Expanding the Present

Sickness and recuperation are great times for practising new spiritual modalities.

I've almost finished David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous, and I was motivated enough by his description of a method for expanding the Present to try it out for myself.

Abram recommends doing this outdoors, preferably in a non urban setting, but I started it inside, in a suburban setting, being the contrary cuss that I am at times.

His method is to stand (sit in lotus in my case) and imagine the full weight of all your years of personal past extending behind you in a sort of balloon-like structure, while all your years to come - your personal future - inflates a similar balloon in front of you.
You are thus standing at the confluence of the two balloons - past and future - in a pinched funnel meeting somewhere in your body. Around your third chakra, or solar plexus, would be about right.

Fairly slowly, start collapsing the two balloons of past and future time. Feel the mass of all this temporality flow into the space where you stand. Faster and faster, deflate the balloons, as the time-space immediately around you....expands.

I can't explain the feeling this engenders. You're going to have to try it for yourself to see what I mean. It's a rush of Presence so intense it can take your breath away. But breathe.

With practise, I can do this almost anywhere now, and it's a very handy tool when the Machine threatens to envelop me during my day-to-day living.

I'm still looking for the right words to describe this feeling. Umm. Intense 'hereness' as well as 'nowness'. A sense of Reality quite a bit more persuasive than the normal mode we tend to live in. Deep. Comforting. Strong. Reassuring.

Nope - I was right, I don't have the words. Maybe the words are...not.
Maybe you have to go out there and do this.

Pic: Found Here