Cultivating Presence

I had this past week a coaching class where we were touching on the subject of being present when coaching and the ability to pay full attention to the client in front of us.

That brought this subject to my attention and walked me to writing this article while having a deeper introspection on the matter.

In my life, I learned that being present is a hard thing to do and it needs to be cultivated.

We spend most of our time in our heads and forget about being fully present in our bodies.

For me, going into the mind and flying on the wings of daydreaming is what I use to do since I was a child. Doing that is so imprinted in me that I find being present one of the hardest works.

While watching the series Anne with an E these days, I found myself relating to the main character, Anne, so much. Dreaming my whole childhood was my escape from a world that didn’t have enough resources for me to keep me present.

That’s why today when I hear of the visualization power, I am so skeptical about it. I have been visualizing my entire life and I was going much deeper than that, dreaming and dreaming and dreaming again…

But what I learned is that dreaming is not going to bring me what I want in my life. Is good to visualize and know where you want to go, but most important is to stop there, to go back and work for it until you get it. Staying in the mind and dreaming will not make life better in any way, it will just keep you in the mind, and that’s away from actually achieving what you wish for.

…But tell that to a child that used daydreaming as a way to protect herself and escape life to a better place.

And for that child I want to lay it out on paper there 6 quotes I am reading to myself when I go back in the mind today, as an adult and when is so hard to drag me out of the dreaming state.

• My body is my home, my temple and I need it to live a full life. If we didn’t need a body, we would have come into this life as spirits.
• When you are not fully in the body, you might let possibilities pass by because you are not able to see them.
• Our resources are just in the present.
• Feeling with our senses is the joy of life.
• We are able to save happy memories in our minds when we are fully present because we remember how it made us feel rather than what actually happened.
• When you are fully present you can use your resources and abilities to act, react, to live.

These quotes are just a kind reminder of what I truly want to live in this life.

And now let’s dig into a more pragmatic aspect of the matter and see how we actually can cultivate presence, some techniques that have the power to make us switch from a mental state of mind to being present in the body:

1. Any breathing techniques

• I use often 4:8:8 method (that’s inhale 4 seconds, keep the air 8 seconds and exhale 8 seconds)
• Acknowledge of the breath – a hand on the stomach, feel the rising and falling of the belly

2. Using our 5 senses

• Smell a flower with a deep presence. Smell your coffee in the morning for 5 seconds
• Touch 2 fingers and feel your fingerprints
• Watch something and observe details that you missed before
• Savoring - taste the food and feel all its flavors
• Close your eyes and hear the farthest sound, and then the closest, and your breath

3. Observe people and places around you (do not judge)

I always use to do that when I am in a line waiting or in the metro and what I see often is a lot of people scrolling down their phones. It’s so hard these days to catch the eyes of a stranger.

4. Perceive the events in your life by how you feel, not how you think about them. Imagine bringing down the elevate from your head into your abdomen and see what’s there.

5. Nature

Go out and feel the wind, stay under the sun and feel its warmth on your face, walk barefoot on the ground and feel the earth beneath you, put your hand in a lake or river and feel the temperature of the water.

6. Meditate

7. Tao

These 2 last techniques are more spiritual and involve guidance to learn them right. For meditation, you can use YouTube to start with or any meditation apps out there, free versions or purchased. I started my journey with meditations using the InsightTimer app, first with the free trial and then I purchased the license for 1 year because I love to keep track of my work of any kind so I like to have some metrics to see how I am doing.

Regarding Tao, this is a more secret & sacred Chinese technique, but a very powerful one, that’s why it’s not available out there for everyone. When I first heard of it, I wanted to know more and I searched the internet and the library and never found anything concrete about the method itself. I then joined a Tao retreat and learned to practice and I understood why is so sacred kept and why you need to reach a certain level of energy balance to be able to practice it. And that’s why, if you’re interested, you will need to learn this guided by a master.

These are methods with which I have been trying to cultivate presence in my life. And now I guess I’ll pass the question and continuation of this list to you, dear reader. So, tell me how are you cultivating presence in your life? I would be delighted to hear back.