• Being truly present is hard and takes practice,  but the reward is… well… everything.  What do I mean by “everything”? When you pause for a moment  and  focus on being here now, your awareness opens wide like a camera aperture, enabling you to let in all the light in  your life. You also are wiring your brain for greater happiness because the practice develops  neural pathways for being present. A University of Wisconsin study found that the  Dalai Lama’s monks showed the highest levels of happiness ever recorded in brain scans when they were focusing on  the present moment.  The rewards are “everything” because you are changing the way you subjectively experience your life, which affects your every experience.
  • Being present also increases your intuition.   To  become intuitive, you have to  focus on your five senses  plus your  feelings, rather than your thoughts.  The mind is usually too distracted to be able to receive  the guidance of the present moment that we call  intuition.  When I “read” people,  I close my eyes and take a breath; time stops and I drink in the person with my senses. The hardest part is not letting my mind distract me.  I find I can get focused  by caring about the person I’m reading, by opening my heart to them.  I make them matter  to me. In short, I feel appreciation or gratitude  for them.
  • So being present, happy, and intuitive  starts with  gratitude?  Gratitude concentrates  your awareness to a laser focus. How many times have you longed to have just one hour  in the presence of someone you have lost?  If I could have just five minutes with my little dog  Sandy who died last year, I’d take her in as never before.  I’d bury my face in her curly tangle of musty white fur and drink her up with all my senses.  My gratitude for having her back would rivet my focus, concentrating all my  awareness into that  moment.  We can have those intense moments now. We don’t have to wait until they’re  lost.  We need only stop and open to the day with gratitude, using  all our senses to take it in.  When we sense the world with gratitude, we have it all, as if our lives are just filled with presents. Every moment is larger, longer, spacious. By the end of the day, you  feel full  with all you’ve  received.
  • If you’d like to have a powerful experience of the present moment, try  this  Louis Schwartzberg film clip.  The whole piece  is amazing, but if you start at 2:36, you’ll get the experience. When you finish the clip, take a few minutes to turn to your own moment and drink it up.   Take a breathe and sit in the magnificence of your own presence.  It’s this kind of  awareness and gratitude that opens the door to…well…everything.