How Do I Stay Present with Difficult Family Members? | Eckhart Tolle

So it needs to be particularly strong when you're in the presence of a number of people who are mind dominated, as most humans still are. It needs to be particularly strong when you're with somebody who is mentally disturbed.

How do I stay present with my family members? When we're all together and this comes up at dinner time, I can be present with myself and present with one family member. But when there's three of them together or two of them together, my presence goes out the window and I get caught up in the drama of what's going on.

So how do you lose presence? You get drawn into.

I get drawn into it. I also have a special needs daughter, the younger one, and she wants my attention. My husband wants my attention and I have a teenage daughter. He usually doesn't want my attention at all. Yeah, but it's a dynamic there. And then my husband and my teenage daughter going at it and me wanting to protect her and then take care of the younger one's needs. I basically just want to run away, not come back home. Yeah, yeah.

Well, that's also very good practice. You have to be. Just be aware of how, if you are able to not lose your. When you give attention, as you must give attention, of course, it's wonderful to give attention to your child or to another human being, but not to lose yourself in the giving of attention so that you are connected with the source of attention which is within you, without losing this connectedness with the source, then your attention can flow and you can say something to your child, say something to the other without losing yourself in that movement. And again, inner body awareness can be the anchor for staying present. So as you sit at the table, you have to feel yourself, feel your inner being, and then you're rooted in being and then you can give attention and you can feel the connectedness with being. You're not lost then in the mental realm they may be, but something. If there's only one person who stays connected, it usually affects the entire energy field in the room. In the same way that a deeply unconscious person also affects the entire energy field in the room. And if there is a deeply unconscious person there, for example, a deeply negative person, that may not be the case in your family, then there would have to be. Your presence would have to be quite intense to counteract that. It doesn't fight it. You don't fight the darkness, just the light needs to be stronger. You turn up the dimmer switch, but you have to turn it up anyway to some extent, as you sit with people at home there's also the additional factor that people with whom you share a lot of past, it sometimes more difficult to stay present with them than people with whom you don't share so much. Past people, acquaintances, friends, but family members. That goes back often a very long time. But it's a lovely challenge too. So practice when you're just with one or two people there, and then there's enough presence power in you so that you can sustain presence even when there are more. What is required here is vigilance of your own energy, your own consciousness. Without the vigilance, we could call it attention too. As one Zen master explains that the essence of Zen is just this, the raised finger, which means that was his explanation for Zen. That's all that's needed, attention. That means alert, presence, vigilance. So it needs to be particularly strong when you're in the presence of a number of people who are mind dominated, as most humans still are. It needs to be particularly strong when you're with somebody who is mentally disturbed. Intense vigilance, intense presence required. It needs to be particularly strong when you have a physical condition, a serious so called illness. Then that can be the motivating force for intense presence of vigilance. So you can see how much more helpful the raised finger is than conceptual explanations. You cannot conceptually explain what presence is or what vigilance is to the mind, because it immediately takes you beyond the mind. And sometimes people ask, I had somebody after a week long retreat some years ago who asked, can you just give us, just explain again the concept of presence? I just want to hear again what it really actually is. I didn't quite get it. The entire week was the practice of presence, but his mindset, I didn't quite get it. Of course it didn't get it, because he was expecting to understand conceptually and he thought if I just explain a little bit more, then he'll really become present. No, I've already said too much. This presence is just attention. Attention is non conceptual intelligence. It's the spacious awareness. This attention basically means there's little or no thought, there's just consciousness, just the light. So you shine the light on people and then you can speak. And the light is still there. And you speak. The presence is there. And as I'm speaking to you now, the presence is there, but the words are also there. They come out of the presence. And if there's a child here that says, daddy, Daddy, he just took away my toy, tell him not to do that, or whatever they say, you can look at him in that lovely presence in which there's also. There's compassion and benevolence. It's all part of that. And you look at the child. Okay, well, just don't talk. No, you say whatever comes to you without losing yourself in that, in the drama, the daily drama, the drama of daily existence, the nervousness of that. So that's your job.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

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