Developing Mindful Presence

Mindful Presence is an experience that occurs when your mind aligns and flows with your present experienced reality. Present experienced reality contains the natural purity of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touch, free from preconceived judgments, views, or beliefs. Present reality is not necessarily absent of thought and may contain memories of the past and thoughts of the future. 

When viewed with presence, thoughts and memories are experienced as they are, free from any belief of them as a reality within themselves but rather seen as projection within the mind. When mindful presence is developed, the power of your mind to weave reality, conditioned by your past, will end. This is experienced as a significant reduction of suffering and freedom in your relationships with yourself and others.

The key to presence is mindfulness. The Pali word for mindfulness is sati. Sati means: ‘memory’ or ‘to remember’. Not remembering the past but remembering the present: remembering your experience. Being mindful refers to activating the function of your short-term, working memory. This is your ability to keep in mind your present experience, over time without forgetting it.

*For those that are computer literate, your memories are stored in the hard drive, and short-erm working memory is your minds RAM.

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In this Insight Meditation Course, you will remember different sensory experiences to strengthen your mindfulness. This may be as simple as acknowledging sounds around you, what it feels like to sit in a chair, or the natural flow of breathing in your body.

In this course, you will be asked to be mindful of:

1. Sensory experience such as sounds.
2. The experience of your body sitting in meditation.
3. The experience of your body as it breathes.
4. The pleasure of letting go.
5. Anything that distracts you from these above experiences.

When mindful of these different experiences during meditation, it is important to move from the concept/idea of what you think these are to your actual experience of them. This brings us to the introduction to Elemental Qualities in the next section of this article.

You may have heard about being mindful of sensations during meditation, but what does this mean?

If you become aware of sensations in your body, you will start to notice their Elemental Qualities. Elemental Qualities are quite ordinary experiences, such as warmth, coolness, softness, tightness, movement, etc., that appear within your body, breathing, and mind. These are the building blocks of human experience and the smallest segment that an experience can be broken down to without ceasing.

A List of Elemental Qualities

Elemental Qualities are not things but rather a range of experiences that can be separated into four groups.

Elemental Qualities are experienced as a range of:

1. Softness to Hardness.
2. Coolness to Warmness.
3. Dryness to Wetness, Stickiness.
4. Expansion to Deflation, Movement.

These can most easily be observed at:

1. Softness, Hardness can be observed at any point of contact such as pressure, and touch of your body or focus of your attention.
2. Coolness, Warmness can be observed as temperature within your body & mind.
3. Dryness, Wetness, Stickiness can be observed within your mouth or as stickiness of your mind. 
4. Expansion, Deflation, and Movement can be observed within your body as breathing or in the wandering of your attention. The wind element is also the experience of anicca, impermanence.

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What is your experience now?

Bring your awareness to your body now, which of the above qualities can you notice? Can you notice that as you are aware of these qualities, such as warmth, you naturally become more present?  

These qualities cannot be experienced in the past or future; they can only be experienced now. By learning to tune into these Elemental Qualities, you will strengthen your attention skills and protect yourself from getting lost within your mind. Learning to tune into these experiences in your body and breathing, with mindfulness and curiosity, opens the doorway to insight meditation.

Emotions for example, appear in our body as a combination of elemental qualities + pleasant or unpleasant feelings (vedana). When we experience emotion as a range of softness to hardness, coolness to warmness, dryness to wetness, and expansion to deflation, all personal identification drops away.

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Summary

Regardless of what experience you are mindful of, the most important thing is to make a gentle effort to remember your present experience and notice when you forget. As mindfulness develops, you will live more fully in the physical world of your senses rather than within the disconnected mind-created world of thoughts and fantasies. As you build your skill by moving through each Meditation Skill in this course, keep in mind these Elemental Qualities. Regardless of what you are experiencing, be it your body, breathing, or mind, learn to tune into these building blocks of experience and see insight naturally unfold.

A Dhamma talk by Stephen Procter on Elemental Qualities is available to watch on YouTube:

• How to Separate Experience into Elemental Qualities