Don’t sleepwalk through life. There is a 4K experience waiting for you to discover it. This is the power of presence.

What is presence exactly?

Presence, as I know it through my meditation and mindfulness practice, is the act of being in the present moment without thought and without examining the past or future. It’s the act of being here, now. When Buddhists talk about needing to be here, what they’re really saying is, Stop thinking. The world around you as it is is the perfect place to stop thinking and find joy.

How do we become present?

Becoming present is a habit we need to cultivate. There are two states humans operate in: autopilot and presence. Both are spectrums, yet we can only exist on one of those two spectrums. Becoming present means paying more attention to the sensory input you’re receiving from your environment: the light reflecting off the candlestick, the sound of the bird singing, the taste of a ripe tomato. It’s the act of falling in love with your direct experience. When we truly become present, there is no thought. There is no past or future. We fall, gleefully, into the deep now–and we can stay as long as we like.

Presence is what helps us step out of the story we tell ourselves about the life we are living. We say that we are jealous or poor or angry or beautiful. Returning to the present, none of this matters. It doesn’t matter what is happening to you because you can always tune into the direct experience of the world around you.

There’s great wisdom in being present. When you are present, it isn’t as if you are simply more aware of your surroundings. There’s a gentleness that always holds you. You realize there is something more to being present, like tapping into an ever-present god. Thoughts disappear. Emotions disappear. There is nothing but the act of being, and this reminds us of how we can live if we choose to.

Presence is something that must be chosen. The Buddha said “No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.” This means that we alone can choose presence. I can ask you to choose presence. I can show you that presence can help you, tell you how much it will improve your life, and give you strategies to do so, but I cannot become present for you.

You must become present in order to experience this joy for yourself.

It doesn’t take much.

It just requires that, whatever you are experiencing, you tune in with your full attention, becoming so wrapped up in the experience that you lose all thought or emotion.

It’s focused curiosity, moment by moment.

When we do this properly, we live our lives in meditation.

And we look back as our lives end, we smile–because we spent every moment of our time on Earth like it was our last.