Without focus & stability, the mind is easily distracted and bewildered by our habitual patterns of thought, feeling, and bodily sensations. Once we indulge in any of these mind-body cycles of ‘automaticity’, we sacrifice both presence and awareness. For many of us, experience and memory have conditioned our minds to be routinely scattered and discursive.

Contemplative practices like meditation help us to gently sustain a relaxed focus of attention. Working intentionally and systematically with our ‘breath’ serves to strengthen our inner capacities for mindfulness (presence) and awareness (knowing). With regular practice, we can refine our attention (concentration) through the vehicle of mindfulness as it keeps us anchored in the present moment allowing space in awareness to develop so that we may notice, recognize, and acknowledge what we are observing with greater precision and sensitivity.

To routinely be with presence and awareness becomes an antidote for our discursive minds. The more we become settled & calm within the open space of our awareness, the less fragmented and scattered the tendency for our minds to be. It is in this state of ‘being’ and ‘seeing’ that things become deeper and clearer in meaning. In this space of ‘here & now’, we reconnect with our ‘natural intelligence’, a presence to be and an awareness to know.

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