The Practice of Presence

Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings.

-Jelaluddin Rumi- (13th century Sufi poet)

That’s life: starting over, one breath at a time.

-Sharon Salzberg- (20th/21st century meditation teacher and author)

The beginning is always today.

-Mary Wollstonecraft- (18th century author and women’s rights advocate, died at age 38, days after giving birth to her second child, Mary Shelley, who went on to write “Frankenstein”)

Each of these quotes came across my path in recent days and accumulated, in a good way. Practicing presence is an important wellness habit for me, and I continue to refine it. Or should I say it continues to refine me? Simple and brief pauses. An intentional inhalation and exhalation. Giving sensory focus to one thing for one moment.

Even if I accomplish this just a few times a day, it matters. It slows the racing mind that has been my companion all these years. It shows me what I can or should do next. That’s all. Presence takes practice, and it takes more practice. Like living gratefully, it is profoundly effective, little by little.

Presence and clarity go hand-in-hand. Both help keep this beautiful and dangerous mind on track. Practice makes progress possible.

I am sitting on our back patio this morning. I chose to focus my gaze on the rug that my husband Darcy bought. I find it to be a bit of a nuisance, but I also appreciate the colors:

I thought about the various pieces of natural debris and how they each arrived on this particular patch of patio rug. Squirrel? Wind? Insect? Human? And I felt connected to a wider whole. That is presence. Nothing more, nothing less.

(If you would like to join the Rivertown Gratefulness Gathering on Zoom this Wednesday, our topic this month is “presence.” Details can be found here.)