doing things that way now to the greatest extent you can, and supporting others who are doing them.
Begin looking for hints of the solution in the here and now reality. Looking for them ensures we’ll find them. There are always microcosms or miniatures of the perfect world in our everyday lives. If you feel unloved, for example, then just watch your life for a moment, and when love is shown to you, relish that and blow it out of all proportion, and that will make it multiply and grow. Do this repeatedly and soon you feel like the most loved being on the planet. It really does work just this way, and the big things (they tell me) are as easy as the small ones. (It’s just that we have more trouble believing the big things can be easy and belief is a key ingredient.)
Take attention away from the problem as often as possible. Do this by replacing it with something else as the object of our attention. The replacement focus should be something that feels wonderful. Something fun, pleasant, happy, and distracting.

Do not beat up on yourself

Right now there’s a lot of bad to focus on, and it’s hard to look away. And frankly, we need to focus on the bad a little bit, to get very clear on what needs to change, and why it needs to change, and in what ways it ought to change in order for improvement to happen. The anger and outrage can be transmuted into neutral energy, and then into positive energy and released toward the goal.

But the focus on the negative has to be the tiniest part of our focus, while focus on the solutions should take up the majority of it. The bad stuff can be our rocket fuel.

I’m not beating up on myself, even though I was feeling so much rage this week, I couldn’t write an original post today. I went in search of one from seven or eight years ago, re-read it six times to pull myself out of my funk, and then updated and added to it. Several paragraphs here were not in the original, and the spell below was added too.

It’s been a week in the USA when I needed a dose of my own medicine.

REMEMBER THIS

No matter how bad things are out there, there is always peace and well-being to be found in here. Pull the focus in to just yourself, the people around you in this moment, the space you occupy, and the ways you spend your time. Put your energy and love into these immediate things. Cook wonderful, healthy meals. Clean and beautify your space, adding touches that make it feel perfect and special to you. Fill your world with delightful scents and beauty. Burn incense, pick flowers, play music, bake cookies, decorate, light it up.

Create a life you love in your little pocket of reality, like a bubble of paradise floating within the storm. And take refuge there.

And then step out, do some good, fight the fight, gather up more information and motivation, and then retreat your haven to heal and transmute the energy you’ve gathered.

BONUS: TRANSMUTATION OF ENERGY SPELL

Adapted from Dorothy Morrison

I was sure I had shared this spell before, but I can’t find it, and if I can’t, you can’t, so here it is again. How to turn negative energy into positive energy.

You’ll need: a baking sheet, some tin foil, and three altar candles: black, white, and gray. In addition you’ll need a box of salt and slip of paper.

The Spell

Line the baking sheet in tin foil.

Take the black candle, and heat the bottom until it’s all melty, then press it upright onto one end of the baking sheet.

Repeat with the gray candle, and place it in the center of the baking sheet.

Repeat with the white candle and place it on the other end of the baking sheet.

Now pour a line of salt from black to gray. You can make an arrow pointing at the gray candle with the salt.

Next pour a line of salt from gray to white, and draw a circle of salt around the white candle.

Now write any wish you like on the slip of paper and place it within the circle of salt around the white candle.

Finally, to activate the spell, light the black candle and visualize it absorbing all negative energy aimed your way. It occurred to me while proofing this post that you can also direct all the rage you are feeling, all your anger and frustration and hate. Aim everything you want to aim at your enemy right into that candle. Scream at it if you want, yell at it, tell it off. But release as much of that negative power as you can. And yes, it IS a form of power.

When you’ve released it all, or exhausted yourself, visualize that negative energy moving through the salt, being cleansed by its power, all the way to the gray candle.

Light the gray candle and visualize it drawing the energy up, and removing all charge from the energy, rendering it neutral. The negativity is burned in the flame. Energy is just energy. It’s not inherently good or bad, it’s just energy. The rest is what we put into it, and we can also take it out.

Next visualize that clean, neutral, pure energy moving through the next line of salt and all the way around the white candle, surrounding and your wish, flooding your wish, filling your wish, absorbing your wish, taking on its characteristics, becoming the wish.

Light the white candle to draw this newly wish-charged energy up into it. The flame sends it out into the universe in the forms of heat and light and a little bit of smoke.

Fire destroy and fire create. My words, my will, become my fate.

Allow this spell to burn (supervised!) until the candles burn out or go out on their own. If the others go out, leave it, but if the white one goes out, extinguish the others immediately. If you have to put them out manually, put them out black first, then gray, then white, leaving a few beats of time in between.

Before putting out the white candle, light the slip of paper with the wish from its flame, drop it into the salt circle at the candle’s base, and let it burn.

When the spell is done, wrap the entire mess in the tin foil and bury it.

It is done.