As far back as I can remember, I’ve wanted to leave the world better than I found it. When I found out how much suffering exists and how much has to change, it was easy for me to get downtrodden and discouraged. My personal interactions with people who seem to be interested only in benefitting themselves no matter the cost to other increased the negative emotions I felt. Wherever I went, I allowed others to determine my emotional state. If I was surrounded by happy people, I’d be happy. If someone said something to me that I disliked, I’d get angry. This was how I lived for years.
Occasionally I experienced brief periods of true peace. The first occurred when I worked at a retirement home and lasted a week. Out of nowhere I felt a sense of peace and stability that I had never felt before. No matter what happened around me, nothing could shake or remove this sense of peace from me. Getting stuck in traffic on the way to work, finding out someone else had made my job needlessly more difficult, or anything else that would normally draw up negative emotions within me failed to do so. This sense of peace and stillness left as quickly and mysteriously as it came, and before I knew it I was back to living in my normal state of wildly varying emotions. A year or two later, I took an acting class at a local theatre. The first thing the instructor had us do at the beginning of each class was lie down on the floor and focus on our breath and our bodies; he also gave us visualizations to use during this time if we wished. Over the course of the six-week class, I experienced more peace both in the class and outside of it than I had had in a long time. After the class ended and I stopped focusing on my breath, however, that sense of peace once again left me.
About a year and a half after my acting class ended, I experienced a great transformation in my life. My friend Israel Anderson had been talking about something called presence and started offering what he called presence sessions. As I heard more from him about what this entailed, I asked to experience one. He called me up and talked me through some concepts about our minds, our thoughts, our bodies, and other related subjects. Over the course of an hour, he showed me how to clear my mind and focus on the present moment rather than dwelling on the past or dreading the future. I now had access to the tools that would allow me to live in that state of presence and peace that I had previously experienced only for short intervals.
“Old habits die hard” is a cliché, but it’s also true. Since I hadn’t known about presence until 2017, I spent most of my life living in a state of unconsciousness. As a result, it was incredibly easy to slip back into that state when I wasn’t focused. However, I had obtained an audio version of The Power of Now and the more I listened to it (in addition to reading the printed version) and practiced its teachings, the easier it became to stay present. I began to notice when I became lost in thought and could then return to a state of presence.
Being present helped me focus less on the things I can’t control and more on the things I can control. Instead of getting caught up in unnecessary drama or spending an afternoon thinking about how things might have turned out had events gone differently than they did, I found myself focusing on things I wanted to change in my own life. Gradually I turned bad habits into good ones, I learned new skills and got better at the ones I already knew, and I spent more time enjoying the company of good friends and getting to know them on a personal level. Presence has helped me a lot and I think the world would change for the better in just about every way if more people made this a regular practice.