Who decides for you when you are not there?

Have you noticed that sometimes a tune goes round in your head for a whole day, and you hum it without ever having decided to?

It's a small example of what I call “sleep”. I don't mean sleep at night, but a way of living: we move, we work, we talk, and all the while we respond automatically to what we learned as children. It isn't one person's flaw: it's the normal condition we all start from. The first step is not to fight it, but to notice it.

“sleep is that ‘conditioned condition’, that state of living which responds automatically to the patterns learned in the years of growing up, patterns that steer every belief and every action mechanically.”

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Try this. For one week, whenever you have to open or close anything at all, like a cupboard, a door, a book, the cap of a bottle, remember to smile before you do it. Every time you forget, ask yourself where you were at that moment and you'll discover that you weren't there, you were absent: you won't even remember what you were thinking about. At that moment you were living, but you were asleep!

Have you noticed that if you try to stay attentive even just to your breathing, after a few seconds your thoughts have already carried you somewhere else?

It isn't a failure: it's the starting point. Presence is the ability to be in things as they happen, inside and outside us, without judging them. It is trained by calling yourself back to being there every time you notice you are somewhere else: at first for a few seconds, then for longer and longer. It's what I teach with the Meditation of Presence, which you learn in dedicated moments and then carry into your day: at the table, while walking, while listening to someone.

“There is no need to carve out whole hours or look for perfect conditions: every instant is an opportunity to practise presence.”

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Have you noticed that when you recognise one of your automatic reactions, you immediately want to blame someone: your parents, your upbringing, yourself?

It's an understandable reaction, but it doesn't get you far. Our parents, and whoever raised us, passed on to us what they had, almost always in good faith; getting angry with them, or with yourself, is a struggle that produces nothing. I know it from experience: I trained for fourteen years alongside my Teacher, falling and getting up again more times than I can count. What is needed is simple to say.

“All one has to do is begin suitable and constant work on oneself and arm oneself with a great deal of patience, because reaching a lasting presence takes long commitment.”

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