Presence isn't the absence of thinking but deep awareness you build through practice. Focus on bodily sensations, space around you, and feelings like gratitude. The payoff: clearer thinking, less stress, better performance, and more appealing to others.
Chapters
The efficiencies of being present. Well, reading about presence, listening about presence, and understanding the concept of being present does not in fact make you present. Only being present allows you to feel presence. When you're present, you're in a state of awareness for the current moment. This means that you're in a thoughtless state but a state of deep level of awareness for everything you must be aware of. If you're thoughtless, that simply means your mind is not swarming with thoughts. It does not mean that you cannot think. In fact, being thoughtless allows you to think better, exponentially better. And the more present you get, the better you can think. Back to the beginning. Being present isn't about understanding presence. What is it about? Well, it's about practicing presence, practicing more often being aware of the moment, focusing more on the feeling than on the thought, feeling your body, feeling the space around you, and focusing on elevated emotions such as love and gratitude. It's about feeling. When you practice, you can get deeper and even more aware. It's a safe argument that in order to achieve just about anything, you should start with presence. Otherwise, you're doing yourself a disservice right off the bat on achieving this thing. And you're also giving yourself a disservice on the experience of trying to achieve the thing. If you're being present, it feels much better doing what you're doing. And you're giving yourself a better time on this planet. Being present allows you to get more done with less thoughts. Simply, it increases the efficiency of your being. The reason we struggle with presence is simply from the infiltration of unwanted and unneeded thoughts. We think we need to keep thoughts swarming in our head because otherwise we think we won't do the right thing. The secret is that if you are fully present, you'll always know which thoughts you need and you'll be able to tap right into them. I mean, in today's world, it's easier than ever to tap into your quote-unquote needed thoughts. You can simply tell Siri to remind you, and boom, you have an extension of your mind right at your fingertips. If you keep the thoughts swarming, you'll feel levels of lower energetic emotions. So if they're swarming your head, you're gonna feel more stress and anxiety and fear. And do you think you'll be the same level of achiever? When you have an ambient feeling of uneasiness all the time? Of course not. Your level of conversation will be less appealing to others, and your perspective on all things will be skewed. Remember, perspective is almost everything. We're all individuals, we all have our own minds, and we all perceive things differently. And this is a topic for another time, or this talk would go on for much longer than intended. But if you always find yourself perceiving things worse off than you should, you're going to lead yourself down a path that you don't want to go down. I mean, look at anyone you look up to— they likely have a positive perspective on things. So your perspective automatically shifts when you're not present due to feelings of stress and anxiety caused by the swarm of unneeded ideas and thoughts. So guys, bottom line, if you are present more often, you live more efficiently, and your life feels that much better.
