Stop Missing Your Life: How to be Deeply Present in an Un-Present World

by Cory Muscara

I decided this is where I wanted to do the work—the work of being deeply present in the world we live in, learning how to be human among other humans, and finding real happiness amid the chaos.

Angela Duckworth, world-renowned researcher and author of Grit,

Permission to not have to maximize every minute.

This is the first dimension of presence: softening the walls we put up, the masks we wear, and the judgments we hold that keep us constantly having to be something other than what we are, unable to honor the many parts of what it is to be human.

At the heart of presence is the capacity to stay open to the fullness of ourselves and the world around us.

How prematurely portraying presence can actually cause us to bypass the very things we need to meet, and work through, in order to develop presence

four pillars of presence—focus, allowing, curiosity, embodiment—and how practicing them is our key to deepening presence and not missing our life

relational meditation practice called circling to practice the art of connecting deeply with others

What is it like to be you?

what are you becoming aware of?

a particular sensation in your body?

an attitude in your mind?

any emotions present?

His mind is able to be with experiences fully and then release them as they come and go.

Be present and let go

What makes an experience “traumatic” is when our sense of predictability, order, and safety are compromised, combined with an inability to process and integrate the experience such that we can’t settle back into our normal flow of life.

shock trauma and developmental trauma—and the varying degrees through which they can occur.

This is not about dwelling on your past. It’s about acknowledging that the past often leaves wounds, big and small, that, when unhealed, continue to bleed in the present, even if we think we’ve put them away or moved past them.

We can think of shock trauma as too much, too soon, too fast—taking in too much stimulation without enough time or ability to process, integrate, and/or release the excess energy from the experience.

we’ll react more quickly or with anger; or we’ll just start zoning out because it’s all too much to be present with, making it feel easier to scroll through our Facebook feed than actually face the world.

book Healing Developmental Trauma, Dr. Laurence Heller and Dr. Aline LaPierre discuss five core biological needs that all humans have—connection, attunement, trust, autonomy, and love-sexuality.

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. —Rumi

Birthday Circle. In it, one person sits in front of the group, while the rest of the group huddles around them in a semicircle, making eye contact and offering their full attention.

I don’t… I don’t know how to receive it.”

Unsure how to receive affection love attention

staying with traumatic energy and defense mechanisms is the only way they start to soften, integrate, and release. Numbing or dissociating from the discomfort just keeps the energy stuck in the nervous system.

Stay with trauma don't disassociate

It’s a risk because we don’t know what sort of pain we might have to feel when we show up as our full selves, honestly, and honoring our authentic experience in the moment.

We want connection in our relationship, and that requires sharing our needs with the other person, but it’s too painful to imagine having those needs rejected, so we settle for “good-enough connection.” That’s a wall.

As you look at the figure above, you can see how the outer edges of the box represent what you might be looking for—connection,

As humans, we’re really good at avoiding pain we don’t want to feel—a few glasses of wine at the end of the day to escape our thoughts, eating beyond the point of being full to cope with negative emotions, getting lost in endless YouTube videos to avoid our stress, and so on.

Avoiding emotions

As humans, we’re really good at avoiding pain we don’t want to feel—a few glasses of wine at the end of the day to escape our thoughts, eating beyond the point of being full to cope with negative emotions, getting lost in endless YouTube videos to avoid our stress, and so on.

Avoiding emotions

Prematurely portraying and holding ourselves to some idealized endpoint, like enlightenment or happiness, can cause us to risk embracing a “premature transcendence,” as Welwood calls it, where we try to rise above the raw and messy side of our human life before we have fully faced and made peace with it. In the context of the pain box, this would be like jumping over a wall instead of doing the difficult, and necessary, work of moving through it.

When we set out to develop more happiness, calm, and peace, it’s understandable that we might view difficult emotions—like anger, shame, and jealousy—as contrary to what we’re trying to cultivate, and therefore experiences we should avoid. However, there’s a fine line between not fueling painful states and suppressing our true experience.

a general rule of thumb, adopting an identity of being at peace with all things without actually doing the real work of making peace with those things is a surefire way to further disconnect from reality, from real connection with other people, and numb ourselves to the experiences of life, bad and good.

The problem is, in most cases, it just doesn’t work, and goes against much of the neuroscience and our emerging understanding of the nature of feelings and emotions.

Cathartic exercises like punching yelling

I don’t believe we can get out of our pain box and access deep presence without feeling safe. And this is a kind of safety we don’t usually think about.

Internal safety is developed by building the psychological, emotional, and spiritual resources that enable us to meet, hold, and stay present to the fullness of our life—including the worst parts of it—and still know that we’re okay.

In fact, one of the earliest forms of meditation, known as Vipassana, is often translated as “clear seeing.”

I like to define mindfulness as the practice of being with our experience rather than in our experience, in a way that is spacious, curious, and heartfelt.

Being with the experience not in the experience

Invite your jaw to soften. Your teeth don’t need to be clenched. Invite your shoulders to soften. As well as your belly and your hands.

To help keep your focus on the breath, experiment with silently labeling the inhale of the breath as “rising” and the exhale of the breath as “falling.”

expand our awareness. Instead of just focusing on the breath, we become aware of anything that arises in our experience—thoughts, sensations, emotions, sounds, and so on. This is called open monitoring.

In the last minute or two of this meditation, reflect on anything for which you can be grateful.

The general sequence looks like the illustration here. This is the bicep curl for your mind! Again and again and again.

Once you feel your mind is more settled on the breath (being able to focus for roughly ten to fifteen breaths without much strain), you can expand your awareness to include anything in your experience.

online resources at www.stopmissingyourlife.com/resources.

Online resources

Truly embodied presence is a quality most humans are drawn toward.

Presence is beauty

There are four key qualities that I consider the pillars of presence: focus, allowing, curiosity, and embodiment, conveniently creating the acronym FACE. These are not hierarchical or sequential—that is, “allowing” is not more important than “embodiment,” nor is it necessary for it to be cultivated before the other. Instead, they collectively create a moment of presence.

FACE focus attention curiosity embodiment

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth, freedom, and happiness.”

Each moment holds the possibility for many different responses. Feel your impulse to go in one direction, take a breath, and assess if there’s a response that might be more aligned with the person you’re trying to grow into.

Specifically, we can more clearly see three main things happening in any moment: our experience, our awareness of the experience, and our story about the experience.

Experience our emotion and awareness of the experience and the story

As Jon Kabat-Zinn says, our awareness of fear is not fearful and our awareness of pain is not in pain. There’s something in the background that is just experiencing our life.

Awareness of fear or pain is not fear or pain