Mindfulness-based therapy does not ask for the abandonment of past or future. It asks for something more precise: an awareness of where attention is actually going, and whether that place is worth the cost of being there.
When the story you've been living was written more by expectation than by choice, there tends to come a moment — sometimes quiet, sometimes harder to ignore — when the gap between that story and a more honest one becomes difficult to set aside.
There's the growing difficulty of saying, honestly, what you're actually working toward and why. And underneath all of it, sometimes, the suspicion that you've been too busy to examine the question.
When anxious thoughts are showing up we are often 'time traveling' to the past or (especially) the future. When this happens, ask yourself "how am I - right here and right now?" Be honest with your answer. Often we are OK right in this second,...