364: The Now Factor: Upgrade your health and happiness immediately with one simple step.

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Courtney Townley 0:00
Welcome to the Grace and Grit podcast made for women who want their healthiest years to be ahead of them, not behind them. Join your host Courtney Townley right now as she breaks down the fairy tale health story you have been chasing all of your life into sensible action steps and lasting change.

Courtney Townley 0:28
Hello. Hello and welcome to the Grace and Grit podcast. This is your host, Courtney Townley, as always, I am so happy you’re here. You’re joining me today. It’s such a great thing, and I hope you’re doing awesomely well.

Courtney Townley 0:39
I do want to tell you at the start of this podcast about a little thing that happened last night that may affect this show today. I live in Montana. I think a lot of you who are regular listeners know that, and obviously we do not have hurricanes here. However, last night we had a windstorm that was the equivalent of a level two hurricane. So we had winds up to 109 miles per hour, and it was wild and short and so incredibly destructive.

Courtney Townley 1:08
I’m telling you that because it pulled off a lot of the roof of our house, and we have a ton of downed trees in our yard, we are all safe. Everyone in our neighborhood is safe, but there’s a lot happening outside of my recording room. And so we have a generator running outside. I have emergency vehicles traveling back and forth in the road in front of my house. And so if you hear some background noise, I just want to let you know that’s why.

Courtney Townley 1:34
But I also want to make a point of stressing that this is really, I think, just an example of a creative solution in a sticky situation. You know, if you saw how I was recording this podcast right now, you’d probably be laughing. I’m in a dark room because we have no electricity. I have connected my laptop computer to the hot spot on my phone. I have used every device I know how to use to connect my big podcast mic to this really ancient laptop computer, and we’re making it work. So winning, I feel like I’m winning today.

Courtney Townley 2:07
I don’t know where you are rumbling in your life, but I just want to share that with you and encourage you to to look for creative solutions, because they’re there. We just really have to kind of forage for them.

Courtney Townley 2:19
Now today we are going to be talking about presence, because in a world that seems to be spinning faster by the day and giving us more opportunities than ever to consume information and over complicate our lives, it is all too easy to underestimate or forget, the profound impact that simple measures can make on our health and happiness. For example, learning how to pay attention to your life and be fully present in your life can improve nearly every aspect of your well being, from mental health to physical health to relationship health to behavioral health and everything in between.

Courtney Townley 3:12
So in this episode today, I want to challenge you to really consider where you might be underestimating the costs of not being present in your life. I’d also like to challenge you to really get clear on some of the thieves of your presence, and I am definitely going to talk about some simple strategies for helping you to refocus and how that practice of refocusing will amplify your health and happiness almost immediately.

Courtney Townley 3:48
Now I personally am deep in the throes of perimenopause, and if you haven’t gotten there yet, or it was a really long time ago for you, I just want to remind you, par for the course is there’s a lot of stuff happening in our body and our brain that we don’t really understand, and that’s really frustrating. And for me, one of those things is honestly just cognitive function. I feel like I’ve always been pretty quick to access my thoughts and thinking through problems and being creative, and over the last couple of years, I definitely have felt more of a challenge with that. And it makes sense, estrogen does a lot of wonders for the brain, and when estrogen is exiting the party, we pay some consequences for that.

Courtney Townley 4:33
If you have been through the menopausal transition, you probably definitely know what I’m talking about, and while I absolutely recognize that my hormones are partly at play here for my cognitive function, I would be remiss to not acknowledge that some of my behaviors are also contributing to my fuzzy thinking and what I mean.

Courtney Townley 4:59
Specifically is when I allow myself to get distracted a lot, mainly by my phone, by social media, by people walking into my office. When I’m trying to work, I’m naming family or I’m speaking of family members, because I do work from home, but distraction absolutely messes up my capacity to think clearly and kind of get into a flow of work. I struggle to be present when I’m constantly being distracted.

Courtney Townley 5:34
I also struggle to be present when I’m always multitasking and trying to do 10,000 things at once, which I find myself doing a lot. I’m trying to wash the dishes and listen to a podcast, and also consider the school supplies my kid might need for the fall like all the things.

Courtney Townley 5:51
So usually, our lack of presence is very multifaceted, and I definitely find that true in my own life. We’ll get deeper into that here in just a second. But first I want to talk about what presence really is, because it goes by a lot of different names, right? We talk about mindfulness, which is the basic human ability to be fully present. That’s exactly what it is, awareness of where we are and what we’re doing.

Courtney Townley 6:17
Consciousness is another name that often is associated with presence. Same thing, it is staying awake to your life. And another really common word that we use, I use this word probably the most is awareness. So I tend to use the word awareness more than any other word when I’m speaking about presence. So awareness is knowledge and understanding that something is happening or existing, and it’s really just awareness, wakefulness of how you are moving through the world.

Courtney Townley 6:52
I want to offer you a couple other definitions of presence. Presence is to be in the here and now fully engaged with whatever you are doing in the moment. It’s not about the content of your life, but the attention you bring to it. So quite literally, anything could be happening in your life, and you have the capacity to direct your attention towards it.

Courtney Townley 7:21
Now, when we don’t like what’s happening, when we are frustrated with what’s happening, we’re disappointed with what’s happening, it’s really easy to distract ourselves on purpose, and there is a consequence to that. But presence is also to be in touch with the fullness of your being through self observation, self inquiry and mindful action. So it’s really like being mode, being a human, how you are being in the moment, not thinking about it, but being in it. And I love Jon Kabat-Zinn’s definition, wherever you go, there you are. Is one of his most famous and well known books. I highly encourage you to read it. It’s phenomenal, but he calls presence literally dying on purpose.

Courtney Townley 8:12
It is choosing to consciously let go of certain things, like shooting, like manuals that you have for how other people should be behaving or how they should be living their life. It’s a letting go of the past of the monkey mind of the mean girl. And those are all, in a way, small deaths, dying on purpose. We’re we’re letting those things go on purpose, and presence is also the power feeling, the power of this moment and the fullness of being. That’s Eckhart Tolle’s definition of presence, which I love.

Courtney Townley 8:56
The power of now is probably one of the first books I ever read about the power of presence, and I remember exactly where I was in my life reading that book. I was running a very busy, busy Pilates studio out of a club in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was the manager of that department, and life was really full, and it was the thing that just really centered me, and I ended up when I left that job, I gifted it to all the gals that were in that department, because it was so profound for me.

Courtney Townley 9:30
So again, Eckhart tolle’s definition is feeling the power of this moment and the fullness of being. That is his definition of presence. So now that we’re clear on what we’re talking about, I’m sure nobody here was questioning what we were talking about, but I think it helps to just bring more insight and expand our definitions to have these conversations. So there’s a very steep price for not being fully present in your life. Yeah. We make a lot of mistakes. We do things rushed. We do things with half attention. Sometimes we do things with no attention.

Courtney Townley 10:09
I’ll give you a great example of this. I think it was about a year ago we got a new coffee maker, and I did what I always do in the morning. I was completely on autopilot, thinking about my day, thinking about my kid, thinking about all the things but what I was doing. I turned the coffee maker on. I came back to my office, and before you know it, I started to hear water rushing in my kitchen, like down the cabinets. So I ran in there, and lo and behold, I had forgotten to put the coffee the pot inside of the coffee maker, and the coffee had made its way down between the oven and the cabinet, through the floorboards of our house into the laundry room, down below, onto the laundry like the mess that this one pot of coffee made was enormous, and it was because I wasn’t paying attention. And I just feel like that is such a great illustration of what happens in our life when we are not paying attention, when we aren’t actually present.

Courtney Townley 11:13
But there’s other costs to not being present, of course, I would say a very big cost for a lot of people is they become very reactive. That is certainly true for me. When I’m not present and I’m worried about the future, I have anxiety about what may or may not happen, or I’m thinking about the past, trying to solve problems from the past which I can’t solve. The past is the past, but when I’m consumed by those things, I get very reactive because I’m not present, and my brain is just doing it’s just going on autopilot, and I start living out of alignment with what I really want to be doing, and that causes a lot of integrity pain. If you’re a longtime listener to the show, you know what I’m talking about. If you’re brand new, integrity, pain is when we live our life out of alignment with what we actually want for our life, and that happens a lot when we’re not present.

Courtney Townley 12:12
We also start to fear our life when we’re not present. It’s almost like we get uncomfortable, so uncomfortable with the what’s actually in front of us the present moment that we’re we’re just not okay with being with it. So we’re always living in the past or in the future, or, worst yet, we’re using substances like alcohol and drugs and all of the things that can distract us from the reality of our life, which all of those things ultimately just create more of a mess. And the biggest tragedy of all is when we are not present, we miss out on our life, because your life is happening in the now. It’s not happening yesterday. It’s not happening in the future. Your life right now is happening in this moment. That is the now factor. That is why I titled this podcast the now factor.

Courtney Townley 13:16
So just for a minute, I would love you to consider what has the lack of presence or your lack of presence cost you? Have you made mistakes? Have you been in some kind of accident? Have you been reactive? Have you felt like you’re living life massively out of integrity, because you’re so reactive. What has the cost been for you? And when you get clear on the costs, the reason I start there is because sometimes, when we highlight the costs, that alone makes a strong case for building a practice of presence.

Courtney Townley 14:00
But in case you need more fuel for the fire, here are some other reasons why it’s so great to build a practice of presence, being present. Number one, it’s simple. It is such a simple and easily accessible tool, you don’t have to go out and get anything, you don’t have to plan for anything. You don’t have to have special training. All presence is is redirecting your focus to what you are doing right now, listening to a podcast, driving your car, doing the dishes, walking your dog, being all in with that. So it’s free. You. And it’s versatile, no special equipment or training needed, and you can do it anywhere at any time. I also believe there is so much power in the practice of presence, because it invites us to engage with our life rather than escape our life.

Courtney Townley 15:24
There’s a great book by Sarah Susanka called the Not So Big Life, and she talks about life being the experiencing of the experience. That’s what life is, being fully immersed in an experience and living it. But if you aren’t experiencing the experience, are you really living? Your heart’s beating, your blood’s flowing, you’re breathing, but is that living to you? Because that’s not living to me. Living to me is all of my biological function being online, but so that I can experience my life and so many of us are living, you know, we’re awake. Our bodies are functioning. Even if they’re functioning subpar, they’re functioning, but we aren’t really living our lives.

Courtney Townley 16:29
And if you listen to the last episode I did on the show, I talked about a little bit about body image and the difference between thinking about your body and being in your body. And one of the points that I made, which I’ll just reiterate here, is that you cannot be in the experience of your life and be judging and criticizing your life simultaneously. That is a gift of presence. When I am fully in something, when I am fully in the experience, I can’t judge, I can’t critique, I can’t self doubt, because the second I do that, I pull myself out of the experience.

Courtney Townley 17:10
So experience what it is to be human, that is the invitation of presence, allow yourself to be human, which means being fully immersed in the experience of being with people, right? People are largely not going to behave the way that you want them to. This is the agony of the human like being in relationships with other humans, right? We can’t control them ever. So rather than thinking about how other people should behave when you’re with them, and letting that ruin the experience, can you just be in the experience? Can you be with your emotions?

Courtney Townley 17:57
This is something we talk about a lot on this show, most people cannot, they have built a habit of distracting and avoiding and doing everything but feel their emotion. They’re not present with emotion, which means they’re not present with pleasure, and they’re also rarely, if ever, present with pain, because they have so many vices they are using to feel anything but pain. So the takeaway here, I think the big takeaway and the big gift of presence in this, is that presence is how we heal our life, because presence invites us to accept what is true in this moment and face the truth of this moment, not run from it, not try to manipulate it. That’s how we heal our life. Facing the truth of your life is how you heal your life. There’s also a gift in presence, in that it invites us into that acceptance piece, versus living your life attached to what it should be.

Courtney Townley 19:20
Another way of saying this, I say this I say this to my clients all the time, like you again, you can argue with reality. You can argue with what’s happening in the moment, but reality will always win. You may not like it, that’s okay. You can disagree with it. You can get frustrated by it, but reality is always going to win, so the sooner we accept that, the sooner we can start letting go of resistance and reactivity and. Because acceptance is really being present with what is if it’s raining today, right, and you wanted it to be sunny, can you accept that it’s raining and then navigate from there?

Courtney Townley 20:22
I certainly did not plan on all the shingles flying off my roof last night. And I can argue that that shouldn’t have happened. It’s not right that that happened. Why didn’t it happen to other people? I can go down that pathway. All that does is create a lot of unnecessary suffering. So I just choose to pivot to the roof blew off my house last night, and that’s a bummer. And I don’t have to like it, but I do have to accept that it is. It’s reality, because until I accept it as reality. I can’t change it. I can’t actually move forward with a viable solution. So acceptance is this is the way things are in this moment. What do I want to do from here? That is the gift of being in a space of acceptance is once you acknowledge what is true in this moment, what do I want to do from here? And presence invites us into all of that. It helps us to clear judgments, and ultimately, presence helps us to become much better stewards of our life, because it starts to expand the lens of our understanding of things.

Courtney Townley 21:47
When I am present, when I am looking at life right in the face, I can let go of assumptions. I don’t have to worry about uncertainty, because I’m right here, right now, and I would say that curiosity is a really beautiful traveling companion of presence. When we’re living in the future, in the past, it’s really hard to enter those waters with a attitude of curiosity, because when we’re focused on the future. We want certainty, and when we’re focusing on the past, we’re often caught up in judgment of things we should have done differently. But being in the now, being in this moment, being with what is, whatever that is for you, really invites you into curiosity. Isn’t it interesting? That I woke up this morning and the tiles of my roof are in my yard? Isn’t it interesting that all these trees in my neighborhood got knocked down last night? Right? It’s way easier to bring an attitude of curiosity to the now, and that makes us softer and gentler and so much kinder.

Courtney Townley 23:10
There’s a quote by Nayyirah Waheed, a brilliant poet, from her book Salt. She has many books, but this poem is directly from her book Salt. And I have shared this in a lot of spaces and places, but even if you’ve heard it before, it’s so worth listening to again. It is so short and sweet when I speak to presence, inviting us into being softer and gentler and kinder. This poem always comes to mind, and it says this, you do not have to be a fire for every mountain blocking you. You could be a water and soft river your way to freedom, too, signed options.

Courtney Townley 23:57
And I love that, because I think presence allows us to soft river our way through life, rather than arguing with reality, rather than living in anxiety and worry because we’re so in the future or living with regret and resentment because we’re living so far into the past. One other gift I just want to highlight of presence this. This is again, of course, it’s never an exhaustive list, because I don’t want my podcast to be three hours long. I don’t have that kind of time, and you probably don’t either. But one other I think thing really worth mentioning on this show is that presence invites us into creation. So when we can actually be with the way things are, it calls for an expansion of ourselves as humans. We have to be willing to sit with difficult emotion. We have to be willing to be with people regardless of how they’re showing up.

Courtney Townley 24:52
Now I’m not saying if it’s an abusive relationship or something that you wouldn’t choose to leave, but when you’re at a family dinner. Right, and someone is saying something that you disagree with, and historically, it has always triggered you. If you are truly present in that moment, you could focus on what it feels like to be sitting in the chair that you’re on, what the colors of the food on your plate look like, right the body language of the person speaking. There’s so many things in that present moment that you could draw your attention to that would not cause you to react in the way that you always have that is a gift of presence. It allows us the opportunity to make conscious choice, to move forward differently. We start to see solutions where we may not have seen solutions before, and we really enter a space of that conscious living, rather than unconscious living. So unconscious living is always the result of conditioned patterns and ultimately generates a lot of confused thinking, and really kind of is a red flag indicating the presence of a filter over reality.

Courtney Townley 26:24
That’s what unconscious living is. It’s reactivity, and we’re reacting to something based on how we’ve reacted to it in the past. So presence invites us to let go of that again. There’s that small death, that little death. So presence ultimately invites you into this opportunity to deepen the relationships of your life. We get to know ourselves better because we have to be in the moment rather than escaping the moment. It allows us to deepen relationships because we have to get to know others without the cloudedness of how they should behaving or our judgments and assumptions about them. It allows us to deepen our relationship with nature and our surroundings, and when we deepen the relationship with those things, we tend to take better care of them. I Right?

Courtney Townley 27:23
And ultimately, of course, the present moment being being present, releases you from so much unnecessary stress when we’re in the future, in the past, we’re often generating stress. Presence does the opposite. It allows you to release it. Because we’re releasing worry and anxiety and uncertainty and the shoulds and the assumptions and the judgments and when we release stress, what does it do to the human body? Well, it softens everything. It softens the nervous system. It calms the nervous system. Presence begins and ends in the nervous system. It involves taking the time to pay attention to where we are and what’s truly going on, and being aware of our response to that, just naming and noticing how we feel in our body, how do we feel in the experience?

Courtney Townley 28:27
And again, when you’re in the experience, you can’t judge the experience, nervous system health as long time, listeners of the show very well know, because we’ve covered this topic so many times, in so many different ways, but it’s a very big deal, especially to your health and happiness, right? Because the nervous system affects every other system in the human body. It’s a metabolic regulator. And when I say metabolic regulator, please, like people who’ve been conditioned to think of the metabolism as weight loss and fat loss, I want you to ditch that and think of metabolic regulator, meaning really regulating all of the chemistry of the human body. Because that’s really what the metabolism is. It’s all of the chemistry of the body, not just certain factors of chemistry.

Courtney Townley 29:15
And because your nervous system is the metabolic regulator, it’s important to remember that a sick nervous system is the same as a rotting foundation of a house. You can spend a lot of time painting and cleaning windows and clearing out cobwebs, but if the house is imploding because you aren’t fixing the fundamental problem, which is the foundation which the nervous system is. None of that really matters, and we create a lot of unnecessary stress for the nervous system. We create a lot of dysregulation for the nervous system when we are always living in the future, in the past, and we are pulling ourselves out. The present moment.

Courtney Townley 30:03
So thieves of presence, probably these will come as no surprise to you, but definitely, I would say a thief of presence is allowing your amygdala to run the show. So your amygdala is really kind of the primal brain. It is very reactive. It has three primary objectives, avoid pain, seek pleasure, and apply the least amount of effort. That sounds lovely, but it is certainly not a recipe for health and happiness. So the amygdala, it’s great that we have it right, because when we’re in life threatening situations, or we’re in really urgent situations, the amygdala is what helps us to react, to take action. But unfortunately, the amygdala sort of misconstrues a lot of things in our life to be life threatening when they’re really just uncomfortable, and when we let the amygdala run the show, we are constantly escaping the present moment because, again, we fear our lives, because life feels like a lot, mostly right for a lot of us, living in the modern day world feels like a lot, and if we’re always looking for ways To escape that in ways that are not serving us and making life harder, you can see where problems would develop.

Courtney Townley 31:28
So when I say outdated software is a thief of presence, I mean that we have to start utilizing that prefrontal cortex. You have this amazing part of your brain that allows you, in a way, to parent the amygdala, to remind the amygdala, like, Hey, you having a lot of to do on your to do list today is not life threatening. I know it feels like a lot, but all we have to do here is make some decisions. Decide what what we want to, what we want to commit to, what we want to do today, and put everything else on another list for another day, right? That’s kind of what your your prefrontal cortex, or that executive function allows you to do, and the more we start utilizing that, the better life gets, because we do start living our life more in alignment with what we want.

Courtney Townley 32:23
Jacked chemistry is definitely a thief of presence, and I kind of alluded to that when I was describing the nervous system. And there’s a lot baked into that sort of cascade of hormones that results from a dysregulated nervous system, but jacked chemistry could be not eating enough food. It could be not getting enough sleep. It could be eating foods that your body doesn’t recognize as food, never taking time to move your body over, training your body like jacked chemistry can look like so many things, but when we are not taking great care of our chemistry, we get very reactive and we struggle to stay present, we get distracted so much more easily.

Courtney Townley 33:06
I would also say, of course, overthinking can be a thief of presence. When I am in my brain all the time, I’m not in my experience of life. I am in my brain. So I love when I see a client rumbling because she is overthinking so much, I just remind her that it is an option to not think, and you see this wave of relief come over her face, because what a gift to remember that right that when I don’t have to think, and all I get to do in this moment is just be. That’s what presence is being here now, and when we’re overthinking, we rob ourself at that experience. I would also say emotional fragility is a thief of presence. So when we do not have the capacity to feel difficult things, and that can be for a lot of reasons, right, trauma could definitely be a part of that. But also simply not having a practice in your life of leaning into hard things, everyone has examples of leaning into hard things in their life.

Courtney Townley 34:25
Somewhere along the lifeline, I also see a lot of people developing patterns of escaping discomfort, even if that discomfort is for goodness, learning a new skill set, taking a new class, traveling abroad. It could look like a lot of different things, and a lot of people, as they age, get more fearful, not less. So we kind of train ourselves to be less comfortable with discomfort, and that is a problem. If you are present in your life, it is actually inviting you into feeling all of it. And not overthinking to make it mean that anything has gone wrong. Life is emotion right?

Courtney Townley 35:13
When we don’t feel anything, do you feel like you’re living right? We’ve all had moments where we have felt so flat, so uninspired, so the highs and the lows are a big part of life. So let’s talk for a minute about practices to promote presence. Because again, I don’t want to make this an epic podcast in terms of length.

Courtney Townley 35:44
The first thing I’m going to suggest is that you submit to a daily practice. So whether that is that you submit to bringing your attention to one thing several times a day and being all in with that one thing, that’s what your practice might look like that’s all meditation is, by the way, right? I know there’s all these different techniques and ways we can complicate meditation this day and age, but ultimately, meditation is just redirecting your focus back to your breath, back to your body, back to whatever you’re looking at, back to a sound in the room, back to something that is true in this moment. So submitting to a daily practice of refocusing in some way.

Courtney Townley 36:30
There is a great quote by Rumi. I just want to read it here, because it speaks directly to this. Submit to a daily practice your loyalty to that is a ring on the door, keep knocking, and the joy inside will eventually open a window and look out to see who’s there. So to me, that just really speaks to when we are fully present in our life, we find so many moments of unexpected joy, and life expands in big and beautiful ways just because we started paying attention. Know yourself.

Courtney Townley 37:15
This is a big thing I work with on my with my clients, one of the first questions I ask a new client is like, if you could design your perfect life, whatever that is for you, how you want to be living, what success means, what health means, if you were living in alignment with that, what Would it look like? And when she gets clarity on that, it’s really easy to start to see where the gaps are between how she’s living right now and where she ultimately wants to be, or how she wants to be. And knowing yourself is made possible through presence, you cannot know yourself without developing a practice of awareness. All of you who are listening, who’ve ever taken a course of mine, you know that’s where I start everything, everything starts with a practice of awareness. Because if you do not shine a light on what is true, you cannot change anything. So that’s that’s presence. So we have to create time to be present, right?

Courtney Townley 38:31
And this is a challenge for a lot of us, because we’re so busy and we jam pack our schedules full of so many things, so starting to develop a practice of just putting a little white space on your schedule each day. White space is non doing, consciously choosing to have some time where nothing is planned. That’s what white space is. And it could just be five minutes, it could be three minutes. It could be an hour, and choosing to do something that you are deciding to be all in with. It could be reading a book. It could be sitting outside with a cup of coffee and listening to the birds.

Courtney Townley 39:16
It could be writing in your journal, talking to a friend, playing a game with a kid, the commitment is to be all in. That is the practice, to be all in. And being distracted is also a practice. So by committing to a little bit of time each day to start refocusing yourself on whatever that thing is, and it could be something different every day. The thing is not the point being all in with the thing is the point asking yourself the question throughout the day, am I awake right now? Am I awake to what I’m doing? I will be the first to admit I ask this.

Courtney Townley 44:59
Quality, care and love, even the most simple action. So again, mundane to magic, that is the invitation of presence. I want more of that. So I, for one am, committing to more of that. And I hope at the end of this episode today, you are looking for opportunity, and it’s not even looking for opportunity, it’s deciding here and now that you will commit in some small way to becoming more awake to your life. All right, my friends, I hope that was helpful. I hope you got something out of that. I will see you again in a couple of weeks, but in the meantime, stay present to your life, take care.

Courtney Townley 45:51
Thank you for listening to the grace and grit podcast. It is time to mend the fabric of the female health story, and it starts with you taking radical responsibility for your own self care. You are worth the effort, and with a little grace and grit, anything is possible.