This Blog Will NOT Save Your Life, But…
About twenty years ago, my wife and daughter and I visited Kauai for the first time. I’ll never forget the contrast between the black lava formations and the turquoise water, or the close underwater encounters with sea turtles the size of my torso, or the frequent double rainbows at the end-of-the-road beach. As beautiful and memorable as it all was, I missed large sections of that vacation. When I say missed, I mean I was so focused on something I was reading that I wasn’t really experiencing what was happening in the moment. There is more than a little irony in this little anecdote, because what I was reading was Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now”(1999, New World Library).
For those of you not familiar with the book, it describes what happens when the author has an epiphany and spends most of the next two years sitting on park benches not doing anything, and simply being present to the now. I had skimmed this book several months prior and been quite curious about the state the author was creating, and I had decided the time to read it properly was during a nice relaxing vacation in a beautiful surrounding environment.
This time I read the book slowly and thoroughly, stopping frequently to stare at the beauty around me and see if anything changed for me. I had heard about this concept of “being present” before and I was always fascinated by it. It sounded like sort of a magical place where all of your troubles and worries no longer exist. Being a big worrier, that sounded wonderful to me. So I read that book as deeply as I could, often having to be roused out of my reverie by my wife and daughter wondering if I was ever going to put the book down and enjoy the heaven on Earth that is Kauai.
Fast forward about twenty years to the present, and I am now co-founder of a school of embodied leadership, where among other things, we teach leaders how to become more present and centered in all of their conversations with their teams, customers, families, etc. One small but important thing I’ve learned in the meantime is that being fully present is about placing your attention in the here and now. As one of my mentor’s, Bob Dunham, puts it, “you are where your attention is”. So, if your attention is focused on reading a book, you are present with that book, and only with that book. When you are paying close attention to what is going on in your own body, than you are present in your body. And importantly, when you are on an exotic vacation with your family, you might want to keep your attention on your loved ones and on the beauty around you, so that you are present in your vacation!
I also now have a sense of that state of no worries that I was so interested in experiencing. Being present does not make your troubles and worries go away, but it does suspend them. Because if you have your full attention in your body, or in a conversation, than you are not paying any attention to those nagging worries. And over time, giving less and less of your attention to those nagging worries does seem to make them less worrisome (you are literally worrying less).
One more hint about practicing being present is that if you want to be present in conversation (or even stillness) with others, it is helpful to have a practice for first being present in your body. This is simply a way of bringing yourself into the present before you enter into the shared space of a conversation. For a lot of people like myself, this simple act of being present in my body took quite a bit of practice. Practice really feeling what is going on in my body, practice distinguishing different locations in my body, and then remembering to become present in my body before I enter a conversation. I still catch myself not being present with others, but not nearly so often, and when I do, I now know I can use my body to get present.
Some of this is probably exactly what Ekhart Tolle was trying to get through my thick skull with his best selling book. But I read that book thoroughly multiple times (and hundreds of other self-help psychology books), and I wasn’t experiencing this concept of being in the now, and it certainly wasn’t making my worries go away.
Being and becoming present is just one of many embodied skills that I needed to develop before I could really help others grow into the best leader they can be. Our culture tends to downplay the important role our bodies play in how we show up to others and in every aspect of our lives. I used to be paranoid that my body and my emotions would embarrass me in front of others. Through embodied practices and some examination of how I am being on a day to day basis, I’ve come to view my body as a great asset in accomplishing what I want to accomplish with others, in creating the future I desire!
And now we come to what I hope is your real takeaway from this post. Reading books can sometimes cause you to do something differently, but reading books will never change how you are being. This has to do with our individual histories and how we develop as human beings. We all have embodied how we are being today, and to really change any part of that requires new embodied learning, not just learning new concepts.
So if you are one of those people like myself, who has spent a good portion of their life searching for ways to improve myself and how I experience the world both at work and in life in general, I strongly recommend you find a place where you can begin to get out of your head and embody new practices. A safe place where you go to learn and practice new embodied actions with other human beings. Books will not, but embodied learning may just change your life.
