Be Present

In many traditions, “be present” is a basic teaching. This is excellent advice; although much like “trust your feet” in rock climbing the phrase doesn’t tell you much.

I started rock climbing in the spring of 2008. On a particularly slippery sandstone climb in the San Rafael swell my partner encouraged me to trust my feet. I imagined that this meant my foot holds were solid enough that I didn’t need to worry about them as I moved up. My feet didn’t feel solid. I thought the reason I felt unstable was that I was new to climbing and as I developed a better awareness of route quality with practice the holds would feel stable. I had to rely on my partner’s tight belay to finish the climb because every time I weighted my feet I slid. This summer on an all girls multi-pitch route I finally learned that “trust your feet” doesn’t mean you have solid holds, it means that you engage energetically and will your feet to stick to a surface (typically one with questionable merit) as you climb. Now when I trust my feet I rely on balance and leverage to move forward on shaky holds rather than weighting my feet and falling.

I sense the instruction “be present” contains the same type of confusion. A physicist friend very interested in mystical experience contemplated, “the difficulty of hearing about mystical experience is you get an interpretation removed from the actual experience”. Living life out of sync with presence is living in this interpretation. Have you ever exited a plane and to the flight attendant’s, “thank for flying with us, come again” replied, “you too.” This conditioned response is embarrassingly inappropriate and where we typically live.
In peak experiences presence happens naturally. Some techniques that encourage presence in everyday life are deep breathing, sensing the body, awareness of the physical (sights, sounds, sensations), full engagement in an activity - to think, feel and act in harmony. The more subtle expression of presence (the trust your feet version), contains the Truth of the moment. As we go through life we are socialized and learn from experiences. Some socialization serves us in the moment, most does not. Elements of conditioning include habitual reactions, addictions, living through projections and object relations. A lot of the therapeutic process is to identify these patterns. The transformative process takes it a step further to use these patterns as powerful transformative material.

As our world becomes more complex humans become more sophisticated and more aware of the subtle energies at play. This places a greater responsibility on leaders to be continually present. If you can “be present” or “be in the moment” as you move through life there is greater vitality found in the immediacy of experience. If you lead from presence you are more in touch with the people you lead and more aware of leading in the most effective direction. The instinctual guidance rather than critical distractions play out. Blind trust in “the system” has been eroded through a number of avenues including the financial crisis. Old school command and control leadership is evolving into servant leadership which requires significant presence.

If you would like to practice presence you are invited to attend my Dancemeditation workshop next month at Snowbird’s Cliff Spa. We will work on immersion in the physical experience as well as unraveling some habitual conditioning. November 21st from 1-4pm.