“When you can no longer detect the all-informing present, you no longer have reason to believe it can offer you guidance.” New Self, New World, Philip Shepherd, p. 220.
So this question came up during one of my workshops about the mind in relationship to presence practices:
“We’re still using our mind. This is still a mental activity. What about that?”
It’s such a great question, because we are using our brain/mind during the practice of presence.
The purpose of presence is to have a direct experience of the moment. One that is free of copies and labels. We are releasing our mind from the duplicates of reality that it has named and understands and therefore has no reason to pay attention to. When the mind has named and believes it understands, there is no contact with the present, only another check mark on the list of “I did that.”
Yes, we use our mind when we practice presence or do these exercises, but we are directing our mind to pay true attention to the information that our bodies gather through their senses. We are tuning into the vibration of life as it is happening, and we need the help of our mind to do that as it processes that information.
What we are doing with presence practices is making an attempt to know the present instead of predict it based on previous experience where we have already decided what this experience is.
What we are doing with presence practices is allowing our mind to be occupied with experiencing, as they say, “real-time” information.
What we are doing with presence practices is allowing ourselves to move with the particle wave of now as it flows through us.
What we are doing with presence practices is vibrating to the tempo of now.
What we are doing with presence practices is mindfully softening the tissues of our body to allow the present moment to ripple through us and onward, instead of hardening ourselves with rigid thoughts creating rigid tissues that hold the moment for any number of learned reasons.
What we are doing with presence practices is unlocking the gate between the mind and body and letting the mind discover what the ever-present, in-the-now, experiencing body has to tell it.
Organic Particle Wave from Shaun Chan on Vimeo.
Video by Shaun Chan, used via CC by 3.0
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