There is a golden opportunity we have in each and every moment of our life. This opportunity resides in the power of our freedom to notice our thoughts and choose what action we will take next. The key to accessing this freedom lies in the gap between any given event, thought or stimulus and our reaction to it. At first it may seem like our reactions are automatic in regards to triggering thoughts or situations. But as we begin to bring awareness to creating a gap of space between our thoughts and reactions, we will start to experience this moment of choice more consciously.

Due to the repeated pattern of certain thoughts creating certain emotions, we might witness ourselves experiencing anxiety and worry nearly in tandem with particular thoughts, this is actually perfectly normal. We have created a pattern of reaction in our mind, but the good news is, this habit can be re-patterned. How this new pathway gets formed and re-patterned has everything to do with creating a gap of space between our thoughts and action.

When speaking of action, this does not have to be an outward physical display or verbalization. We act on the majority of thoughts we have by an ongoing inner dialogue that occurs only within our mind. We have angry conversations with people, events or situations all the time that remain our own private soliloquy. We give plenty of airtime to grievances, catastrophe scenarios and victimization thoughts, which are often playing daily as a stream of internal monologues within our mind.

Every moment, thoughts are streaming into our mind and we have the ability to exercise our will to decide what we are going to do with them. Each moment before us ends up being the most important decision point of our entire life. How can this be true? The nature of this truth is based on the reality which is right in front of us but often overlook. The reality is this: The past is gone and the future hasn’t happened yet. Therefore, our power always and only resides in the moment before us.

All consequences of cause and effect have their genesis in these precious “gap moments” of decision. We have all heard or witnessed the devastating results of someone’s actions where one moment of decision literally changed their life. In these scenarios sometimes people have a lifelong prison sentence to contemplate the actions they took in that one fateful moment of choice. On the plus side, people who have utilized present moment awareness to their benefit report feeling liberated from their past way of approaching life situations as well as the freedom to make new life-giving choices. This is really what the definition of free will means.

We are powerful creators and cannot diminish our power of creativity, but we can misuse it and take our lives in the opposite direction of where we truly want to go. We can reclaim our power moment by moment when we choose to use the gap of mindful awareness. In making this all-important choice we begin to recognize our tremendous power as conscious creators in this beautiful Universe.