What does it mean to be present in the moment? And why is it important?
“Practice being present in the moment.” I’ve often read that advice in self-help articles and books. And the confused voice in my head would say “Ok. Sure. I’m present. Where else would I be?”
What do those words mean? And why does it matter?
Present moment awareness is being aware of what is happening, exactly where you are, in this precise moment.
Notice the word awareness. Our awareness is something we can shift. While you read this you might be aware of the words on the page or the sounds around you in the room. You probably aren’t aware of the feeling of your clothes touching your skin. But, now that I mention it, your awareness might shift to those sensations from your shirt on your arms, your pants on your legs, or your feet in your shoes or touching the ground. When we shift our awareness to the present moment there are all sorts of details that we can notice that help us to “anchor” in the present moment.
Here’s an example from my life:
I was taking my son to school one morning when something triggered a memory of a conversation between my dad and me. The conversation occurred during the month that we knew he was dying. I could remember where I was sitting in a chair next to his, the lighting in the room, and the sounds from the kitchen behind me. As that memory came to my mind, I felt like I was back in the moment and tears came to my eyes. My chest started getting tight and my breath got short and shallow. And then, in an instant, I noticed myself having those emotions and body sensations and was back in the present moment, riding beside my son, looking at the water as we drove over the bridge on the way to school, fondly remembering my dad, with some sadness.
I allowed myself to feel those feelings. And I allowed myself to move on to the next moment. The present moment.
“Feeling our feelings” is allowing ourselves to notice the emotions and body sensations that are happening for us, without pushing them out of our awareness or judging them as being good or bad.
Our feelings, both our body sensations and our emotions, are always sending us messages. Messages about things like: how we need to take care of ourselves, how to keep ourselves safe, or what our next best step in life might be. Those messages are influenced by what is happening around us, inside of us, and what has happened to us in the past.
When we are in a stressful situation, or even think of something stressful, our muscles and fascia respond. Our perception of what is happening to us results in shifts in our physical body and our biochemistry.
When we chronically tune out or push down uncomfortable feelings the emotional and physical activation can be stored in our body as stress to our nervous system and our tissues.
But we also don’t benefit from dwelling on those feelings for too long because that too causes stress to our bodies. So, what can we do?
When we learn to observe our own awareness, we can see when our awareness is stuck on a thought or an emotional experience or any perception that is causing us discomfort. Observing our awareness gives us an opportunity to shift. Shifting our awareness to the present moment is a way of giving our nervous system a much-needed break.
In the present moment we are almost always safe.
If we can practice awareness of what is happening, right in this very moment, we can give our nervous system time to rest in safety. Feeling safe matters. When our nervous system lives in a state of stress those moments of being present allow our body to rest and recover. When we practice that present moment awareness over and over we are able to string together more and more moments of safety in the present moment. We can get better and better at noticing our own experience and shifting our attention, rather than being caught up in our own stressful thoughts, without a way out.
Our body and brain need those moments to rest and recover.
How can you learn to be present in the moment? For me it took months of practice, usually facilitated by mindfulness audio recordings that directed me, over and over, to bring my awareness into the present. Often, I would have a mindfulness exercise playing, and all of the sudden I would realize that I’d been thinking about what I was going to make for dinner, or I’d be remembering a conversation I’d had, rather than listening to the recording and noticing the present moment.
At first, I judged myself for my lack of ability to stay present in the moment, but eventually I came to see those as moments of awareness, too. They were me seeing myself thinking about dinner or conversations, and then zooming out to realize that I was having those thoughts in the present moment. How strange it was to realize that I could notice myself having those thoughts. Almost like I was watching myself think. It was an opportunity to practice shifting awareness back to the present. Nothing to judge.
A good starting place for building present moment awareness might be to start tuning into your body sensations by doing a 20 second body scan several times today. I will link a 7 minute body scan in the resources at the bottom, for those that would like to have someone lead them through that process. Doing a quick 20-second body scan several times a day, over a period of several weeks, will start to build your capacity for shifting your awareness to the present moment.
A word of caution: when you start noticing your own experience it can feel worse before it feels better. Kristin Neff, self-compassion researcher, calls this “backdraft”. If we have been pushing feelings down, and we start a practice of noticing them, we can sometimes feel overwhelmed. If that happens to you, notice that emotion or body sensation and give yourself a break. It isn’t a failure to pause and come back to it when you are feeling better. It is allowing yourself to regulate. We all need the freedom to do what works for us to feel regulated.
You might be thinking “But I have real problems that I need to think about to solve them!” Or “This just sounds like trying to distract myself.” Those kinds of thoughts are very familiar to me. I spent years thinking that I needed to think all the time or how else would I solve my problems?!
Present moment awareness allows to you not only to rest in the safety of the present moment, it also allow you to see your thoughts more objectively.
When we are in a heightened state of physical and neurochemical activation we have moved into a state of protection. We have “flipped our lid!” (See my previous blog or Dan Seigel’s flip your lid analogy if you are not familiar.)
In that state of protection, we do not have good access to the part of our brain responsible for language, logic, and explicit learning: our cortex. Our best problem solving is done when our state of regulation is in a state of safety, rather than a state of protection, because our whole brain can work together and solve problems more effectively and efficiently.
In fact, our brain does some of its’ best problem solving when we are not actively thinking.
Have you ever tried to remember someone’s name or a word that isn’t coming to you, only to have it pop into your awareness later when you’ve quit thinking about it? That is what happens when you allow your brain to be in a state of “open focus”.
We will save a detailed description of open focus for another blog, but basically open focus allows us to make use of our unconscious processing. Unconscious processing is said to happen at a rate of 20,000,000 bits of info per second. The conscious mind can only process 40 bits of info/sec. Practicing present moment awareness can increase your ability to have open focus awareness, which allows you to access unconscious processing more readily.
Have I convinced you to practice present moment awareness yet? Let’s summarize…
Spending more and more moments in present moment awareness can decrease the activation of your nervous system, reduce stress, and help you to feel more regulated. When we are more regulated, we can see things more objectively and solve problems from a state that allows us access to our highest level cortical processes, including unconscious processing that is much faster than conscious processing.
“But what about being an advocate and staying fired up?”, you might say. “Doesn’t that require that we use emotional activation to solve problems?” My answer is “No.” Our emotional activation is great for bringing our awareness to a problem. But it isn’t super helpful in solving the problem.
In a recent podcast Brene Brown and activist Dr. Shawn Ginwright discuss his book, The Four Pivots: Reimagining Justice, Reimagining Ourselves. The book is described as “an activist’s road map to long-term social justice impact through four simple shifts”.
The first “pivot” is using the world to mirror back to us the things inside us that need to be healed.
And the first step of understanding ourselves is…awareness! Then, regulating ourselves to be able to come from our highest level of reasoning and understanding. Present moment awareness is one of the best ways to achieve that regulation.
When we can feel our own feelings without being overwhelmed by them, we have the potential to heal ourselves.
Doing that work is a topic for another day, too. I’m particularly drawn to Internal Family Systems work as a way of having compassion for the parts of ourselves that create those uncomfortable feelings and patterns of behavior that may not serve us well. But first comes awareness, regulation, and felt safety.
This work has the potential to make us all better practitioners, better family members, and better humans. Practicing present moment awareness is a great place to start. It can bring you a sense of peace, and I know that we could all use a little bit more of that.
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