The art of Presence

Being present – in the moment – mindfulness – these things were a foreign concept to me just a short few years ago.  I recall a counselling session after I had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer and my world seemed to be crashing down around me.  The counsellor assigned me some homework.  “All you need to do for the next two weeks is spend five minutes everyday concentrating on your breath.  Nothing else but your breath.”

“Too easy“, I thought with confidence.

Not so. It took me the whole two weeks to master a full five minutes.

These days I can last up to 20 – 30 minutes in meditation, I can stop and take in the present moment, and I can tune in to my body – or my intuition to work out my next course of action. But not always – I still need to work at it and as always I stray from the mindfulness path quite often. My monkey mind is often swinging wildly in my head, clamouring for my attention, taking me away from what is happening right in front of me.

And now as I begin to pack up a house with 12 years of stuff in every available nook and cranny to move, I am faced with the challenge of staying present.  

I am practising the art of Packing Presence.

And the dance is a complicated one.

Each item needs to be considered – Is it useful? Does it have sentimental value? Is it necessary?  These are all easy questions to answer when we are talking about a threadbare khaki green sweater with moth holes that was given to you by your great aunt you hardly knew.  But what about a lifetime’s worth of emotionally infused things.

As I am uncovering long forgotten items, I am also uncovering long buried emotions. So many material things that we have assigned our hopes, dreams and even hurts to. So many items that we have unknowingly imbued with power.

A trip to Spain that we planned so many years ago – we were desperately unhappy – but not willing or able to define our state of despair – so we filled it with a holiday – and on this holiday everything we purchased was drenched in a vision of how happy we would be when we got home and these items filled our home.  Needless to say these items did not change the state of our relationship.  But although we are in a completely different state and place in our relationship, these items still hold so much emotional energy.

How then to stay in the present moment to ensure I am not boxing up stuff to carry with us into this new space in our lives?  How then to not dwell in the past and relive every triumph, devastation or disappointment?  How then to not trip into the future and  begin the worry of how to create our new space to be filled with all of the hopes I have for our new life?

Yet again, I am not aware of a clear cut answer. I believe it is a little bit of all – dwelling on the past to allow the emotions to arise and be cleared, dreaming into the future to define with clarity how we are going to be, and always coming back to the present to ensure anything that is coming with us – will bring us joy, ease, peace and love.

As I live in this holding pattern – this in-between-ness where this home we have lived in for 12 years no longer feels like ours, and the house we will move into is not yet ours to inhabit, I am calling upon my trust, my faith – to view this time as a gift.  A time to clear out the old and hope for the new – but remain in the present to fully understand the lesson.