Living with Purpose: Coming to the Present Moment
Photo by ROMAN ODINTSOV from Pexels
One of the great secrets of living a life of purpose is spending time in the present moment. I have written before about the importance of finding purpose.
It may seem to be a superfluous observation, but it is astounding how we have been conditioned to spend time everywhere except the present moment. Our minds are occupied with memories from the past and every counsellor or therapist immerse us in behaviours and practices used for dealing with the past, making peace with the inner child, and healing our wounded selves. At work and in our life, we are continuously preoccupied with planning for and worrying about the future. Managers are obsessed with annual and quarterly forecasts, and financial consultants are bombarding you with questions about your planning for your future and eventual retirement.
Which leaves the present moment.
The present moment is the only time and space where we are truly alive. It is the only moment within which we authentically know how we feel, what we sense and experience. It is the only place where we can create the changes we need for a consciously better future.
Is this not where we want to spend our attention?
“To give your positive or negative attention to something is a way of giving energy. The most damaging form of behaviour is withholding your attention.”
― Masaru Emoto
To empower yourself with the ability to create transformational change in your life, and living a life of purpose, means unlearning our obsessive focus on the past or future and bringing our attention to the present moment.
So how would we approach coming to presence?
There are multiple paths to presence. For example, there are meditation methods, yoga, relaxation practices, religious practices of prayer and contemplation, breathwork, guided visualization, and other techniques.
It is a struggle to find a technique that works for you, and many find it difficult to launch even in a simple 20-minute practice of meditation. Moreover, with monkey minds conditioned to be attention-deficient, a silent meditation focused on letting all thoughts go may seem more a torture technique than a wellness practice.
So, I would like to offer an alternative practice. It is a technique that I learned from my mentors Robert Dilts and Stephen Gilligan, and it is called the COACH state.
COACH is the acronym for the following:
- C — Centred: Inhabiting your body fully and completely. Centredness is the ability to connect with how your body makes you feel safe and balanced. We often can visualize a point of centredness with a particular point in our bodies.
- O — Open: Open to whatever may arise, whether those are feeling, emotions or sensations. When you give yourself permission to be open and observe, feelings, emotions, and sensations appear to expand your awareness and show entry points into possible insight and learning.
- A — Attend: Attend to the world around you and how you experience it through your senses now. What we see, feel (tactile sensation), hear, smell, taste at this moment.
- C — Connect: A connection to all our resources and capabilities. This connection is our own resources and capabilities AND those external resources and capabilities available to us. Connectedness is about you fitting into the larger system you are a part of.
- H — Hold: Holding the space around you and observing and experiencing it from a state of curiosity, wonder, and resourcefulness.
It is a simple exercise that you can learn and use to immerse yourself in the present moment. I provide a script below that you can use for your practice. You may wish to record this script for yourself for initial practice.
Here is a sample interpretation of the COACH state exercise:
Sit back and relax
Close your eyes … or not
And relax
Focus on your breath
Notice the air flowing in with the breath … and out
Take a deep breath in …
And out …
And breathe in …
And out …
And keep on breathing like this for a few moments
…
And on your next breath, breathe in all the way to your centre
That space in your body where you connect with your sense of self and where you feel your balance
Breathe in and out for a couple of deep breaths,
all the way down to your centre.
Saying to yourself,
I am centred
I am open to whatever may arise
Any feelings, emotions and sensations … for they are here to teach me
I am aware of all my senses
Attending to everything I see … Everything I feel … Everything I hear … Everything I smell and taste … In this moment
I am connected to all the resources and skills within me, and available to me from around me
I am holding the space for me to make the changes I need and want to make, and for anyone else to have the freedom to make the changes they need and want from a deep sense of awe, wonder and curiosity
Take another deep breath in, … let it out … and just enjoy being in this moment, here and now
Welcome to your present moment!
This little exercise takes about a minute or two and is a powerful technique to quickly come to the present moment. With practice, it becomes possible to connect with the state of presence almost instantly.
“If you feel lost, disappointed, hesitant, or weak, return to yourself, to who you are, here and now, and when you get there, you will discover yourself, like a lotus flower in full bloom, even in a muddy pond, beautiful and strong.”
― Masaru Emoto
As someone who struggled with more conventional methods of a present moment practice, this technique has been a revelation. Whenever I feel my grasp of the present moment is lost, it is a simple way to return to the here and now.
In conclusion — continuously paying attention to the past, or a constructed future, is energy mostly wasted. Instead, you can focus your energy on the only moment you are truly capable of creating transformational change in. The present moment!
