So what is this thing that appears so important, being “present”?

Being Present is… just being present. 

 

You could say it’s kind of just noticing.

Just seeing whatever’s there, hearing whatever’s making noise or just silence, noticing what I’m feeling in the body, or just what I’m thinking.

 

It’s sort of like taking a step backwards and then just watching it all.

And when we’re watching and allowing, there’s no need to name, categorize or understand it.

 

It’s like going into a new store, and when you’re asked if you want some help, you answer: “Just looking.”

 

“Just looking” allows the mind to settle. We gently allow what is… to be.

If something really does need to get moved or changed, then we do it, without creating a story around it. We could call this “awareness for its own sake“.

For our minds, this can look a little crazy. But it’s really not.

We’re talking here about an active “meditation“ practice which doesn’t require closing one’s eyes (though you can if you’d like).

I call it SAPP®: Seeing Alive Presence Practice®.

This SAPP is surprisingly useful in our day-to-day life.

Why?

 

First of all, in order to allow Stress and Anxiety to dissolve quickly.

These guys STRESS and ANXIETY basically come from a part of us that often thinks: “What is happening should not be.”

Since we’re often unable to change what we don’t like, we “resist“. (Accuse, deny, complain, bicker, swear, wine, become aggressive… whatever.)

And as we “resist“, we give birth to a conflict within us which then manifests as STRESS, ANXIETY or FEAR. And if we’ve already been through stuff like this, past experiences tend to feed into our current resistance to what is. And we end up suffering. A lot.

——

 

Seeing Alive Presence Practice wants to reverse that process by getting you used to being.

Just being, here, now.

 

For most of us, this does not come automatically. We’ve been struggling against what happens for such a long time and even if it hurts to do so, we’ve gotten used to it. As crazy as it sounds, a part of us would rather stick to this refusal/resistance based on what we think we know, rather than allowing reality to be by letting go into an unknown space.

But with Presence Practice, we can start gettng used to this new way of living, and we start suffering less.

Our mind might still want to tell us we’re crazy, but our body and emotions will thank us.

 

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And when you think of the alternative?

When we’re not present, we’re simply not here. We’re in our heads, continually filtering reality through our thoughts, somehow convienced that by “thinking” our way through life, we’ll be in control, and suffer less.

LOL.

 

———

In reality, we control practically nothing, or when it looks that we finally have the upper hand on something do, it’s generally only for a limited amount of time. Life pretty quickly brings something else to surprise us…

And again, rather than accepting that things continually change around us without our being ableto control everything, we tend to resist, to clamp down, to try to make things stay the way they were before, the way they “should be”…

And again we become stressed, tense, anxious, afraid.

—-

Had enough already?

 

Join me in Presence Practice  in Daily Life. Start to experience something else: alive, vibrant, peaceful and happy, underneath the personalities and “lives” we’ve constructed in our sandcastles.

Start Seeing Alive.

 

© All texts copyright Tony Brazil 2017