PRESENCE - How to be with not being present?
Be in the moment they say. Be in the here and now. Be present ... it's on everyone's lips. Spiritual memes are flooding the internet, podcasts praise it, IG influencer accounts make it seem THE state to be in. But what does it even mean to be present? And HOW do you do it? No one is telling that. And no one is telling you what a struggle it is.
Presence is often understood as being one with what is. You feel what is, you are aligned and let it come and go through you. Enjoy what is enjoyable, be sad when something sad happens. All on a basis of calm neutrality. But what if something entirely different is going on in the exterior world than on your inside? What if you realize, "my inner state doesn’t make sense in relation to the outer world". “I should feel [fill in any allegedly appropriate or adequate feeling].”
Well I can tell you, despite meditating for years now, I find myself very often not being present, internally not aligned with the exterior. Not just flowing with what comes, the ebbs and flows of feelings and incidents. The entire opposite, I am often at a stage where I notice THAT I am not present and it feels like this is making it even worse.
What happens then? Well time goes by, things happen, the loop continues and sometimes all of a sudden my brain kicks in and notices what is actually going on - as if my inner observer just magically appears and screams "dooooooo something".
So I pause. I try to sense. I try to go inwards. I find myself often tense and numb and dispersed and the noticing of it intensifies everything ... at first. Then I remember. I remember that there is no agenda, there is no goal on how I have to feel. There is no feeling of presence. Presence is being. Then the shift starts. I try to be with my not being here. I talk to that inner me, acknowledging that I can sense that it is actually drifting outwards. I let it know that I can feel how numb it feels. I let it know I can feel its not-feeling, its longing to be somewhere else/ to have something else. I let it have that. Usually here is where I fall back into being the numbness and the suffering and the longing. Then I switch back out of it being able to attend to it again. Back and forth. Until I can hold the space for the inner world (that is absent) in me entirely.
The paradox is, that by being with yourself not being present - you are very present. You are present with what is. You just have to notice it and try to stay with it. That is the crucial first step out of the loop. NOTICING THAT something is going on. Hard truth is also, that the staying with it, can be very hard in the beginning. It is like an untrained muscle that you didn’t even know existed, and is just aching when you try to use it. You don’t even know how to use it properly in the beginning. But slowly you get the hang of it, you get a sense for it. You will be able to switch it on and come back to it, when you lost it again. It becomes easier. And then … comes the pleasure. When you can attend to your inner world (which might be numb, absent, suffering, in agony or having a panic attack) you feel love. You feel the compassion of a caregiver that magically and exactly knows how to be with you. It is soothing and a perfect match. When you are present with yourself not being present you turn the whole thing into something even more beautiful: a compassionate connected being. That is the soil for everything in you to slowly come back to life, to endure the hardships of life and the past.
Presence for me is being aware of what is going on in the very moment you are in right now. That includes the outer world and the inner world. As well as the capacity to notice if they differ from each other - and then attend to that. It includes awareness of your physical body and the energy within yourself and around you. The sensation of an atmosphere, a relational space between you and others and how this all affects your inner workings.
Additional gold star points go for noticing when your past is playing out old strategies and patterns. When you get a grip of you being an old you re-acting rather than a present you responding. The new you is waiting to be switched on by you … keep on training, it will come!
