Refuge in the Present Moment

When the swirling of thoughts, worries, fears, and dread occupy your mind and impact your body through tension, fatigue, restlessness, how do you settle yourself?  How do you acknowledge what’s there?  How do you sit with it? How do you work with it?  What’s the aim?  What are we up for at that moment?  Can we sit still and observe the thoughts without getting caught up in them… being able to see thoughts as thoughts, not facts, not necessarily reality.  They are accumulations of our experiences and the filters we use to make sense of our worlds, including relationships.  

Drawing on awareness of the five senses can bring about feelings of ease and stillness to help soften our mind’s tendency to worry and project into the unknown future.  By cultivating stillness, our nervous system can slow down, allowing us to zoom out. Through bringing awareness away from the “default mode network” and moving into a more neutral state, we can focus and make choices about how to proceed.  To notice if we need to tend to ourselves and address certain needs.

Being able to notice what’s around us with our eyes, what our ears hear, what we taste with our mouths, different scents, and how we experience touch can be anchor points of awareness to help move our minds from rumination to a place of more neutrality where you can observe the sensations associated with what’s right in front of you at any given moment.

These portable skills can be effective tools in the moment when we notice feeling distress, discomfort, and tension.  

The process begins with a kind, gentle awareness of “what’s here now”:  

What’s being observed in the mind, body, heart, and breath.  

How do you greet your inner experiences and how are they presented to the world?  

What’s it like to slow down and check in with yourself?  

How is your breath?  Can you deliberately slow it down and see if you can extend each inhale to a count of 5 and each exhale to a count of 5.  

Notice what that’s like for you.