How to Actually Be Present | Matthew Brensilver
Matthew Brensilver, a meditation teacher and addiction researcher, discusses how to achieve presence by embracing painful memories as exposure therapy. He also explores navigating high-bar teachings, the brain's predictive nature, and distinguishing between true and false alarms.
Deep Dive Analysis
14 Topic Outline
Introduction to 'Being Present' and Memory's Role
Understanding the 'Present Moment'
Navigating High-Bar Meditation Teachings
Memory's Function in Meditation Practice
Practical Approach to Healing Past Memories
Mindfulness as a Form of Exposure Therapy
The Brain's Predictive Nature and Vigilance
Self-Assessment and the 'Am I Okay?' Loop
Cultivating a Futureless Present Moment
The Buddhist Concept of 'Becoming'
Finding Respite from 'Becoming'
Operationalizing Meditation Practice Principles
Differentiating True and False Alarms
Final Reflections on Inhabiting the Present
6 Key Concepts
Being Present
This refers to not being identified with discursive thought or the narrative of the moment, but re-establishing metacognitive awareness of what's arising and passing. In its most radical form, it entails surrendering vigilance, orientation, and tracking phenomena as threat or opportunity, becoming profoundly porous and defenseless.
Mindfulness as Exposure Therapy
Meditation practice acts as an 'unsystematic desensitization' where whatever can disrupt one's peace is allowed to arise. By approaching difficult memories, emotions, and thoughts with awareness and acceptance rather than avoidance, one habituates to them and transforms their 'stickiness'.
Brain as a Prediction Machine
Neuroscience increasingly views the brain as constantly modeling the world and predicting future events. This function is driven by an inherent vigilance for survival and safety, manifesting as a compulsive internal query of 'am I okay?' or 'will I be okay?'
Becoming
This Buddhist concept describes the continuous sense of self across time and the impelling force of the future, where happiness is perpetually deferred. It's the feeling of never quite arriving, always striving for a future state of rest or contentment.
Cessation of Becoming
Referred to as liberation (Nibbana), this is a radical relinquishment of the urge for another moment, freeing the mind from the continuous striving and the feeling of being 'smashed between the past and the future.' It offers a profound sense of respite and openness.
True Alarms vs. False Alarms
In the context of the mind's self-protective mechanisms, true alarms represent genuine threats that require appropriate responses. False alarms are often egoic threats or predictions of harm that do not reflect actual danger, and meditation helps to de-escalate the arousal associated with these.
7 Questions Answered
It means not being identified with discursive thought or the narrative of the moment, but re-establishing metacognitive awareness of what's arising and passing. In a radical sense, it means surrendering vigilance and being profoundly porous and undefended.
Memories should be given radical permission to arise, allowing their energy and intensity to unfurl in the space of awareness without contention. This process transforms the 'stickiness' of the past and helps heal it.
The brain functions as a prediction machine, driven by an evolutionary imperative for survival and safety. This leads to constant vigilance, making the present moment feel like a 'canary in the coal mine' of the future, always asking 'am I okay?'
Becoming refers to the continuous sense of self across time and the impelling force of the future, where happiness is perpetually deferred as one strives to 'get there sometime' rather than fully resting in the present.
While not strictly necessary, retreats are often indispensable for most people to truly appreciate the multidimensional depth and radical potentials of awareness, as they provide seclusion and conditions that help relinquish vigilance.
The practice involves learning to de-escalate arousal around false alarms, which are often egoic threats or predictions of harm that don't represent actual danger. This allows one to eventually meet true alarms (genuine threats) with different medicine.
Meditation transforms one's sense of the past by allowing undigested memories, pain, and shame to arise and be known from a perspective of wisdom and love. This process integrates the 'shards of our own history,' making them less sticky and electrified over time.
30 Actionable Insights
1. Process Memories with Acceptance & Wisdom
When ambushed by a memory during meditation, practice “love” by accepting its presence without fighting it, and “wisdom” by not taking it personally or getting sucked into the story. Observe it as sensations, then return to your breath, repeating this process to heal your relationship with the past.
2. Love to Death Difficult Experiences
When intense or sticky memories and feelings arise, “love them to death” by bringing acceptance and awareness to them, allowing their energy to be discharged and digested in the present moment, rather than resisting or fighting them.
3. Reframe Meditation “Distractions”
Instead of seeing memories, thought patterns, urges, and emotions that arise in meditation as distractions, reframe them as “the good stuff” you’re meant to see in a new and more skillful way. This helps you engage with your inner experience rather than fighting it.
4. Practice Total Non-Rejection of Memory
Practice total non-rejection of memory, giving radical permission for memories and their associated emotional resonance to arise and “blow through the space of awareness” without resistance or contention.
5. Heal Your Past Through Meditation
Understand that meditation practice can heal your past by allowing undigested memories and experiences to surface and be processed with presence, wisdom, and love, rather than being explicitly re-narrated.
6. Apply Present Wisdom to Past Pain
To digest painful past experiences, consciously apply the wisdom you possess now to the lack of wisdom you may have had at the time of the original event. This helps to integrate and heal those memories.
7. Embrace Unsystematic Exposure
Recognize that meditation practice is a form of “unsystematic exposure therapy” where whatever can disrupt your peace will eventually arise if you sit long enough. Embrace this as a core element of practice, allowing you to habituate to all your memories and inner experiences.
8. Drop Compulsive Self-Assessment
Practice dropping the compulsive self-assessment questions like “Am I okay?” or “Am I doing it right?” for even a few moments. This act of relinquishment is a deep surrender into the present, akin to a “readiness to die” to future concerns.
9. Broaden Meditation Progress Metrics
Avoid focusing exclusively on one type of barometer for meditative progress, such as only mindfulness or concentration. Recognize that practice has many mechanisms of action and can heal and awaken you in diverse ways, so appreciate all the different ways it may be functioning.
10. Disidentify from Discursive Thought
Understand “being present” as a direction not to be identified with discursive thought or the narrative of the moment. Instead, reestablish mindfulness by having metacognitive awareness of the phenomenal world arising and passing moment by moment.
11. Observe Ambient Vigilance
Become sensitive to your brain’s “ambient vigilance” and compulsive prediction about future safety, which often manifests as the question “Am I okay? Will I be okay?”. Observing this helps in disengaging from constant future orientation.
12. Equanimize Prediction & Self-Modeling
Practice metabolizing and equanimizing the agitation and phenomena of prediction and self-modeling (e.g., picturing your body, surroundings, or anticipating the next moment). Recognize this as a fear-driven impulse and observe it as arising and passing phenomena.
13. Distinguish & De-escalate False Alarms
Learn to distinguish between “true alarms” (genuine threats) and “false alarms” (egoic threats, threats to control, or predictions of future harm that aren’t actual existential threats). Practice de-escalating the arousal around these false alarms.
14. De-escalate Pain by Reframing
When experiencing pain, use the framework “pain is the prediction of bodily harm” to de-escalate catastrophizing. Assess if the pain genuinely represents tissue damage or an existential threat, and if not, consciously de-escalate the perceived disaster.
15. Move Towards Vulnerability
Instead of trying to shore up and become invulnerable, consciously move towards vulnerability and surrender more deeply, trusting the path of practice to meet your animal condition with acceptance.
16. Greet Vulnerability with Acceptance
Greet the vulnerability of your animal condition with acceptance, love, and patience, rather than demonizing yourself for natural tendencies to shore up boundaries or become territorial.
17. Cultivate Warmth & Wisdom for Presence
Cultivate an “open heart” or an attitude of warmth and wisdom (seeing things as they are, not solid, and passing) toward whatever arises in your mind, as this is the way to inhabit the present moment more fully over time.
18. Let Go of Future to Enter Present
Recognize that the present moment can feel claustrophobic due to fixation on the past and future. Practice letting go of future orientation and planning to enter the “bottomlessness” of the present moment.
19. Contemplate a Futureless Moment
To deepen your sense of presence, contemplate what a “futureless moment” would feel like. This practice encourages a profound surrender of the heart, placing all hope and attention into the present.
20. Use Death Contemplation for Surrender
Engage in contemplations about death to consider how deeply your heart might surrender if the present moment were truly futureless. This practice helps cut through pettiness and fosters profound presence.
21. Cultivate Safety to Relinquish Vigilance
To relinquish vigilance and surrender more deeply into the present moment, cultivate conditions of safety in your practice, whether through seclusion or explicit ethical commitments, allowing your inner life to feel secure enough to open.
22. Inner Safety for Life’s Uncertainties
Cultivate inner safety in your practice to surrender more deeply into the present moment. This process paradoxically prepares you to deal with the inherent lack of safety, impermanence, and unreliability that is part of the human condition.
23. Just Do the Practice
Shift your mindset from “trying to do the practice and make it work” to simply “doing the practice,” trusting that the benefits will unfold naturally without needing to force or manufacture results.
24. Surrender to Practice’s Logic
Instead of grappling with understanding and measuring every aspect of practice, surrender to its inherent logic, trusting that its goodness accrues naturally without you having to manufacture it.
25. Have Faith in Practice’s Logic
Cultivate faith in the inherent logic and mechanisms of the meditation practice itself, trusting that its benefits accrue wordlessly without needing to busy yourself with additional efforts or trying to force outcomes.
26. Cultivate Willingness to Learn & Soften
Rather than approaching meditation as an explicit project to heal the past, cultivate a willingness to learn from and be softened by everything that arises organically in your practice.
27. Question Your Mindfulness Definition
Challenge your understanding of mindfulness and presence, even if you are an experienced practitioner, to prevent staleness and open yourself to new, radical possibilities of undefended awareness.
28. Name Difficult Mental States
When experiencing amorphous dread or difficult mental states, consider giving them a name, even a slightly playful one, to help concretize and “tame” them, making them less overwhelming.
29. Offer Your Heart, Don’t Extract
Shift your meditative gesture from trying to extract something (like more concentration or insight) from the moment to one of offering your heart up to whatever is present.
30. Consider Meditation Retreats
While daily practice is beneficial, consider attending meditation retreats, as they are often indispensable for most people to develop a deeper, multidimensional appreciation and understanding of mindfulness and its radical potentials.
7 Key Quotes
To be present is to be willing to die, which is a maybe jarring way of formulating it.
Matthew Brensilver
The path of meditation, the path of mindfulness, the path into a deeper sense of presence takes us through memory and the past.
Matthew Brensilver
Mindfulness practice is a kind of exposure therapy.
Matthew Brensilver
The present moment just feels like the canary in the coal mine of the future.
Matthew Brensilver
To be present is to consider what a futureless moment would feel like.
Matthew Brensilver
There is a sense of respite from only ever living smashed between the past and the future.
Matthew Brensilver
The goodness that we've been discussing just accrues without us having to manufacture it, right? It just is embedded in the logic of the instructions themselves.
Matthew Brensilver
1 Protocols
Responding to Difficult Memories in Meditation
Matthew Brensilver- Be willing to experience the past in the present moment, giving radical permission for memory, images, and associated feelings/affect to arise without contention.
- Allow the energy and intensity of the memory to unfurl in the space of awareness, rather than explicitly trying to reconceptualize what happened.
- If caught reliving the memory, re-establish mindfulness by noticing body sensations and affective flavors, becoming conscious of the experience.
- Absorb the intensity of the experience, meeting it with awareness and love (acceptance), allowing its stickiness to be digested.
- Return to the breath or anchor of attention once the intensity subsides, understanding that this process helps heal the relationship to the past.