Presence is not a concept. Nor is it an idea.
Rather, it is an experience. A direct, intimate, unfiltered experience with reality exactly as it is.
People talk and teach frequently about mindfulness these days. It’s become a fancy buzzword now. Clean,
polished, easy to market. But real mindfulness, and with it, presence, isn’t always soft or
marketable. It’s not always peaceful. It’s not unicorns and rainbows or even nervous system regulation. Often, presence means meeting pain, fear, grief, or confusion. Sometimes it means meeting joy. Sometimes a twisting, painful anxiety in the belly. But it always means meeting Truth.
I’ve had moments recently that dropped me back into something I haven’t felt since I was three
years old. Before words. Before a name. Before I knew who I was supposed to be. Just Being.
Just pure contact with reality. One moment, for example, while traveling with my daughter, I was feeling pure joy and compersion for her lived experience as a queer person. The next, while becoming painfully aware of our shared political moment, there was fear, aversion, and disgust. That old, familiar twisting in my guts. I am happy to say that I met each of these moments with complete acceptance, equanimity, and relaxation in my body, and without an offered opinion or furrowed brow. Just pure presence… with it all. (This doesn’t happen all the time, for me, but these were memorable moments).
This is what presence offers. A return. A remembering. A chance to be with what’s true – not
what we wish was true, or what we’ve been taught to pretend is true – but the raw, beautiful,
sometimes messy truth of now.
Welcome to the present moment, my friend.