3 Ways To Improve Presence of Mind
All you need is your mind and your breath
I’ve been meditating now for over 18 years and the phrase ‘being present’ still eludes easy definition. It’s much easier to experience presence in something like the practice of mediation than it is to explain it. As a Mindfulness teacher, over the past few years, I’ve tried to define it for students, but I find the best way for you to understand is to give you a pathway to the experience of presence itself.
Let’s keep it simple. We’ll focus on 3 main ideas.
1) Teach how to direct your attention to where you want it to be.
2) Explain a simple way to locate and choose moment experiences, in order to cultivate presence.
3) Show you how improved presence can translate into your everyday life.
Focus: How to build it and why it’s important
Meditation practice. One of its basic building blocks is Focus and Concentration. In many different traditions, the first thing taught is to bring back our attention from distraction to an object of attention — our breath, a mantra, a sensation in a specific area of the body (feet, palms, etc…). We need this specific object of attention so that we know when our mind is distracted and when it is not.
When we sit, we pick one of these objects and we rest our attention on it. Take the breath as an object of our attention, for example. We sit, we feel the sensation of the breath as we inhale, then as we exhale. We continue… sensing the inhale… then the exhale… After a breath or two, our mind naturally begins to wander. This is all well and good. Because once we notice our attention has wandered, we have just cultivated a moment of presence of mind. We bring our attention back to the inhale (or the exhale, whichever comes first) and we start again.
As we continue to practice, we do this over and over again. It’s no different than weight training. We do curls to strengthen our biceps, or sit-ups to strengthen abdominal muscles. In basic meditation, we practice bringing our attention back to the object (the breath) and that strengthens focus.
To improve our presence of mind we need to learn to choose to put our mind on what is present over what is not. Strengthening focus in this way, bringing our mind back, allows us the mental dexterity to do that.
So, how can we know what is present and what is not?
The Body is Always Present
The body, with its senses, is like an antenna for your mind. It reaches out into the world and picks up signals (sensations), which it then processes through the brain. The brain facilitates reactions, discerns or judges, and makes meaning whatever has just been sensed. But what the body senses — touches, tastes, smells, hears, and sees — is always in the here and now. Always present.
So when we pay attention to sensations in our body, as they occur, we are cultivating present moment experiences. And if we continually bring our attention back to these sensations in the body, intentionally, as I mentioned above, we are habituating our minds to favor the present moment, over and over again. Thus, literally developing presence of mind.
Often, our body picks up sensations to which our mind pays no attention. For instance, when you have an emotion, there’s usually a bodily sensation that correlates to it. Even if the feeling is based on something in the past or worries about the future, it can be felt in the body in the present. When I feel anxious, my stomach feels like it’s folding inwards. When I feel love, my chest feels open, sometimes pulsing, sometimes aflutter. In contrast, our mind habitually ignores the present moment experience, in the body, and chooses instead to ride a train of thoughts that have spawned from the emotion. In these emotional circumstances, all you need to do is to check in with the sensations in your body and you will bring more presence of mind to that experience. (And like feel more grounded as a bonus).
Use the sensations in the soles of your feet as an easy source of this type of present-moment grounding.
This leads me to the last idea… How do we bring the practice of improving our presence of mind into our everyday life?
Presence of Mind in Relationship
Now that we know how to develop our presence of mind as a practice and feel it internally, how do we bring it out into the outer world of being?
Simple.
Think about how you approach a conversation. When you talk with a friend, there’s hopefully an exchange. You talk, they listen. They talk, you listen. Only most of the time, when one person is talking, the other person is only partially listening. Often, the listener is stimulated by what he or she is hearing and it generates thoughts, analyses, judgment general distraction, etc…
We’re all guilty of being poor listeners. So how do we bring more presence of mind to this circumstance?
First of all, you become aware that you aren’t listening. Knowing whether you are listening is challenging and can take practice. But knowing whether you are distracted is much easier. If what your friend is saying to you is the object of attention (like the breath in meditation example above) you know when your attention has wandered from that. But if you’ve been practicing meditation, you have the ability to simply bring your attention back to what they are saying.
Also, if that feels difficult because you don’t like what they’re saying or it’s boring you, all you need to do is check in with the sensations in your body. That will keep you in the present moment. Your presence of mind then will help you to choose to place your attention on them, rather than your distraction.
Without going into great detail as to why this works (there are multiple reasons), one thing you will be bringing is present moment awareness to the exchange and you’ll be surprised how much that benefits your ability to listen and your friend’s feeling of being heard.
In Conclusion:
The fundamental practices of Mindfulness are ways in which we create the habit of connecting our awareness to the present moment.
One way to be sure that you have presence of mind or are cultivating and improving presence of mind is for you to be consistently ‘re-minding’ your awareness of just what the present moment is. We do this mainly through the body. That is, when given the choice of whether to follow the thoughts in your head, the same old story about this or that, you direct your attention instead to sensations in the body — which you can be assured is in the present moment.
Once we practice this for a while, we start to gain experience of what the presence feels like, in our minds and in our bodies. And we build a habit of choosing the present moment over non-present moment distractions.
It’s not easy work. It takes a lot of practice and a lot of patience. But it’s worth it, in my opinion. Remember, the experience of practicing in this way will often not feel so present when you’re practicing, but when you step ‘off the cushion’ so-to-speak or out of the practice and into your everyday life, you will notice that you have more presence of mind.
It’s not about how good or bad your practice felt, but how your life changes as a result of your practice that’s an indicator of whether or not it’s working for you.
If you’re interested in more ways to practice Mindfulness in a way that works for your Everyday Life, sign up here: Bram Barouh Mindfulness — Newsletter
If you love dogs, like me, you can also check out my blog about how my dog is my greatest teacher here: https://brambarouh.com/blog
