All of my work has always been about understanding consciousness and specifically about presence. In my seminars, which are highly experiential, I guide people to experience the Now state. And almost everyone can. But afterwards, the old mental habits take over and people lose both the energy of presence and the well-being. I knew this was true for me; I was much more able to stay in the present while I was teaching than when dealing with family and business issues. So I began to make this loss of presence my central contemplation. And what I saw was that when my attention left the Now, my mind was either in the past or the future, or I was caught in subject-object consciousness: I was objectifying myself in some way, or caught up in thoughts about others. One day I was explaining this insight to a group. As it happens, I have a Tibetan carpet in my seminar room that has a beautiful mandala in the center. As I talked, I walked around the mandala, sometimes standing in the center to represent being in the Now, and at other times standing around the periphery to show how attention moves into past, future, me and you.

Yes, at first it has to be a discipline. You have to make a concerted effort to return your attention to the present. The way the Mandala teaching helps is that it makes it easy for you to identify where your mind has gone and the emotional consequence of that. As soon as you see that you have left and where you have gone, your attention has automatically returned to the present.

Being in the Now is not about emptying oneself of thinking, but of experiencing the fullness of perceptions and sensations. Perceptions and sensations are our original experience of consciousness when we are children. To stay in the present is not about emptying the mind, but keeping the mind and body in the same place. Learning to live in the Now should not be confused with seeking to realize mystical states of consciousness; this is, of course, a possibility. But more important in our lives is the clarity, well-being and increase in our intelligence that naturally occurs simply by being present.

Stories are what we say to ourselves, often without realizing that we are doing so, about who we are, about someone else, about money, God, taxes, anything. These thoughts are beliefs, judgments, or opinions. They may have little or no truth to them. By calling them stories it helps us realize that all these things that we so readily believe are usually just our most current fiction, not something that is ultimately true. If I say I am going to work, and that is what I am doing, it is a fact. But if I say I hate to go to work, that is a story, a kind of complaint. Most of us confuse our stories with reality and this leads to all kinds of mischief and misery.

Emotions are feelings that are created by the stories we tell ourselves. For example, if I tell myself that a certain friend will never be able to truly understand me, there is no way I can really know if this is true. But as soon as I believe it, I feel angry, or sad, or lonely, or abandoned. Without my story, I will not feel those emotions and I will see my friend in an entirely different way that gives him the space to be who he is, different from me, and not in my life to give me what I want, but to be just himself.

One unusual incident does come to mind. A woman around sixty years old volunteered to have me guide her in the Mandala work as a demonstration for the group. She wanted to work on her tinnitus, the ringing in her ears that had bothered her for decades. So as I always do, I had her stand in the Now position at the center of a Mandala that I had created on the floor. When she reported that she felt calm, I had her move to the "me" position. I asked her, "What are the stories you tell yourself about having tinnitus?" She thought for a moment and then said something like, "I can never really love myself."

In the Mandala work you want to fully feel what happens to you when me-stories like those pollute your now. So I asked her how those stories made her feel. She admitted that they depressed her and made her hopeless. I asked her to stay with the actual present moment feeling of hopelessness, not simply remember it. I saw her eyes moisten with tears. Then I asked her to return to the Now position at the center of the Mandala. I invited her to imagine how she would feel if, even though she still had tinnitus, she simply stopped telling herself those stories. Almost instantly she said, "There is nothing at all wrong with me."

I thought that she was not really feeling and connecting to what she was saying. But she said, "It's true. I am completely fine." And with that she stepped out of the Mandala and took her seat. There was a bright smile on her face, but my inner skeptic still thought she was just saying what she thought I and the group wanted to hear. But I was wrong and this soon became apparent. Something had fundamentally shifted in her. Her tinnitus was still present, but from the moment she realized that it was her me-stories that were hurting her, not the tinnitus, she completely stopped poisoning herself with those beliefs. The whole process took maybe two minutes, but the insight and change of feeling that occurred has endured.

I am much more at peace and softly joyous much of the time. Challenges don't cause me to contract and become anxious, or if they do it is only very brief. I feel so much more love and so much more able to share love.