PRESENCE

While both your body and your breath exist in the present moment, quite often your mind is somewhere else. As often as you remember, you can bring your attention back to the felt-sense of your body and your breathing to establish presence.
 
True embodied presence allows us to be aware of the mind’s wanderings into desire and aversion—the wanted and the unwanted—while more clearly discerning what requires action and what is better left undone. With presence, we may act without striving and rest without resistance.

In mindful presence,
​Lori Furbush

The Breathing
 
An absolute
patience.
Trees stand
up to their knees in
fog. The fog
slowly flows
uphill.
 
White
cobwebs, the grass
leaning where deer
have looked for apples.
The woods
from brook to where
the top of the hill looks
over the fog, send up
not one bird.
So absolute, it is
no other than
happiness itself, a breathing
too quiet to hear.
 
―Denise Levertov