I wonder if you've ever thought of your mind - or, to be more precise, your egoic mind - as a type of prison, and a very widespread and toxic one at that. What makes this prison especially problematic is that most prisoners are unaware they are incarcerated, often for life.
I was such a prisoner, and if it had not been for a series of incidents that eventually led to my liberation, I might have spent the rest of my life in solitary confinement. I used to "busy" myself in that cell blaming everyone else - God forbid, never myself - as well as the whole world around me.
Our egoic mind is ingenious in its endless attempts to distract us from living in the present moment, which is the only reality. It tries tirelessly day in and day out, simply because its very survival is at stake. It can only survive - and even thrive - by making us live in three imaginary worlds.
It chains us to the imaginary present by resisting what is. It drags us into the imaginary past through regret, and it projects us into the imaginary future through worry.
Because of our history and language education, which often ends up serving as a subtle and sophisticated form of institutionalized brainwashing - though hopefully unintentional - many of us are conditioned from childhood to live in these three phantom worlds. But the truth is that they have nothing to do with reality and exist only in our egoic mind.
If you find this hard to digest, consider: we can only think about the past and the future in the present moment. Nobody has ever lived in the past, and nobody will ever live in the future!
My own ego had to destroy itself through that series of events I can now call a blessing in disguise. That self-destruction was sudden and fatal, but the subsequent process of liberating myself through the narrow door it opened was gradual. And the door is inevitably narrow, covered by the layers of mental walls built over the course of a lifetime.
After the walls gave way, I was helped by the teachings of Chabad Chassidus and other non-Jewish teachings of nonduality, as well as various spiritual practices - meditation, contemplation, journaling, and self-seclusion in nature - as ways of internalizing and stabilizing presence.
Now I live more or less rooted in the present, outside those three phantom worlds. Even when I find myself drawn unconsciously into one of them, I can generally rescue myself consciously into the present.
Probably the single most significant outcome of this new life is that joy and serenity have become the norm rather than the exception. My internal weather is mostly sunny, with few or no clouds. And even when it is temporarily cloudy, I remain fully aware that the sun is always shining in the background. The wonder is that this has become my ordinary life!