To be present, to be in the now.... What does it really mean?
I will explain from a scientific point of view what it means to be present, and why to use meditation as a tool to achieve it, to transcend your body, your environment and time. Create a new personality and personal reality.
Meditation will help you overcome the analytical mind according to DR Joe Dispenza.
What does the word meditation mean?
According to the Tibetan symbol, it literally means, to become familiar with something.
The 95% of our personality after 35 years is defined by a set of programmed thoughts, unconscious and automatic habits and behaviours, reflexive emotional reactions.
That means that 95% of who we are runs on a subconscious or unconscious programme, so the first step to change is to become aware of your unconscious thoughts, to become aware of your automatic actions and behaviours.
By stopping and observing these states of mind and body, just by feeling them, you will become aware of your unconscious self, and you will be gaining ground.
You can control your mind.
These thoughts like...I will never find the love of my life...I will never change my job, I will never change...I am like this...I am not good at something...It's very hard...It's sad....... When they appear during meditation practice, and the person realises that they cannot control them and they give up... They accept the idea that they are not good at meditation.
Let us approach this situation differently.
When you have those thoughts, instead of thinking about them and letting them drag you down, just observe them, and there you will begin to know yourself. And if you feel the urge to get up and leave the meditation because you still have your body's programme on autopilot with the thousand things you have to do, take a deep breath..... Hold those thoughts, don't give them importance and focus on the now, stay in meditation, in your breath, winning victories over the mind.
Every time you work to overcome some aspect of your old personality through meditation there is a release of energy. Every time the body yields to the mind we are recharged with this energy which we will have at our disposal to heal, to create a new future for ourselves.
Decide which thoughts you want to activate in your brain, assembling new neural networks, over and over again, until the mind converts thought into experience, making it connect with new thoughts repeatedly, setting an intention in each exercise.
If the familiar past represents the known and the predictable future (what you are going to do) also represents the known, then the present is the unknown. For us to begin the meaningful change where the body does not influence our mind and where our environment does not control our feelings and thoughts, we must stand in the now.
In meditation, the first step is to relax the body, close the eyes and disconnect from everything familiar around us. 

Tell your body to be still! 

I will feed you, you are no longer the mind, I am the mind. Where you put your attention you put your energy, and instead of sending it to the past or the future, you will hold it in the timeline of the present to create from there.
Every time you do that it's a victory and those victories add up.

When you meditate and problems with other people come to you, if you pay attention to them, you will be giving your energy to that person, energy that you could be using to create your own future. The CHANGE within you.
If you are aware that your body is losing energy and you focus on the present moment, you will be recovering that energy and breaking energy bonds that do not add up.
Think of meditation as a way to go beyond your body, your environment, your whole reality, don't keep your attention on the known, because you will create more of the known.
Work the sweet spot of the present moment, consciously becoming the creator. If you do this consciously you will see changes in your life.
The purpose of Meditation is to go beyond your analytical mind, that which separates your conscious mind from your subconscious mind.
Babies do not have analytical skills, they learn them as they grow up.
They are programmed into subconscious behaviours, with positive and negative associations that give rise to their habits and behaviours, such as a baby that associates crying with being fed, and will cry every time it wants to be fed. A negative association would be for example the association of an object with pain, when he touched it as a child and got burnt.
As the child notices different emotions, it begins to create patterns and develop the analytical mind, separating the conscious mind (5%), which is that of logic and reasoning from the subconscious (programmed attitudes) a 95% that make up the majority of who we are.
We need the analytical mind to survive in our life, it weighs the past against the future. Right with wrong. We need it for learning, for ethics, for important lessons... But when you add daily stress, then we become too analytical, and we move further away from the subconscious state where we can make changes.
The purpose of meditation is to go beyond the analytical mind and reprogram subconscious behaviours, making us more effective people.
But even if our conscious wants to get there, our subconscious often unconsciously puts up barriers, the so-called resistances. They prevent us from crossing the barrier of the analytical mind.
When you learn to control and increase your brainwaves through the meditative process, you get to reprogram the subconscious.
Meditate daily and get out of the state of survival, which is living in stress.
Move into the state of creation by reprogramming your mind to redirect your energy and do it IN THE NOW!

Ursula.