What is Presence?

Trying to answer this question is like trying to answer: ”what is love?”. It’s personal, experiential and too dynamic to be captured in words. So my disclaimer is that anything I write on this subject will reduce it to something that it is not. 

So instead I have a suggestion: lets run an experiment! Pick something to eat slowly and intentionally. I will use an apple as an example. Hold it. Feel its weight, temperature and texture. Notice its shape, colors, and details. What thoughts come up as you do this? Any feelings (i.e interest, surprise, anticipation)? Smell it. Bring it close to your lips. How does your body respond? What emotions arise? What thoughts are now present? Don’t rush. Let yourself get curious, explore. When you are ready, slowly take a bite into it. What sounds, flavors, sensations arise? How does your experience change? Chew slowly and notice what happens… You can do this with any food of your choice. The key is to slow down and allow yourself to get curious about the experience. Engage with what you are doing with the entirety of your being, bringing your sensory, emotional and mental awareness online. Give yourself over to the experience for no reason - let go of having any expectations. Eat your food of choice as if this were the first time you ever had it. 

WHAT HAPPENS? 

This is presence or mindfulness. It is a non judgemental state that emerges when we are aware, curious, receptive, and fully engaged (somatically, emotionally and mentally) with what is happening. As a result, there is a vividness, aliveness, and alignment (between what we are perceiving and what we are actually experiencing) that becomes available. We feel deeply connected to the moment. Even if it is an uncomfortable experience. 

So how do we cultivate more moments of presence in our lives? By slowing down, being curious and making full contact with what is happening. By stepping out of the conceptual  and dropping into the experiential. 

Informal practice:  

The invitation this week is to run your own experiments: choose a habitual activity that you usually don’t pay attention to, and do it mindfully (taking a shower, having a meal, listening to your partner, going for a walk, etc.). 

• What are some new discoveries that you have made?

• What is the impact of slowing down and bringing intentional attention to this activity?

• Can you practice bringing some presence into difficult moments too?

• What are some areas in your life that you want to be more present?

• Notice when presence naturally arises in your week. What are you doing? What are the conditions for presence?

Formal practice: sit everyday for 10 - 20 minutes. 

• Start by choosing an object to pay attention to (i.e. sound, breath, or sensations). Get really curious about this anchor. Notice when it comes and goes... How it changes. Drop into the felt sense of the experience. Marinate in it. What is the impact? How does this affect your state of being?

• Allow your attention now to drift to anything that arises. Make full contact. Immerse yourself with what is happening. Follow the experiences versus leading them. Where does this take you? What is revealed? If you get lost, you can always go back to the anchor and start again.

The Dilemma of Presence

Meditation can become such an interesting dilemma if we are going into it with an expectation of a certain outcome. Whether that outcome be wanting to feel calm, or to disengage from the thinking mind, or wanting to have more awareness (concentration) or to feel more self connected... 

While it's helpful to get clarity around our purpose for meditating, it's also important to hold the intention loosely. Otherwise meditation can become another stressful act of striving, evaluating, and self judgment. The attitude of doing, or getting it right, or trying to get something out of… creates expectation. Expectation generates pressure, and not meeting expectation throws us into a chain of negative emotions and thoughts that solidify into some kind of self identifying story around our competency. The tension and suffering that arises from focusing on outcome, not only pulls us away from presence, but further fuels the conditions for disconnection.

As a meditator, it's quite normal for us to think that we can will ourselves into presence or to stop the thinking mind. After all, isn’t that how we do the rest of our life? If we want something, we work towards it! We try and put effort until we achieve our goals. 

While these strategies might be helpful in navigating our day to day, they have the complete opposite effect in meditation. The more we try to make something happen, the further it pulls us away from actually being with our experience. Presence comes from surrendering to what is happening, as it is. This is what allows us to deeply connect to the moment. We can’t contrive it. Any agenda or attempts at making things be in a particular way creates disconnection.

So the question is, how can we cultivate presence if any sort of doing gets in the way? 

One way is to understand that the availability of awareness is dependent on the state of our nervous system. A nervous system that is resourced, relaxed and receptive will be more supportive of having awareness. 

If our nervous system is overly activated and the body goes into a state of fight/flight/freeze, the part of our brain that supports consciousness shuts down. What takes over instead is the survival part of the brain which relies on default programming to run the show. Meaning that, there is very little conscious awareness available in that moment. The same thing happens if our nervous system is under activated. A lack of energy, whether that be due to insufficient rest or an increase in energetic demand in our lives, leaves us exhausted. Being under-resourced makes it very difficult to have clarity or attention. 

Unfortunately, the lifestyle that most of us lead, keeps us pendulating back and forth between these two extreme states. We are either hyperactive with the amount of stimulus, busyness, and speed in which we live. Or we are left completely exhausted from the tremendous amount of energy that this expends, compounded with lack of down time or sleep. There is little time and space built into our day for the nervous system to recover, replenish and re-establish homeostasis. 

So it's no surprise that when we finally settle to meditate, a lot of what we are witnessing is just the nervous system discharging excess energy built up from the momentum of our lives. Experiences that did not get to be fully metabolized take advantage of this pause, to integrate. Emotions that were not felt rise to the surface. This shows up as an incredible amount of mental and emotional activity that can be quite intense and unpleasant - in particular if we are meditating to get quieter or calmer. The not wanting what is happening, and the strategizing to “improve” the situation only serves to add an additional layer of tension. This makes it almost impossible for the nervous system to fully unwind and for presence to arise. 

So, how do we deal with the dilemma of wanting to have more presence and yet knowing that any trying or efforting will just throw us further off course from being connected?

Well, we can start by letting go of any expectation of what meditation should be like. We surrender to the understanding that we have little to no control over what is happening during our sits. Our state of being is beyond the scope of will power, it's mostly the results of the conditions at hand and biology. 

Can we stop interfering with our experience and instead be with its unfolding? Can we step back and trust the millions of years of experience and refinement that our organism has developed in reaching homeostasis? Instead of adding pressure and then judgement, what would happen if we accepted, allowed and supported our body’s wisdom? What is really being asked of us in meditation is to renounce control.

Another aspect that we can focus on if we want to cultivate presence, is our lifestyle. The choices that we make create the conditions that affect the nervous system which in turn, influence the availability of awareness or presence. Slowing down, reducing the amount of stimulus, and creating more space in between activities;makes it manageable for our system to receive, process and respond to input without going on overdrive. Avoiding situations that tend to unnecessarily activate us and orienting more towards those that soothe, connect and enliven us; creates the conditions for presence.

This is a gentle process that accrues over time. The more we unwind, the more awareness becomes available for us to examine and see clearly what is conducive to presence and what is not. 

The invitation this week is to run your own experiment: how does supporting your nervous system in reaching homeostasis affect the amount of presence in your life?

Informal practice:  bring attention to your current lifestyle

• What is the overall state of your nervous system? 

• What kind of activities tend to be triggering and send your nervous system into hyper arousal? What types of activities are soothing?

• Notice how the availability of awareness fluctuates during the day and the week and note the conditions.

• Experiment with dropping a habitual activity to have more “doing nothing” time in your day. What is the impact? (this could be as simple as not listening to a podcast while you drive, or not being on your phone whenever time and space presents itself)

• Notice a healthy activity that feels soothing and brings more presence in your life. What is the impact of increasing that activity? (this could be walking, listening to music, connecting with a hobby, etc.)

Formal practice: sit everyday for 10 - 20 minutes. Give yourself permission to do nothing. Let yourself space out. Let the mind yammer away without needing your experience to be different. Keep things really casual and loose. This could be in the form of just enjoying a cup of tea in the back yard or window gazing. What makes it formal is being intentional about creating the time in your day to come back to yourself.

• Notice when presence arises spontaneously. What are conditions when that happens?

• Notice when you are disconnected or disassociated. Instead of making it a problem, see if you can observe the conditions that create this state.

Be kind and patience with yourself. Unwinding takes time and requires gentleness and care.

Video recording: reframing meditation

Underneath the habit

Our brain is an incredible learning machine! The more we repeatedly expose it to an action, the quicker and more effective it becomes in executing the skill. New neural pathways form to reinforce the circuitry to make this habit second nature... have you heard the expression: neurons that fire together, wire together? Over time, we don’t even have to put any effort or conscious intention into performing the task. We have successfully conditioned ourselves towards a behavior! 

This is an amazing feature to have. It’s what allows us to become adept at playing a musical instrument or developing any high performing skill. The flip side though, is that we can also become very skilled at less desirable habits. These are particularly problematic if they become part of our unconscious default mode. 

So the question is: what are we training ourselves to do? What is the impact of this habit? Does the conditioning contribute towards our long term well being? Is it alignment with our core values? Is there enough awareness available so that we can consciously choose to engage in the habit, or is it compulsive and we only notice it in hindsight? What needs does this habit meet? Is there a more skillful way to meet these needs? Can we train ourselves to do that instead?

Breaking “bad” habits is one of the toughest things to do because it literally requires creating new neural pathways. Instead of doing this though, we tend to deal with the habits that we don’t like by rejecting, suppressing, controlling and shaming them. These strategies rarely work in changing behavior. It is counterproductive because it prevents us from actually seeing and honoring the underlying needs that the habit meets. In addition, it creates more unpleasantness which increases the likelihood that we will use our habit as a coping mechanism. This locks us in a cycle of re-triggering and reinforcing the conditioning.

So how can we drop unhealthy habits? 

We let go of unhealthy habits by bringing mindfulness into what is actually happening. We meet the unpleasant/discomfort that is triggering the habit - with interest and care. We allow ourselves to feel the emotions, nonjudgmentally, that want to be expressed. 

Emotions point us towards our underlying human needs. Unpleasant emotions are particularly important because they signal when a fundamental need is not being met. If we skip over these to go straight into a coping strategy, we miss out on important information. The need will remain unmet, the emotions will continue to arise to get our attention, and we will be kept in a perpetual state of having to manage the situation.

Being tenderly with what is happening soothes the nervous system. It is a form of self empathy that de-escalates the situation, so that instead of going straight into unconscious conditioning, we can stay with our experience. Allowing and accepting what is happening also frees up the energy we were using to resist, so that more awareness can be available to “see” what is wanting attention. When we connect to the underlying unmet needs and honor our conditioned attempts of meeting those needs (versus shaming them, after all, they did provide immediate relief even if they were ineffective in the long run) we take our first step towards freedom. Clarity gives us the choice and creativity needed to find a more skillful response to replace the habit. In this way, we can gently rewrite our conditioning with new constructive strategies that better promote our long term well being.

So...the invitation for this week is to bring mindfulness into our “guilty” pleasures. While they might seem like a good and innocuous strategy that offers immediate relief and ease, what is the long term cost?

Informal practice:  study yourself in relation to your guilty pleasures

• What are your guilty pleasures? 

• When do you tend to indulge in them (under what conditions, what time of the day, after what kind of events)?

• Is it a conscious choice or is it compulsion (there is little awareness or will power presents, you realize in hindsight that you engaged with it)?

• What needs do you meet by indulging in your guilty pleasures?

• What are the short term and long term impacts of your guilty pleasure (physical, emotional and mental)?

• Can you think of a new strategy to meet those needs?

Formal practice: sit everyday for 10 - 20 minutes. Choose an anchor or resting place for your attention (i.e. breath, sounds, body sensations) and set your intention to stay with the anchor. Notice any drifting away from the anchor. 

• What pulls you away from your anchor? Are they thoughts of problem solving, daydreaming, or planning? Or is it not wanting to feel uncomfortable emotions or mental states?

• How do you react to these distractions? What happens in the body, emotional and mental field when you get absorbed into these distractions?

• When you engage with the distraction, is it conscious or compulsive? What is the impact?

• What needs do you meet by indulging? Can you connect deeply with the needs instead of indulging in the distraction? What happens when you connect with the need instead?

Can we meet this moment with tenderness?

It's quite natural for us to react to discomfort or pain by moving away from it, by fixing, or changing or redirecting our experience. There is nothing wrong with these strategies if done with presence, discernment and intention. However, most of the time, we are not mindful. We skip over the pain and get lost in the story about what we think is going on. 

This unconscious conditioning kicks in as a protective mechanism. It pulls us away from being with the unpleasant. But this comes at a high cost: when we avoid meeting the difficult moment, our system is unable to fully absorb and integrate what is actually happening to generate the most appropriate response.

As counter intuitive as it is, meeting a painful experience with interest and tender care (versus skipping over it) offers the empathy and soothing that we are seeking. By noticing and being with what is happening, our system is able to integrate and digest what is difficult. The unpleasant energy actually moves through us and dissolves.

Conversely, avoiding difficulty creates an incompletion in the system, a fragmentation of ourselves. This unpleasantness will continue to resurface to be seen and metabolized. And we will double down in trying to manage it. By trying to avoid pain, we become locked in a perpetual cycle of fear, vigilance and coping strategies to keep things “under control”. This creates and perpetuates the chain of suffering.

So the invitation for this week is to notice difficulty when it arises and “taste” it.

Informal practice:  

• When difficulty arises, what strategies do you tend to use? Do you burrow in and try to fix/solve it? Do you distract yourself with pleasurable activities? Do you tend to justify, explain or come up with a reason for why this is happening? Or do you reframe the story to see the silver lining? What is your avoidance habit? 

Please note: all of these strategies can be skillful when coming from a place of presence versus unconscious conditioning. And presence comes from meeting the difficult moment somatically and emotionally versus cognitively.

• Try allowing yourself to stay a little with unpleasantness and difficulty (don’t go over threshold, just “touch” it). Recognize it as painful, and try to be with the experience with interest and tenderness. What happens?

Formal practice: sit everyday for 10 - 20 minutes. Notice where the attention goes. If you end up in obsessive thinking, great! Investigate! What’s underneath the story? Thinking is often a coping strategy that takes us away from experiencing the pain underneath. Drop the question: what is this REALLY about? Don’t try to answer the question (this is not a cognitive exercise) just ask the question to point the attention to what is under the story and then LET GO of needing to know. Notice any body sensations or emotions that arise. Hold space for the energy to move through you.

This exercise creates a pause in the momentum of the thinking and offers an opportunity for us to cultivate curiosity and care. It also reframes thinking during meditation from being a problem to being a delicious opportunity to study our conditioning. 

Cultivating the safety within

We have spent most of our lives having our way discouraged, corrected or shamed. This is part of living in a society where our behaviors, ways of thinking and being has been homogenized in order for the group as a whole to feel safe. However, it comes at a high price. It means forfeiting our own unique way of being in order to be accepted and belong to the group. 

It is however: a choice. Each moment is a choice in how we show up (if we can see the moment before letting the conditioning run the show). Freedom lies in seeing this clearly.

The invitation for this week is to watch yourself as you move through your day to day life and try choosing you instead. 

• What happens when you check in with what your heart yearns for and do that instead? 

• What if you were to follow your way of doing things instead of accommodating or self-sacrificing for others?

• What if you were to prioritize self care versus getting things done?

Formal practice: make time every day to sit with yourself and steep in your "safe harbor". Allow all aspects of your experience to unfold, witnessing it lovingly. Let your armor slip off and let yourself rest deeply in the refuge of your meditation where you are encouraged to be completely YOU, uninhibited. Make contact with this safety within.