being present
on being in the moment
Stuart Evans and
being present
Here’s the deal. The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed — to be seen, heard and companioned exactly as it is. When we make that kind of deep bow to the soul of a suffering person, our respect reinforces the soul’s healing resources, the only resources that can help the sufferer make it through.
... See more
The other day, lying in bed, I felt my heart beating for the first time in a long while. I realized how little I live in my body, how much in my mind.
∆ Rodger Kamenetz, from Terra Infirma (University of Arkansas Press, 1985)
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps... See more
Rainer Maria Rilke • Letters to a Young Poet
Contracting our attention into the moment is hard, but it increases its potency, just as the brevity of words increases the potency of an idea, creating deeper grooves in the mind. If brevity is the soul of wit, then presence is the soul of experience. We cannot be fully ourselves until we are fully in the moment—attention nowhere but here.
Isabel Hazan • distillation
I am also slowly learning that being present is not just about giving my full attention to whatever is happening right now. It is also about recognising that what I have is good, and then wanting what I have.
I’ve found myself wanting to get out of the liminal place I’ve been floating in — wanting it to be done already, wanting to arrive in clarity, wanting to feel more certain or sure about what I’m supposed to be doing and how I should be doing it. Part of me feels like this pressure to “get there” comes from the false belief that there is anywhere bu... See more
Lisa Olivera • Ten things, part five
Some ppl really ruin their lives trying to experience third person feelings in the first person.” Feelings observed are distinct from feelings felt. When we watch two people snuggle into bed in an advertisement for sheets, it looks wonderful, but snuggling in bed ourselves feels wonderful in a completely different way. This gap between our observat... See more
Get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house. Do you think you'd care so very much about those things if you blew an aneurysm one afternoon, or found a lump in your breast? Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over Seaside Heights, a life in w
... See more