Present Moment Awareness: A present time, moment by moment awareness of thoughts, feelings and sensations
This is the ability to be in the present moment rather than in past reflection, future planning, or analysis of something. Present moment awareness is about focusing on what is actually happening rather than the mind being in a different place than the body. The advantage of this is that we can be more attentive to what is happening in front of us.
The richness of the experience of now can be more fully felt which gives a richer quality of life experience. For example, if someone paid a lot of money to go to a concert, and their mind was somewhere else for 75% of the time, then you can’t say they got their money’s worth. By contrast, if you are fully present you can hugely enrich your experience.
In terms of managing life challenges, it helps if we become more attentive to possible threats and present to information that may be necessary for our survival - to turn up in life while it is happening. Life is a live feed and continues whether we’re paying attention or not.
One of the effects of developing this level of awareness is that we are more able to respond uniquely or freshly to each new event. This can of course include not just threats, but also opportunities that increase life’s richness.
This includes being able to be present to all the stimuli that are coming to us without tuning out and being somewhere else, like our private thoughts and feelings. A good example is when we walk down the street or in a shopping centre. Watch how present we are or how others are. It’s about nonjudgmentally noticing what is happening, and not just outside of us, but to what we can sense, what our body is telling us.
This next exercise is an active approach of bringing attention fully to the activity you are engaged in. This can be done deliberately for a defined time, for example while driving you can focus on all the actions and sensations of driving, rather than using that time for random thinking.
This exercise is split into three areas that we can practise anytime, and these three things are generally happening all the time – seeing, hearing, and sensing.