How do you bend time?
Be present. End of how-to. (You know I’m being sassy, but…)
Have you ever noticed how time slows RIGHT down when you’re in the middle of a plank or having your ass handed to you by someone or something out of your control. It’s like it turns into the slow-moving hands of molasses as the clock goes around and around.
And then, look how fast it is when you’re running late, it speeds up to transcend any record of speed known to man.
That’s the art of being completely and totally present. It can bend time.
What Is Presence?
Presence is experiencing. REALLY experiencing. Not attaching a past label or identification to something you’ve seen before, it’s the act of using all your senses to be totally HERE.
Presence eludes us in the mind. The mind is pulling us away from here and taking us over to there. It lives in the future and the past, and anything outside of this moment, is not presence. The mind will scream at you that you will forget if you stop thinking about the future or the past for just one minute.
This is a summary of what not being present looks like:
When you’re running late you get lost in the future.
The mind races into creating scenarios which haven’t happened yet. It wants to figure everything out so you can feel in control.
It will try to solve what’s going to happen when you get there, how late will you be, what will everyone think, why does this always happen, oh my god, why is this car going so slow? Most of the time this is happening, you aren’t paying any attention to your breath, and it’s my guess it has almost completely disappeared.
The mind will do that, overthink and make your breath become non-existent. It does that because your breath is the link to the present. When your breath is gone, presence is, too.
On the contrary, when you are in a plank, you are hyper aware of everything that is happening inside of your body including your breath. Your breath steps to the forefront and demands that you see it. As your mind is pulled into the body and your breath, you may wonder how much more you can take. You might actually hear how much your mind is screaming at you. This is when my “I can’t” voice is the loudest, but then my stubborn ego kicks in and says, “I can” (if someone's watching, otherwise, you know….). You are present with every shake of every muscle, and you can hear your subconscious loud and clear. You can hear it because you’re PRESENT. You can hear it because you’re uncomfortable.
Comfort seems like such a harmless thing. I think most of us would even say we want to be comfortable, but during our discomfort is when we have an opportunity to really meet who we are. It gives us the opportunity to see and hear what our operating platform is. What are the thoughts I’m thinking. Weird, I know. But, you’d be surprised how cutthroat some of them are and how we aren’t hearing them, but our bodies are. Just like you don’t know how to beat your own heart, you don’t have control over the thoughts that are spilling out at you, not until you do some really decent work in the space of presence.
You are so used to standing, walking and moving around that your subconscious can do all of this work for you, it lets you go into your wandering brain, your programming.
You completely leave where you are - think driving to work and not remembering, your body did that. It’s also just like tying your shoes. If you try to “think” about it, it’s way harder than if you let your body do all the work.
When you leave your body, you end up somewhere in the future or the past. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you can go both places….. You might be thinking about all of the things you need to get done, or how no one ever helps you do it, and you might be thinking about how you’re going to let everyone down. The lower minds aren’t too kind when left to wander. Their early job was simple, to keep you alive. They didn’t come with the tools to choose and filter, that was left to our higher mind, but we can’t access that unless we’re present. Unless we are 100% where we are.
When our minds wander, we are no longer present, and when we’re no longer present, we begin to suffer.
We suffer for anywhere but where we are. We are trying to be in two places at once and never fully arriving anywhere.
If we were to see how powerful the human mind and body really is, we would see that we’re already time traveling. Most of us are doing it all the time. Like 95% of the time. Mind blowing.
Lack of presence is a trained thought pattern that our society has been glorifying for my whole life.
Always be doing more
Never be satisfied with where you are at
There’s always more…..
What if, without all this storytelling, you actually enjoyed where you were/are. That, you found the medicine of what you need right here in your life, as it is. This doesn’t mean that what you are doing, and where you are, will be all that there is. It means that you aren’t trying to run to, or away, from who, what, and where you are.
It means that, finally, you can rest and enjoy what sweetness life is, even during the hard times.
There are gifts in the present moment. They weren’t lying when they called it the present.
It’s the present of a lifetime, if you open it.
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