Quotes About Presence

I'd been expecting someone so nondescript he was practically invisible, maybe the Cancer Man from The X Files, but this guy had rough, blunt features and wide blue eyes, and the kind of presence that leaves heat streaks on the air where he's been.

When you walk into the house, you want to be seeing your woman, and hearing her. You need to know she's there, or what's the point in having her at all?

what I'm saying to you is, if you're going to have a woman in the house, you want one that fills a bit of space. It's no good having some skin-and-bones scrap of a girl with a mousy wee voice on her and not a word out of her from one day to the next. You wouldn't be getting your money's worth. When you walk into the house, you want to be seeing your woman, and hearing her. You need to know she's there, or what's the point in having her at all?

The air is rich as fruitcake, like you should do more with it than just breathe it; bite off a big mouthful, maybe, or rub handfuls of it over your face.

the air around us had split open and whirled and re-formed itself and there was one less person in the room.

Knocknaree wood was the real thing, and it was more intricate and more secretive than I had remembered. It had its own order, its own fierce battles and alliances. I was an intruder here, now, and I had a deep prickling sense that my presence had instantly been marked and that the wood was watching me, with an equivocal collected gaze, not yet accepting or rejecting; reserving judgement.

I want you at home so that any time I start getting panicky, I can stick my head in and look at you and take a few deep breaths. It's for my sake, not yours.

What I'm saying to you is, if you're going to have a woman in the house, you want one that fills a bit of space. It's no good having some skin-and-bones scrap fo a girl with a mousy wee voice on her and not a word out of her from one day to the next. You wouldn't be getting your money's worth. When you walk in the house, you want to be seeing your woman, and hearing her. You need to know she's there, or what's the point in having her at all?

Have fun, she wanted to say, but it might sound dismissive, so she said nothing. He took her silence as a sign of her disappointment to being deprived the glory of his presence. "Don't worry," he said. "I won't be late. Why don't you put on a little sumpin' sumpin' and surprise me.

What do they do for a village idiot when you're here?

Two qualities are essential to mindfulness: even-hovering attention and tenacity.

order for mindfulness to work for us, we need to make an effort to strengthen our ability to be mindful.

This quality of seeing things freshly, as though for the first time, lies at the heart of mindfulness.

Mindfulness is not thinking about what we experience, but a direct, bare attention to the experience itself.

Try not to get locked into your conceptual mind—it interferes with what's happening naturally. Just let go of the schema thoughts with a mindful presence. Just stay connected to awareness and try to be mindful whenever the schema appears. Try not to be concerned about what needs to happen; healing happens by itself, if you let it, with the soothing effect of awareness.

If you stay mindful as thoughts appear in your awareness, they reveal their empty nature and eventually dissolve. Let them vanish on their own, without adding to them in any way.

Instead of being swept away and captured by a thought or feeling, mindfulness steadily observes those thoughts and feelings as they come and go.

By becoming mindful we can drop the compulsion to try to make disturbing thoughts go away, to agitate ourselves by worrying, or to try to make things better or in any way different. We can be with life just as it is, observing completely what happens, without immediately trying to change it.

What would it be like if I could accept life--accept this moment--exactly as it is?

Each time you meet an old emotional pattern with presence, your awakening to truth can deepen. There's less identification with the self in the story and more ability to rest in the awareness that is witnessing what's happening. You become more able to abide in compassion, to remember and trust your true home. Rather than cycling repetitively through old conditioning, you are actually spiraling toward freedom.

The intimacy that arises in listening and speaking truth is only possible if we can open to the vulnerability of our own hearts. Breathing in, contacting the life that is right here, is our first step. Once we have held ourselves with kindness, we can touch others in a vital and healing way.

Nothing is wrong—whatever is happening is just "real life.

Attention is the most basic form of love. By paying attention we let ourselves be touched by life , and our hearts naturally become more open and engaged.

I was manipulating my inner experience rather than being with what was actually happening.