Much has been written about presence and mindfulness, so I won’t bore you be repeating it.  Instead I’ll simply cut directly to a technique I use to bring myself into the present moment.

Presence is when we get out of the ramblings of our heads and fully occupy the world around us.  Focusing on the senses is a common practice in mindfulness.  But it didn’t occur to me until quite recently that I don’t have to focus on all my senses at once to experience presence.  One sense at a time will do.

The one I use the most often is hearing.  When I make I cup of tea, I listen to the water pouring into the kettle, the clank of the kettle as I put it on the stove and the chime of the spoon against the inside of the cup as I stir the sugar in.  When I wash my hands, I hear the rush of the water and the flow of it down the drain.  When I can hear them, I listen to my footsteps.  Or the whirr of the fan in the space heater.  Or the whisper of the leaves outside my window.  I also notice the silences between each sound, and the murmury noises that keep things from being completely silent.

I also take in the things I see.  I notice the colors and textures of things and look at their shapes.  I can see how those shapes fit together–the table, the books on the table, the covers on the books, the shapes and colors on the covers of the books.  The important thing is to see the thing and stop there, without getting caught up in what the thing is or how you feel about it.  Writing is particularly distracting, but I can always read and then refocus on the visual.

We often ignore the sense of touch.  We notice it when we brush our fingertips against things, but every inch of our skin is laden with nerves that detect heat, cold, pressure, pleasure and pain.  Sometimes I go beyond my fingertips and feel my clothes against my skin.  I feel the ground against the soles of my feet as I walk, even with the intermediary of shoes.  When I’m driving, I’ll feel the steering wheel in my hands and my seat underneath me.  I feel the heat or the cold from the heater or air conditioning.  All of this brings my body and mind into the present, where everything happens.

The essence of rich living is to fully occupy your life, which you can’t do if you’re not paying any attention to it.  Engaging your senses allows you to capture all the miracles around you without letting them slip past.  Try it sometime and see how it works for you.

I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in

And stops my mind from wandering

Where it will go

–The Beatles, “Fixing a Hole”

The mind wanders.  Whether this is a bug or feature depends perhaps on when it wanders and where it wanders to.  It can make tedious situations bearable and can bear the seedlings of great ideas.  But daydreaming can also lead to spirals of thought that send one veering downwards into worry and depression, especially when it gets stuck on one particular thing.

There are a lot of techniques for pulling out of that tailspin–meditation, mindfulness and so on–but there’s one that I stumbled on that I carry in my pocket that may be of some use to you.

In brief, it involves talking back to the wandering mind.  In detail, I’ve come up with a number of phrases–you can modify them to ones that work for you, of course, but feel free to use these as starting points–to interrupt the line of thought and shift myself back into the present.

“But that will never happen.”

“That’s not the way it happened.”

“It’s over and I can’t change it.”

But that will never happen

One of my most common wanderings involves conjuring up worst case scenarios for things in the future or somethings even in the present.  They can be theoretically possible things, or completely outlandish ones.  Either way, they are anxiety inducing and tend to catch up the mind in all kinds of ruminations–I’m going to fall and break this thing I’m carrying, they’re going to hate me, I’m going to say something incredibly rude.  (These are examples of worst case scenarios that I have indeed gotten my head stuck on.)  The antidote is a simple phrase: “But that will never happen.”  All at once, the daydream nightmare (daymare?) dissolves and the mind, with nowhere else to be, returns to the present moment.

Sometimes the thing I’m thinking about is a future event that will happen to me.  A meeting with the boss, for example.  I might find myself rehearsing the things I’m going to say and imagining the things my boss is going to say.  More often than not, I find myself mentally defending against the harshest possible questions.  In this case, “But that will never happen” still works for me.  Yes, the meeting with the boss is going to happen, but it will not happen in the exact way that I’m imagining it.  My predictions of what the boss is going to say are likely to be way off base, for example.  So I take a breath and let it go.  Sometimes I do rehearse, but I try to do it mindfully and deliberately instead of letting it rattle about it in my head while I’m waiting in the checkout line.

That’s not the way it happened

Another place my head gets stuck in is the past.  I rehash things that happened and often rewrite them so I can, for example, say the things I wish I could have said in conversation or restructure the sequence of events to the way I wish things had gone.  When rewriting, I stop it with “That’s not the way it happened.”  Once again, that stops the brain’s wandering and restores the present moment.

It’s over and I can’t change it

When I manage to rehash what did happen without amending it, it can be stopped with “It’s over and I can’t change it.  Let it go.”  (In point of fact, “Let it go” can work as an all purpose phrase to halt brain ramblings in their tracks.  Though it does run the risk of getting a Disney song stuck in your head.)  Accepting what was is crucial to one’s peace of mind.  Going over what happened doesn’t advance you, particularly when the things you’re going over are only making you miserable.

The essence of it is to bring the brain back to the present, where all life happens.  Spending your time in a swamp of negativity that is ultimately ephemeral doesn’t gain you much of anything.  But with a regular practice of pulling yourself out of that swamp, you can spend more time in the now and savor its riches.

The starting point of living a rich life is to pay attention to it.  This seems ridiculously obvious, until you try doing it on a consistent basis and become more aware of how your brain can go rabbiting off from the present moment and gnawing on stupid things like What That Mean Person Said On The Internet.  Honing one’s ability to keep the mind on the moment is ultimately a lifetime process.

Think of it a bit like an exercise program.  There’s never really a point when you can say “Yay!  I’m fit now!” and never have to exercise again.  If you do, you’ll be okay for a while but eventually your body will regress for lack of challenges.  However, much like fitness, the more you do, the better you get at it to the point that a flight of stairs that would normally wipe you out completely can now be ascended two steps at a time.  (And I’m not exactly one to talk about keeping in shape, mind you; how do you think I know about what happens when you slack off?)

There are loads and loads of books and resources on mindfulness and presence, from The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh (which I highly recommend) to The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle (which likewise I did benefit from, though I did have some issues with.)  If that’s too woo for you, there are many nifty scientific studies on the benefits of mindfulness.

Does this mean you can’t ever let your mind wander ever?  Of course not.  But presence allows you to notice when your mind is wandering and bring it back to the moment.  You can even set your mind loose and decide “I’m going to just sit and think for a while.”  (This is one of the reasons I carry a catbook–so I can allow my mind to ramble and still remain in the present moment as I focus on the pen on the page getting all my thoughts down.)

But what if the present moment is kinda sucky?  Wouldn’t it be better to vanish into the mental clouds for a while until the moment passes?

Here’s the thing.  A rich life is not a pain-free life, nor a perpetually happy life.  A rich life has moments of agony as well as bliss, grief as well as elation, loss as well as gain.  That is how life works.  You have to be there for all of it.  But you will notice that if you accept the pain and honor the pain, it will pass more quickly than if you try to smother it.  Pain is a signal from the body that something is wrong that needs to be set right.  By paying attention to it, you can determine its source and have a clearer idea of what to do about it.  Emotional pain is much the same way.

An important part of presence is acceptance.  There are some things you can change.  If you’re in an uncomfortable position on the couch, you can shift and get more comfortable.  There are, however, some things that you can’t.  If you’re stuck in traffic, there’s really not much you can do except wait.  (Unless, I suppose, you want to be one of those people who thinks that the fact that they’re in a big hurry qualifies them for the emergency lane.)  While you wait, you can seethe about how horrible traffic is, or you can turn up the stereo, plug in some music you like and pay attention to that until traffic moves forward some more.  Your call.

Presence is the practice in which all other components of rich living are rooted.  By seeing what you are surrounded by, you are able to be grateful for it and to be curious about it.  And the best way to be yourself is to be who you are in this moment, without waiting for some better moment to arrive.