A life that is unscripted leaves room for complete freedom of expression and authenticity in every moment.  Everything becomes potentiality.  Because to be unscripted is to be free of time.  It is to live in the here and now.  Eckhart Tolle says, “to be free of time is to be free of the psychological need of the past for your identity and future for your fulfillment.  It represents the most profound change of consciousness that you can imagine.”  Imagine being free of psychological time.  Tolle makes a distinction between what he calls “psychological time” and “clock time”.  To be free of psychological time allows us to live unscripted – embracing each moment as ‘new’ and unburdened by our past identities and future goals and imaginings.  Free to just ‘be’.  Tolle calls this “presence”.  He says, “there is no salvation in time.  You cannot be free in the future.  Presence is the key to freedom, so you can only be free now.”

Sometimes it really helps to have a role model for what presence looks like.  I did.  In the mid-1980s after studying English Literature and Humanities at York University in Toronto and Concordia University in Montreal and finding myself influenced by Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy to read some of the work by Carl Jung  –  I decided that if I found the right psychotherapist that I would explore Jungian therapy as a way to jettison the traumas of my childhood.  Fortunately for me, I discovered a therapist who embodied presence.  Unscripted.  I then began my Jungian exploration toward being available to myself and others in the present moment .  For me, at that time period, Jungian therapy and classical hatha yoga training became my predominant modes of my journey toward freedom from psychological time.

It is not easy, for most of us, to live unscripted.  It is not something that is encouraged, at least not in North America.  Tolle tells an interesting anecdote in his book THE POWER OF NOW about a conversation that Carl Jung had with a native American chief.  This chief… “pointed out to him that in his perception most white people have tense faces, staring eyes, and a cruel demeanor.  He said: ‘They are always seeking something.  What are they seeking?  The whites always want something.  They are always uneasy and restless.  We don’t know what they want.  We think they are mad.’  ” (p.75)  It seems to me that we are encouraged to stay ‘on script.’  Tolle states –  “Resistance to the Now as a collective dysfunction is intrinsically connected to the loss of awareness of Being and forms the basis of our dehumanized industrial civilization.”

Fortunately, we can change.  The first step is to realize that we are not fully aware and present in every moment.  We are usually reacting rather than just ‘being’ or responding.  Often we are in a state of  automatic pilot.  First of all, we need to become fully conscious of this – realizing that we have become caught in a time-warp, and hence are not in the current moment.  We need to become excellent observers.  Monitoring ourselves for the many ways tension and dis-ease  arises in us as a reflection of our refusal to just ‘be’ in the moment.  Unfettered by the past and unburdened by an imagined future.  Our denial of what ‘is.’   Our denial of the here and now.

There are so many ways to practice being present.  One of my ways is my daily hatha yoga session.  What are yours?  We need to make it a daily habit to monitor our own emotional and mental states and to pay attention to what is going on inside us.  What are our thoughts?  What are our feelings?  The inner produces the outer.  Always.   When we resist what is happening NOW, we are avoiding our point of power – because it resides in the present moment.  Freedom to be aware, to change and to create anew.

Living unscripted is a choice – as is everything.  Living unscripted is challenging for most of us raised in North America; however, it leads to our freedom and the acceptance of our unlimited potential.  Our whole self.  To accept the moment is our personal power point in our manifestations.  Freedom to own our responsibility for our choices and to relax and enjoy or accept what is – OR to speak our truth and change anything that is not working in our lives.  Freedom to choose.  Again and again.  That, to me, is unscripted.

Love & Light,         Monica