Presence is how you deepen connection.
Just Be Like This Today: “Today I am fully present.”
This is a daily invitation to grant yourself permission to drop all your other nagging ‘Musts’ and ‘Shoulds’ about personal development, wellness and living a virtuous life. Just enjoy this one cup of Living Wisdom, just choose this one thing and sit with it today.
If you do not reset your state of presence, you allow the weight and intrusions of the previous moments in your day, to overshadow this one, and rob it of its gifts. Presence is what deepens connection and connection is what deepens meaning.
Reading this post will give you more than it costs in time. But slowing down, being fully present and fully open, really connecting with this, or any today moment, is how the secret magic of life really happens.
How many things do you half do? Half-watching a show on television while scrolling, or half-tasting the meal you’re eating, except for the loudest notes thinking about the last moment or the next moment. How many times do you rush to say something, or just be waiting for your turn to speak without having really listened and really heard what is going on?
You catch yourself sometimes, gulping a coffee down, or powering through a meal because you have so much on your mind. You notice yourself, in dialogue with someone, but your head is somewhere else. You want a life of meaning, rich with experience, but then in times like this, you have to know you are living half a life.
Whatever happened yesterday ‘belongs to death’ in a way.
There is a famous Roman statesman and philosopher called Seneca who left us with this:
“This is our big mistake, to think we look forward to death; most of death is already gone, whatever time has passed is owned by death.”
Seneca
His reasoning was that death is not just the cessation of life but a metaphor for the loss of moments that are lived without presence or meaning.
The essence of life is possibility, vitality feeling and emergence. Where there is life there is the potential for new experiences. Vitality is the life force that animates you, this is what desire is, and how you get the potential for every kind of movement. Feelings and emotions are the colours of your life’s canvas, and they are the most vivid right here in the unfolding moment. Sure, regret and remorse are feelings too, but the one thing you can always count on everyone agreeing on is that if the point of life is anything it is to minimise regret.
To enjoy a meal and appreciate the moment as much as the food, if you actually slow down and allow yourself to dial into your sensory experience without distraction or urgency, the experience deepens, and time effectively slows down.
This is what we call connected to the moment.
Even moments of grief and sorrow are part of the tapestry of a vibrant life. To grieve is to have loved. To feel sorrow and suffering is to care for something. This is the cost of having a human heart.
Imagine your life was a stack of frames, one moment per frame. There are many of them, but they aren’t infinite. Now from that stack select and remove all the ones where you were sleeping, unconscious, or anaesthetised. Aside from dreams that really change you and stay with you, you can take all of those moments and drop them in the recycling bin.
Then take the ones where you were so young, you could not remember, including your birth, your first steps, your first ice-cream. Those memories were not for you, they were for someone else. Select all these and drop them in the recycling bin.
Then select all the moments where do you not have rich memories and rich experiences and put them through a compression tool that squashes them down to ‘vague time’, just a kind of tinted or sepia tone that you remember your life with, depending on your remembered self from that time. In the compression, they lose specific details and ordering and they just become kind of filler frames to be used to pad out any story your subconscious can come up with when it’s trying to fill in blanks.
Of the frames that you can call your life, they don’t make up a very big percentage; rarely double digits. The smallest percentage is what you can call your life, according to Seneca’s reasoning.
And the only difference? —presence and awareness.
You don’t need to practice meditation necessarily to practice mindfulness. Even worse, there is some confusion around meditation whereby some people believe or even try to instruct others that the intention of meditation is to detach from thoughts and feelings. This is the exact opposite of mindfulness.
Real mindfulness is presence, ‘whole body’ and ‘whole mind’ awareness. Full presence is when the whole of you is alive and participating in the unfolding experience.
Flow is not some state of perfection. It is just the absence of resistance.
HOW TO PRACTICE IT
There are times when you want to process the past, by reviewing it and engaging with the thoughts and feelings that arise. This is very important for your psychology and nervous system and how you integrate those with the unfolding process that you are. There are times when you want to be considering or evaluating the future. This is how you realise your intentions. When you do either of these you need to be fully present with that. When you are grieving just grieve and be present with it. When you are angry, have the presence of mind to name your feelings, and to be present with the storm in the body, so that you can give yourself some space to allow the feeling without venting it. When you are cold, or hungry, or anxious, these are just feelings. You don’t need to enjoy them, you just need to witness them and allow them, and instead of trying to fret them away, which just reinforces a victim narrative in you, you own the experience.
There is an art to facing discomfort, the craft of it we call self-leadership. You can guide yourself to richer experiences, a fuller life and therefore more meaning, by connecting with the moment, eyes wide open.
Here are two ways you can implement a practice deepening of presence in a practical sense :
ONE: THE TACTICAL PAUSE
Taking tactical pauses between moments and in moments, just to catch yourself, to leave everything else at the door and be fully present in the moment that you are living right now. You do this between meetings, before answering an email, before having a conversation, as you sit down to a meal, and before you are about to change lanes in traffic or engage with someone.
The tactical pause is a military term for doing precisely that, an intentional pause to perform a regrouping of awareness and critical thinking.
I take it to mean also, ‘dropping in’ to the body, becoming present and aware and resetting my integrity, my posture, and my openness and my curiosity. The nature of modern life means that you and everyone, are bombarded with signals and demands on your attention. It doesn’t take much to become scrambled and if you do not ever learn to do this on purpose, it builds up as stress and anxiety, causing more distraction and leading to dysfunction.
To begin with, you may have to set reminders on your phone. Eventually, over time, every time you feel stressed, overwhelmed, distracted or anxious this becomes a trigger to remind you to take a tactical pause.
TWO: CONNECT WITH YOUR BREATH
You connect with your breath is pretty much like the ‘tactical pause’, except you can do it any time, in the middle of what you are doing without detracting from what you’re doing but always deepening what you are doing.
To simply notice how you are breathing is the first basic step. Then to breathe more fluidly, a little more slowly and more measured, perhaps a little more deeply.
The body seeks movement, the mind seeks stillness, and the breath is the mediator and also the key to both houses.
These two things, the tactical pause and connecting with the breath, are so simple that they can seem trivial. They are anything but, and the results of practising them can be nothing short of profound. Presence is how you deepen connection. If you are present, this is how you extract the essence from each moment, how your vitality, imagination and creativity come alive. Connection is how you create meaning. This is how you squeeze the juice from life.
Just be like this today: “Today I am connecting with my breath, today I am taking pauses to reconnect with my intentionality and my authenticity. Today I am present.”
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Love this reminder. I learned the SOBER acronym when I worked in an addictions rehabilitation centre. S = Stop O = Observe B = Breath E = Evaluate R = Respond rather than React.