Your Energetic Presence
When we enter a room, have a conversation, go to a work meeting, send an email or get in touch with a friend, amongst many other relational interactions, we do so with an energetic presence.
How you show up is your energetic presence, and your energetic presence is a representation of the choices you make in your life.
Your energetic presence will influence whether people want to work with you, be your friend or romantic partner.
I recently had a conversation with someone where we discussed that you can often tell the difference between people who have and do not have some contemplative practice in their life, whether spiritual or not.
I think you can tell the difference because simply by having a reflective practice of looking inward, your presence and energy will naturally become calmer because you regularly work on processing and letting go of heavy energies.
For example, there will be an energetic difference between someone who wakes up five minutes before they start work and a person who meditates for 15-30 minutes in the morning.
Yes, it is a commitment to meditate every morning; at the same time, by meditating in the morning, you are building up a reservoir of calm you can tap into throughout the day when faced with modern challenges.
All of us face challenges, myself included, and I certainly want to do the work to do that from a calm and compassionate place.
So many people react from an angry, urgent and frustrated place, and then everyone loses out.
The same stands true for an evening meditation. When you give yourself 15-30 minutes in the evening to let go of heavy energies from the day, you don’t carry them with you into sleep and set yourself up to show up at your best the next day.
You can tell the difference between someone who watches Netflix or is on Instagram until 5 minutes before bedtime and someone who meditates before bed.
The incredible thing, which many people have lost a sense of, is that you have a choice here. You can decide who you want to be and the energetic presence you wish to carry with you as you move through life.
You can transform your energetic presence through your choices.
Moreover, when you decide to bring in contemplative practices into your life, they become helpful guardrails for letting in unhealthy habits. For example, meditation helped me to stop drinking alcohol entirely because my meditation practice is so important to me; I don’t want to feel hungover when I meditate in the morning.
It was as simple as that.
Don’t get me wrong, I also have unhealthy habits, but I feel that my contemplative practices have helped to curb many of them.
For example, I still have way too much chocolate. 😅
HOMEWORK
So, you don’t need to start with 15-30 minutes. You can begin with five minutes. Set a timer on your watch or phone, close your eyes, and sit in that stillness until the timer goes off. You can either focus on your breath or a point within yourself.
To start with, it is that easy.
Over time, you can extend the time and bring in more practice.
JOURNAL QUESTION
What is getting in the way of me bringing in contemplative practices?