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During a particularly hard break-up in my 20s, a friend advised me, “The more present you are during this process, the bigger the present you’ll get out of it.” And though I barely understood what that meant, I gave it a try and an odd thing happened. I saw that I was choosing the big, dramatic grieving process I was going through. And that meant it was optional.
In The Art of Presence, Eckhart Tolle says, “Through thought you cannot possibly grasp what presence is.” But he gives some clues to point us in the right direction. He says it’s there, “when you’re not thinking about the last moment, or looking to the next one.” And he uses phrases like “a state of relaxed alertness” and “a spacious stillness,” to describe it.
Thich Nhat Hanh said, “The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence.”
Our presence is tremendously rare and hugely valuable. Especially in this age of epidemic distraction, it’s increasingly difficult and uncommon to choose a voluntary time-out from technology, data, and our own mental analysis. But unlike the artificial value of a coin that accidentally got stamped with a head on both sides, our presence can do for us what nothing else can. And we can make it more abundant by simply choosing it.
Although it may not put food in our belly, most other problems disappear with presence. The need to fix or relive the past disappears. The need to avoid certain unwanted events in the future disappears. Even if we're working on something now that will benefit us in the future, with our presence, we work on it now in order to work on it now. And that’s enough.
The allure of distraction, which so often threatens our presence, dissolves when we practice being present. Do you know the word obviate? I like to write using words that almost everyone understands, but there’s only one word I can think of that means “to make unnecessary,” and that word is obviate. Learning to deepen our presence obviates the urge for distraction and mental departure from our current reality.
With presence, we perceive all kinds of intelligence and detail that we’re otherwise deaf and blind to. We know when to eat and when to stop eating. We know how to move our body in a way that doesn’t cause pain or injury. Our work becomes more interesting. Our relationships become healthier. We listen better and we feel heard.
With two kids, my presence is requested almost incessantly. I hear the word Papa at least 100 times a day. Often, I hear it ten or more times in quick succession. We all yearn for someone’s total presence with us. These are the moments of connection between what is the same in both of us. Presence uncovers what’s real in this moment. And that’s refreshing, exciting, and affirming.
When we’re all so busy that we see time as a commodity, it can seem that giving our presence to someone else is like giving away our treasure. But are we actually giving something away?
Of course not. When we “give” our presence we gain the present. To withhold our presence means both we and the other person miss out.
So, how can you learn to be more present? It takes practice. If you’re new to this, I don’t recommend making a goal like, “I’m going to be more present from now on.” I don’t want to discourage you, I just want you to be realistic about what you’re up against – a lifetime of habits and a sea of tantalizing distractions.
Try something a bit less ambitious, such as this: Once a day, as you begin some activity – whether it’s buying groceries, playing Candyland, eating a meal, and listening to a friend’s problems – select this activity as an exercise in presence. In your mind, identify what exactly you’re doing – “I’m vacuuming the floor” – and devote yourself to that. Don’t run away in the middle of the activity. This means don’t pick up your phone, don’t depart in your mind to explore other thoughts and ideas, don’t visit the past, don’t anticipate what’s next, don’t judge. Just dwell in the present. Be saturated by the present. Feel everything. Accept everything. And let each next moment come.
Over time, quicker than you might think, you’ll start regaining your attention. You’ll be able to focus on something for more than five seconds. You’ll begin to yearn for this, which will make your practice much easier. And as you start willingly selecting more and more moments to be completely present, you’ll experience an unending offering of presents.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
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Optimism is a choice and it’s a possibility that available to all of us. If optimism hasn’t come naturally to you, it’s simply a consequence of habits of thinking which can be changed. Changing the way you think takes focused effort, but it works more quickly than you might guess. Plus, the fast return on your effort helps support your enthusiasm to keep at it.
The Dreambook – the life planner Briana and I created – is an excellent tool for implementing such a change. Simply following the method in the book will make you more optimistic. You’ll be doing things like: identifying your gifts, values, and purpose and consciously bringing them into your daily activities; clarifying your dreams and figuring out what truly makes you feel happy and productive; setting goals, breaking them down into manageable plans, and scheduling those plans in your calendar; prioritizing the things that feed your soul; expressing gratitude; and more.
Besides resulting in great tangible improvements, this structure builds self-trust and a positive outlook. It works.
Beyond the basic processes in the book, you can use its planning, scheduling, and tracking tools to work in scientifically proven tactics for supporting an optimistic mindset. Here are a few to try:
- Do kind things for people every day.
- Print out pictures of friends, family, inspiring people and put them in your space.
- Meditate. It supports peace, positivity, and perspective.
- Avoid negative media (and reduce media consumption overall).
- Spend money on fun and memorable experiences (rather than entirely on stuff)
- Treat your leisure time as a deliberate and purposeful activity. Go all-in, don’t be thinking about the “productive” things you could be doing instead.
- Routinely remind yourself of your strengths. If you can’t readily think of them, ask friends to help you identify them and write them down.
- Cultivate a “growth mindset” – believe in your ability to improve, and see failure as a learning experience.
- Maintain an environment that’s full of humor, happiness, and beauty and take little breaks throughout the day to notice these things.
- When stuck in a mundane task, figure out a way that it’s going to serve a higher purpose. Even if it seems relatively insignificant in itself, what does it enable that’s more important?
- As you begin a task take a moment to expect a positive outcome (using self-talk about your strengths and track record, or simply visualizing things going well). This primes you to perform well and spot opportunities.
- Focus on what’s working well in your life.
- Make a commitment to stop complaining.
- Write down what you’re grateful for daily.
- Give a genuine compliment to someone every day.
- Catch yourself in negative trains of thought; pick up your attention and put it on something else.
- Remember that a hardship is not a sign that everything is going wrong, or that it’s bound to snowball into more hardship. Every day people turn hardship into opportunity.
- Before speaking / posting, ask yourself: (1) Is it true? (2) Is it kind? (3) Is it necessary? (4) What is my purpose? (5) Does it improve upon the silence?
- Slow and deepen your breathing – this helps slow down your mind and promotes more evolved thinking.
- Sit / stand up straight. Don’t slouch.
- Journal about your positive experiences – this grows them and helps them sink in.
- Appreciate small changes in the right direction. Lots of small changes are more likely and more sustainable than one giant change, and they amount to the same degree of change.
- Exercise.
- Exchange touch more often. A hug, a pat on the shoulder, a handshake, a massage – we’re wired to associate welcome touch with feeling safe, calm, and connected.
- Make it harder for yourself to engage in behaviors that don’t serve you (e.g., put the candy out of reach).
- Make it easier for yourself to engage in behaviors that are good for you (e.g., put your exercise equipment in a place that’s easy to access and pre-determine when / where / how you’re going to exercise).
- Prioritize your relationships!
- Don’t get pessimistic by focusing on short-term downward trends; back up far enough to see the broader trend toward betterment.
- Read about the lives of impressive people.
- Believe in human potential, ingenuity, and compassion. We can accomplish incredible things.
Whew! That’s enough to completely revolutionize even the most cynical pessimist’s perspective.
I encourage you to copy/paste or print out that list and stick it in your 2022 Dreambook and work these approaches into your schedule. Pepper your pages with reminders. Give each one a good, consistent shot. Positive people don’t just have a better experience of life, they change the experience of those around them.
You rock,
Peter
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When a patient comes in to see me, I get a brief opportunity to facilitate a shift toward the positive. I might overhaul their diet, give them exercises, insert acupuncture needles, or prescribe some medicine. It’s clear that these interventions help. But when I look back at the treatments that were major turning points for people, about half the time what made the difference was something I said.
Most of what I say is pretty simple stuff. The more simple, the bigger the potential impact. All the essential truths of the great spiritual traditions are simple. But they’re underappreciated and easily forgotten. There’s so much other stuff vying for priority real estate in our minds. And in a time when we put so much value on complexity – science, for instance – simple concepts don’t get taken seriously. Someone once said, The truth is simple. If it were complicated, everyone would get it.
The nice part about profound truths being simple is that you don’t have to work so hard. Stop trying to have all the answers; just listen and remember what you already know. The simple truth I want to share with you today is one you are undoubtedly familiar with: positive thinking makes good things happen. If someone said to you, “I have the solution to most of your problems: think positive,” you might say, “I have the solution to why nobody likes you: unsolicited, crappy advice.” But I urge you to reconsider.
If you consistently had positive thoughts about your life, do you know what would happen? You would feel consistently positive about your life. And that pretty much constitutes a good life, doesn’t it? Regardless of whether or not your life is exactly the way you want it to be, if you cultivate positive thoughts, your consciousness – your experience of life – will be more positive. Isn’t that what really matters? Your perspective is more important than your circumstances. Wouldn’t you rather be poor and happy than rich and miserable? If you’re happy, you’re happy.
But it’s not just a mind trick where you fool yourself into being thrilled by a pathetic life. As you make a habit of forging positive thoughts, you become a more positive person, and then the objective circumstances of your life change. Have you ever met someone who was really successful and also super positive? Which do you think came first? I would venture to guess it was the positive part.
The tricky aspect – or so it seems to a mind that loves complication– is actually remembering to think positively. Many people feel it’s not their innate nature to be positive, or that life circumstances have made it difficult to be an optimist. But they have just made a habit of focusing on and emphasizing negative viewpoints. It’s true that the glass is both half empty and half full. Both perspectives are valid, but they are not equally meaningful observations. The optimist focuses on what is and the pessimist on what isn’t.
Like the song goes, accentuate the positive. Here’s how:
- Look and listen for good signs, positive news, beauty, and fascinating things, and then latch onto them, talk about them, share them, savor them, amplify them, run with them. Imagine you just tapped into a vein of gold in the earth, and now you want to follow that vein. Jump from one good thing to the next. Make a game out of it.
- Create more positivity in the world. This is especially important if you find it hard to arouse your own optimism. Instigate positivity in people around you, even if you feel dark inside. Create the vein of gold that you can then follow, by asking people about their lives, their kids, their dreams. You will ignite a light in someone else that will lead you in the right direction. Then keep doing it. Deliver genuine compliments. Help others to see the positive side of whatever they’re grappling with. It’s often easier to do for others than for yourself.
- Get out of the dirt. Following the gold vein is as much a matter of not choosing to veer into the dirt as it is a choice to follow the gold. Catch yourself choosing to indulge in negativity and be disciplined about shifting your attention to something else. It’s like breaking an addiction. Notice which of your acquaintances have a “this sucks” mentality and (a) hang out with them less (b) laugh internally at everything negative they say – lightly, not disparagingly (c) don’t let them throw you off your gold vein. Also, stop watching Breaking Bad. Choose your media consumption consciously.
- Tweet/post/comment responsibly. The stories and opinions you choose to share shape who you are in the world – plus who and what you attract. Are you a positive influence on your environment or a negative one? Before you click “Post,” look at what you’ve written. If it’s snarky or amounts to “Doesn’t this suck?” just delete it. You won’t feel any regret.
- Respond with humor to situations that would otherwise make you angry, irritated, or anxious. I know it’s hard, but if your habit is to relinquish the whole gold vein just because of some stupid situation, you simply cannot engage with it in an adversarial way. Be imperturbable. Go on a drama fast. Stay committed to your positivity.
- Lose the belief that finding problems and errors makes you smart or likeable. People who enjoy finding what’s wrong with everything rarely care as much about looking for solutions.
- Know what you want. Most of us spend so much time thinking about our current problems and the undesired future situations we hope to avoid that we have a clearer sense of what we don’t want than what we do want. Know with laser-like precision what kind of life you want and replace the habit of dwelling on what you don’t want with savoring the anticipation of getting what you do want.
Once you’re in the zone, let’s go have some tea together. Positive people are fun to be around. I wonder what cool thing you’ll do next.
Be well,
Peter
[post_title] => The Truth is Simple. Start Feeling Better.
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During a particularly hard break-up in my 20s, a friend advised me, “The more present you are during this process, the bigger the present you’ll get out of it.” And though I barely understood what that meant, I gave it a try and an odd thing happened. I saw that I was choosing the big, dramatic grieving process I was going through. And that meant it was optional.
In The Art of Presence, Eckhart Tolle says, “Through thought you cannot possibly grasp what presence is.” But he gives some clues to point us in the right direction. He says it’s there, “when you’re not thinking about the last moment, or looking to the next one.” And he uses phrases like “a state of relaxed alertness” and “a spacious stillness,” to describe it.
Thich Nhat Hanh said, “The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence.”
Our presence is tremendously rare and hugely valuable. Especially in this age of epidemic distraction, it’s increasingly difficult and uncommon to choose a voluntary time-out from technology, data, and our own mental analysis. But unlike the artificial value of a coin that accidentally got stamped with a head on both sides, our presence can do for us what nothing else can. And we can make it more abundant by simply choosing it.
Although it may not put food in our belly, most other problems disappear with presence. The need to fix or relive the past disappears. The need to avoid certain unwanted events in the future disappears. Even if we're working on something now that will benefit us in the future, with our presence, we work on it now in order to work on it now. And that’s enough.
The allure of distraction, which so often threatens our presence, dissolves when we practice being present. Do you know the word obviate? I like to write using words that almost everyone understands, but there’s only one word I can think of that means “to make unnecessary,” and that word is obviate. Learning to deepen our presence obviates the urge for distraction and mental departure from our current reality.
With presence, we perceive all kinds of intelligence and detail that we’re otherwise deaf and blind to. We know when to eat and when to stop eating. We know how to move our body in a way that doesn’t cause pain or injury. Our work becomes more interesting. Our relationships become healthier. We listen better and we feel heard.
With two kids, my presence is requested almost incessantly. I hear the word Papa at least 100 times a day. Often, I hear it ten or more times in quick succession. We all yearn for someone’s total presence with us. These are the moments of connection between what is the same in both of us. Presence uncovers what’s real in this moment. And that’s refreshing, exciting, and affirming.
When we’re all so busy that we see time as a commodity, it can seem that giving our presence to someone else is like giving away our treasure. But are we actually giving something away?
Of course not. When we “give” our presence we gain the present. To withhold our presence means both we and the other person miss out.
So, how can you learn to be more present? It takes practice. If you’re new to this, I don’t recommend making a goal like, “I’m going to be more present from now on.” I don’t want to discourage you, I just want you to be realistic about what you’re up against – a lifetime of habits and a sea of tantalizing distractions.
Try something a bit less ambitious, such as this: Once a day, as you begin some activity – whether it’s buying groceries, playing Candyland, eating a meal, and listening to a friend’s problems – select this activity as an exercise in presence. In your mind, identify what exactly you’re doing – “I’m vacuuming the floor” – and devote yourself to that. Don’t run away in the middle of the activity. This means don’t pick up your phone, don’t depart in your mind to explore other thoughts and ideas, don’t visit the past, don’t anticipate what’s next, don’t judge. Just dwell in the present. Be saturated by the present. Feel everything. Accept everything. And let each next moment come.
Over time, quicker than you might think, you’ll start regaining your attention. You’ll be able to focus on something for more than five seconds. You’ll begin to yearn for this, which will make your practice much easier. And as you start willingly selecting more and more moments to be completely present, you’ll experience an unending offering of presents.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
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