Engaged Presence® practice (EPp) is like a treadmill at the gym. You don’t need to know much about the machine to become a stronger runner, you just climb on and run! :). However, some people may want to know as much as possible about the machine before they feel comfortable climbing on.
Guiding motivation of EPp: Every moment of life is pregnant with the possibility of expanding the scope and value of our life. You are what you practice; you strengthen what you exercise. In pursuit of broader scope and value, we practice non-judgemental perception of, deeper feeling about, and more expressive response to present moment events.
EPp is a small-group experiential learning format that exercises our ability to see, hear, and respond to the people around us. From a meditation perspective, EPp can be described as a practice of non-judgemental awareness of present moment events in the context of goal-oriented social interactions.
The drive of EPp practice is to facilitate a personal transformation which equips us to maximize the quality of our moment to moment life experience and our ability to make the most of the opportunities that life has to offer.
The EPp formats I’ve developed share the following characteristics:
-
Clearly defined objectives accompanied by immediate and unambiguous feedback; if the goal, process or feedback is vague, the results of the activity are vague.
-
Simple execution, easy to start without much talking; we learn more by ‘doing’ than talking about ‘doing’.
-
‘Full spectrum’ participation (mental, emotional and physical); we strive to bring our whole being into the present moment.
-
Continual Whole-Group Attention on the same ‘ball’ whether or not one is involved in the current interaction; optimal learning is facilitated by an optimal mix of participation and observation.
-
Levels of complexity to climb as we gain proficiency; boredom is a sign of non-growth.
-
Eventual likelihood of inducing cognitive overload; we strive for ever-more graceful response to stressful situations.
Below I present more specific transformational growth elements I feel have resulted from my focus and training in Engaged Presence practice. I offer these as goals to those who pursue a course of Engaged Presence practice:
-
Greater Emotional Equanimity: Rumination on the past and excessive anticipation of the future are often subjectively unpleasant and unproductive. EPp raises our awareness of non-present attention and lowers the effort to shift from the non-here-now to present moment attention and action.
-
More effective participation in the present: We are often presented with the opportunity to expand the scope and value of our lives. Exercising and increasing our perceptive/expressive responsive abilities maximizes our chances to notice and respond fully to the opportunities life offers us.
-
More effective preparation for the future: Future objectives are achieved by the action of concerted present-moment participation.
-
Greater psychological resilience: Engaged Presence practice taxes one’s ability to attend and participate in continuous full-spectrum interactions. I believe the fact of subjective fatigue indicates the existence of limited internal resources. In my experience, repeated Engaged Presence practice raises one’s ability to sustain extended goal oriented social activity.
-
Greater Psychological flexibility: an EPp workshop consists of several distinct exercises/games, each with a different format. Each format includes a process of procedural evolution that serves to advance the complexity of the game as participants’ skill increase. A byproduct of experiencing diverse evolving formats is an expansion of our ability to adapt to evolving circumstances.
Skills gained in a class of goal-oriented social activities transfer easily to real-life goal-oriented social activities.
In the first workshop we’ll practice a single format that features mostly physically engaged presence but also small parts of emotive and verbal/cognitively engaged presence:
We’ll stand in a circle and endeavour to keep a light plastic ball aloft between us with small taps of the hand; essentially we’ll be playing beach ball. We’ll employ the simple verbal exercise of counting out loud, individually each in turn as we hit the ball: “one, two, three” etc.
Simple counting does not actually require listening, so soon we’ll ‘raise the level’ by introducing ‘rules of the moment’ which serve to gradually evolve the verbal sequence such that correct verbal response requires the accurate perception of the preceding word.
Emotionally engaged presence is practiced by expanding our perception of the preceding person’s ‘transmission’ to include body language, verbal qualities such as cadence, tone, amplitude, emotional nuance, etc.
While simple to describe and perform initially, the intensive nature of the activity can induce fatigue. We practice responding to fatigue by ‘gracefully disengaging’ for recovery, then gracefully re-engaging when ready.
