Four Ways to Be Present to Your Experience

To be present is to be alive, awake, aware, and alert.

When you're asleep, you're alive.

When you wake up in the morning, you're alive and awake.

And when you brush against the bathroom door as you stumble into the bathroom, you're not only alive and awake, you're also aware.

Most of us can accomplish all of this without too much stress.

Indeed, if there were no stress in our lives, we would merely remain alive, awake, and aware, but we would never get to a point where we could be alert to anyone or anything.

To be alert, we need stress. Not the bad kind, necessarily, but the good kind, where we can feel comfortably and appropriately challenged with an opportunity to rise to some occasion.

When our competence and skill level are on par with the challenge at hand, we feel good. We're alert. We go with the flow and we flow with the go.

But when the challenge exceeds our competence and skill level, stress turns into distress.

It's no big deal, really, if the distress we feel is momentary, but if the imbalance between skill and challenge is prolonged, we've got a problem.

We can either back away from the challenge or we can face up to it.

Sometimes, if the challenge feels too big for us to meet, sometimes it's best just to back away.

If, however, the challenge that we face feels only somewhat bigger than our capacity to meet it, then it's probably a good idea to face it.

And if you do decide to face it, this is where being present to your experience comes in handy.

Here are four simple ways to be present to your experience in the face of a moderate challenge.

In the face of a challenge that feels a little bigger than your capacity to meet it, it pays to pause for a moment to get your bearings and catch your breath.

And I mean this literally.

Quietly tell yourself: "pause". And then take a moment to place your focus on your breath. You can either follow it naturally or you can be deliberate with the pace at which you breathe.

Either way, pause and be present to your breathing with the intention of finding a nice, steady rhythm - the slower and deeper, the better.

I've found it helpful, on the inhale, to mentally say to myself, "breathe", while focusing on my breath, and then, on the exhale, saying to myself, "release", while willing my body to relax.

Once you've found your desired rhythm, engage the final step by placing a steady focus on a sight, sound, or sensation. Just observe the qualities of this sight, sound, or sensation.

Let your focus linger for a bit. The point here is to be present to the sight, sound, or sensation, along with having the intention of inviting a solution to your problem in the face of your challenge.

If no solution is forthcoming, then just stay present to your next impulse, and if you feel that you can trust it, act on it with as much confidence as you feel comfortable projecting.

Being present to your experience in the ways that I describe takes practice.

As part of your daily routine, you might take a few minutes (or more) in the morning to sit with yourself and practice pausing, breathing, releasing, and observing.

I like to sit at my desk and follow this simple procedure before I go for my morning jog.

Or, if this doesn't seem feasible for you, then think of a time of day where this type of practice feels possible for you - perhaps before you start work or while you do some exercise.

Having a practice like this can help you face moderate challenges and improve your relationship with stress so that you can stay calm, aware, and alert much if not most of the time.

Pause, breathe, release, observe. It's really that simple once you get the hang of it.