Eckhart Tolle instructs listeners in simple, everyday practices for cultivating presence: begin the morning with five minutes of pure presence (avoid immediately reaching for phones), end the day with presence before sleep, and interrupt automatic doing (e.g., sit quietly in your car for 30–60 seconds). He introduces "window meditation"—using any window or framed view to give full attention and discover beauty—and recommends closing the eyes to feel the inner body and access a formless, extensionless awareness (the transcendent "I am"). Techniques include breath/abdomen-focused grounding and gently letting thoughts pass without attention.
When you wake up in the morning, give yourself five minutes of pure presence. Be present in your entire energy field, every cell of the body. And you lie in your back and your tense, just not. You can be a person. Once you get up out of bed, you start becoming a person. But while you're still there, be the presence. So there's nothing to think about. There's only sensing presence pervading your entire energy field, being it. Beautiful day, way to start the day. Resist the temptation of reaching for your phone. I just want to know what the weather is like. Well, look out of the window. I need to know what he tweeted today. Who is he? And when you go to bed. Also important, the last five, ten minutes, whatever before go to sleep from presence rather than from thought. Avoid digital devices in bed and be present. That changes the nature of your sleep too. I often say if you drive to work, it's important to interrupt the doing with occasional realizations of being. So you get into your car, you close the door, and you sit there for 30 to 60 seconds, just being. But not internally waiting for 30 or 60 seconds to be over already, but to really just be there. So you interrupt this flow that drags you along in the doing dimension and bring in being so. And then during the day, many times you bring in moments of beingness when you connect with the deeper eye. And you can use external things to help you. Looking at a potted plant in your office or wherever you are, or looking at a tree outside the window, or looking at the sky, looking through the window. You can use any window as a meditation, whatever window it may be and whatever may be on the other side of the window. I call it the window meditation. Look at the window and give attention to what's outside the window, whatever it is that you can see. But while you see it, feel yourself, the being of you. And then there's not a person perceiving it. There is a presence. You have become. You have transitioned from being a person to being the presence. There was this little episode that Oprah did some years ago where they gave people an empty frame. People, they stopped people in the street and they gave them an empty picture frame and they had take this picture frame and direct it anywhere and wherever you direct it, to just give attention to what it is that you're looking at in this frame. So you go around with a picture of me, stop somewhere, and there's the floor, and you hold it for a few seconds and you give it. It becomes a painting. So wherever you direct it, it becomes a painting, which means you give your fullest attention and you discover beauty everywhere. An amazing thing. And so that gave me the idea of the window meditation. When you look, wherever the window may be, you give it attention. I even have a succession of photos that I took on my iPhone of different windows in different places in the world. Hotel windows mostly. And so looking different. Just maybe one day I'll project it on a screen somewhere. The window views, the window meditation. So being. And of course you can also, if you get a chance, completely do away with sensory perception and close your eyes. And that's meditation as such. Close your eyes and sense the beingness of you. Sense the presence. Be that. And that's the. You're not doing a meditation. You're not doing anything. You are realizing being. You're realizing I am the I am. And that is when you access it directly. So no more sense perceptions, except what happens accidentally. But you don't necessarily focus on anything. You just focus on the power of presence, the power of presence in you, which is essentially you. And it usually incorporates your entire body. It's not really the physical bodies, but something deeper that underlies the physical body and that which underlies the physical body. You may want to close your eyes for a moment, but that which underlies the physical body actually doesn't have any shape or form anymore. It does not. Doesn't really have any extension in space anymore. There's just presence. And that's an incredible realization. Then you go deep enough into the body, it ceases to be the body. And you may lose a visual image of yourself as body. And all that's left of you is an extensionless point of presence. It's wonderful, an extensionless. There's no space or time in it anymore. It's the transcendent you, transcendent I. There's only one I. So you have no shape anymore, no shape or form, and you're not subject to time. And let's see, the power of presence. That is the power of the one power, the one that underlies the cosmos. It's if thoughts come in, don't give them any attention, then they drift away again. It's fine if you drift out of it, taking a deep breath, a kind of belly breath, two or three times on your belly. Your abdomen expands as you breathe in, contracts as you breathe out, and then puts you back in touch with the inner body. And then again, the image of body may, if you go deep enough, may disappear. And all that's left is that awareness, that point of awareness, extensionless awareness that is so wonderful.
