Austin Mao walks through a layered mindfulness practice that stacks attention on your body, eye contact, peripheral vision, and temperature. The technique, called stretching, creates what he calls ultra presence, a state that feels like temporary enlightenment.
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Now imagine if you could do that with your closest loves, with your best friends, with strangers. Imagine if you could do that with your workplace, that you're able to focus and rest while you run. Imagine if you could do that with your impact in the world. Like, what could be possible is magnified, amplified.
What are some of the practices that you bring for people to experience this?
I'm excited to share this practice with you. It's a practice that I learned from the retreat Prisma, and it's called stretching. And what it's going to be about is holding multiple points of attention at the same time. So let's start by closing our eyes if that feels comfortable and safe. Taking a deep breath and just start to scan your body from head to toe. Feeling the top of your forehead, your nose, your lips, your throat, your heart, your belly, your hips, your knees and wiggle your toes. Feeling the ground beneath your feet. Just take a deep breath into your heart space. Now open your eyes and find something in the room or wherever you are that is you didn't notice before. Could be a mark on a wall or a lampshade. And now, Vishen, look in my eyes and just notice the connection that we're sharing in this moment. And now, while holding this relational context. Looking each other's eyes. Now feel your heart. Continuing looking at my eyes. Holding the relationship. Feeling now feeling your own body. And now layer on the periphery. Like look behind me while looking in my eyes, while feeling your heart. And now see if you can feel the temperature on your skin while holding the relationship. Oh, feeling inside of you. I'll take a deep breath there. What did you notice just happened for you?
I felt extremely calm and I. I started noticing different things. I can feel the temperature, can barely feel my heartbeat, but I can feel my heart. I can see you. I can see the beautiful lamp behind you all at the same time.
Yeah. Did you feel more present?
Absolutely.
Yeah. So this took a minute. And this is a demonstration of what we're calling ultra presence. Right. And it's a deeply meditative state because you're called to hold multiple contacts that normally we focus on one at a time or don't even focus on at all. Outside of us, inside of us and relationally. And as you layer on, if you try to notice the taste in your mouth, the feeling on your skin, the sounds that you're hearing, our vision. Notice your heart while noticing your knee, while noticing your forehead, while holding the relational context. Men. I believe that that is what many would describe as a temporary state of enlightenment. In addition to being a spiritual badass, we kind of just talked about this. You're also a technologist, right? One of the ways I like to think about enlightenment is that it's information. How much information can the mind hold? The mind is very precise, but it can hold only a limited amount of information. How much information can you feel in your body? The body is the seat of our emotions and the word love that we might feel. Man, how many volumes of books and reels of film have been written to try to describe the feeling of love that we feel in our heart? Millions. And the spirit has infinite information.
Right?
As we are holding these different contexts in hyper presence and ultra presence, we are tapping into so much more information than we're normally used to holding, and we become superhuman.
So the act of doing this exercise, you're saying, is allowing us to absorb information. But isn't that the opposite of presence? Isn't the point to just be with you rather than to feel the temperature and feel my heart and look at the lamp behind you? Isn't the point simply to be with you? Isn't this distraction.
