More present in the future

Are you trying to will yourself into being more present?

People tend to explore mindfulness when they feel like they haven't been present enough in the past.

That's was motivated me. I hoped there was some trick I just needed to understand.    

Now I see mindfulness practice as attentional exercise that supports being more present in the future.

Can you will yourself into being physically stronger than you are right now? 

Have you ever been able to force yourself to relax when you’re feeling anxious? 

I don't think either of these things is possible.

But I know that it's possible to become so intimately familiar with real-time perceptions that you're able to focus on what's happening more and wrestle with it less. 

Attentional exercises develop attentional skills over time.

If you want to inhabit your life more fully right now, you need to have invested some time and energy before now. 

This isn't a new idea. The ancient Greek poet Archilochus observed, “We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”

Now is always the perfect time to exercise your attention.  

Here are a few resources to help you work toward feeling more present in the future. 

• Watch Lucy Kalanithi's TED Talk, "What Makes Life Worth Living in the Face of Death"
   
• Read Mind Your Life by Meg Salter.
   
• Pre-order Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics by Dan Harris and Jeff Warren.
   
• Learn meditation exercises from Shinzen Young using the new Brightmind app. His Unified Mindfulness system provides the foundation for my meditation practice and my teaching efforts.
   
• Track your practice, explore tons of guided exercises, and connect with other meditators using the free Insight Timer app. 
   
• Drop into mindfulness practice sessions in my home the first three Wednesdays of every month.
   
• Find time on my calendar to chat about individual coaching.

Recent blog posts

• Airport Insecurity

  Flying provides a steady stream of frustrations: the crowded isolation of DIY check-in, the sock-footed walk on eggshells through TSA, the hypervigilant tracking of an elusive ETA.

  All the inevitable discomforts of air travel make it a fertile attentional fitness opportunity. I’ve been developing a strategy that transforms the situation from hell into heaven. Okay, maybe more like a really productive purgatory.

• If These Clouds Could Talk

  What does it mean to let our thoughts drift by like clouds?

  Shifting our awareness from what our thoughts mean to how they fluctuate is an attentional exercise that develops liberating abilities over time. 

  Observing the movement of clouds can provide a glimpse into how we can relate to mental activity more objectively, but it oversimplifies things when the analogy is taken too literally.

• The Sacred Stays Sacred
  
  I took this photo with a disposable camera – after accidentally frying the digital one I'd brought on the first day of the trip – and it's one of my all-time favorite shots. It's a reminder to me that holiness and human imperfection are inseparably tangled up together.
   
• Total Eclipse of Internal Interference
  
  The real magic happens when we become intimately familiar with the moment-by-moment experience of being alive. Instead of trying to force complete experiences to happen. I focus on setting the stage for them to happen by exercising my attention. 
  
  When remembering to notice that we're alive becomes a habit, we begin to erode the internal friction that obscures our view of the richness we're swimming in every day.
   
• Naked and Aware: Bare Attention in the Shower

  There are many obstacles to establishing a consistent mindfulness routine. Three big ones are finding time to practice, being distracted by thoughts, and feeling bored.

  I discovered an exercise that obliterates all three simultaneously, but I’m pretty sure you’re going to hate the idea of it.

  As with any good attention exercise, it leverages an ordinary activity as an opportunity to build capacities that for responding more effectively to the challenges of ordinary life.

• follow me on Facebook or LinkedIn
• sign up for a class
• request 15 minutes to discuss individual coaching
• recommend an attentional fitness workshop where you work

Daron