Presence

Presence really is absolutely everything.

It is the foundation of a fulfilled life experience.

Any moment when we have having an experience of life that is less than enjoyable we can be sure we are not in presence. And any moment when we are having a rich experience of life we can be sure that every cell of our body is exquisitely present to the sensations and perceptions of our life in that moment.

In biological terms, in the moment of presence, what is going on in our bodies is at least two things – one our ventral vagal parasympathetic nervous system is dominant, two, the attentional mode of the right hemisphere of our brain is primary in mediating our experience. I am certain there other neurological things going on but the extent of my current understand limits my work and thinking to these two. And, quite frankly, with our general level of understanding of how our body represents experience to us, there are more than enough insightful rich pickings in these two to keep us going for months.

Demasio, since his early book, Descartes’ Error, has explained in ever-increasing depth how our sense of self is actually a feeling not a thought. It is not so much “I think therefore I am”, but rather, “I feel therefore I am”. 

Every living creature has mechanisms, from simple to complex, to maintain a state of homeostasis in their systems. We need to be within the narrow boundaries of this biological state for all our bodily processes to function – basically in order for us to stay life. Demasio, argues that the primal foundation of this state is the basis of our felt sense of self.

So we have this deep cellular condition of feeling “me”. 

Furthermore, it’s a helpful thought to consider that our default experience of feeling “ourselves” is one of lack of agitation, lack of excessive tension, lack of significant activation in our biological systems and that in our complex human bodies we label this condition as emotions such as peace, calm, joy … and presence. 

So a peaceful state is actually our default home position. 
Then two things happen, one which is obvious but the other maybe not. 

Clearly, events, or perceptions of events, either in our environment or in our story-telling mind, trigger us out of this calm state, out of the felt sense of homeostasis. But the other thing that also knocks us out of it – are most of the things we attempt to do to restore it.
 
We create lives for ourselves, set goals, aspirations, create needs and obligations that on the surface we do in order to create a life of ease, pleasure and contentment but the pursuit of these things in themselves create disruptions to our state of peace. 

So we are bizarrely trying to recreate our default state, by doing things that actually continue the loss of state that we are desiring! 

So back to presence. 

Presence is being in a place of still awareness of the internal sensations of our body, the external perceptions of the world around us in the moment that we are living now. It is, of course, associated with practices that stop everything, where all you are doing is paying attention. But it also occurs naturally in situations where you are completely consumed in an activity – ski-ing, mountain-biking, absorbed in a detailed piece of work. (Loch Kelly in his excellent book Shift into Freedom – talks about two different “flow” states in the context of presence – but that’s for another day).

Obviously mindfulness and meditation are traditionally associated with presence. However, I think it is helpful to explore ways of accessing and living in it through bodily practices that help us to access ventral vagal dominance and right brain experiences of the world. 

These are things I will explore in another post.