387: Fully Here, Fully You: The Midlife Presence Revolution

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Courtney Townley 0:01
Are you someone who is physically present but mentally absent in your own life right now, in this episode of the Grace and Grit podcast, I am going to help you explore why midlife women especially cannot afford to live their life on autopilot, and I’m going to give you some very actionable strategies to help reclaim your presence in a world that is designed to steal your attention. So if that sounds like something that might be helpful to you, stick around, because that’s where we’re headed.

Courtney Townley 0:27
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 0:46
Hello, my friends and welcome to the Grace and Grit podcast. My name is Courtney Townley. I’m delighted that you’re here, and today I’m going to talk with you about the power of presence, especially at midlife, and why it is just such a potent, potent thing.

Courtney Townley 1:09
First, I want to share with you a little bit about my life right now, because, man, I am in a hot season. There is just so much going on. And I’m telling you this because this podcast today is as much for me as it is for you, and what I mean by that is I feel very untethered in my life right now. I have so many irons in the fire. There are so many incredible things happening in my business and my life, and there are some some challenging things also happening in my life, and it’s just a season of busyness and just a lot going on, and I know that if I do not anchor myself, if I do not practice the things that help me to stay present, I’m going to miss it all.

Courtney Townley 1:56
So let me just set the stage by saying, yes, it’s summer, which is always a challenging season I find for a lot of women who still have children in the home. My son is 15. He has a summer job, so it’s certainly not like entertaining a toddler all day. But there is something very discombobulating about having that routine shift in the summer. Plus it’s just summer like nobody really wants to be working in the summer. We all want to be out camping and fishing and swimming and doing all the things that we love to do in the summer months. And so I’m contending with a fuller schedule for that reason.

Courtney Townley 2:30
And then I’m running my business, which is always a very full on activity, while also getting ready to take 20 women to Portugal in August for our surge retreat. So I’ve run for the past two years a Montana Grace and Grit Retreat where I bring a community of women out to share a week of activities, outdoor activities, classes on menopause and fitness and wellness and mindset, all the things. And I have a huge heart for Portugal, specifically the Azores Islands. And just happened to fall into the lap of an incredible retreat center there last summer, and lo and behold, I will be there in about two weeks, ushering in the next round of the Grace and Grit retreat. So I cannot wait to tell you about that, but there’s a lot of preparation that goes into that.

Courtney Townley 3:24
Of course, in the background, my father has been rumbling with a lot of health conditions this year, so I keep running down to Texas to check on him. And if you don’t know, I live in Montana, so it’s not like really the easiest thing for me to pop down to Texas, but I seem to be doing it almost once a month right now, and then my book is coming out this fall. Well, I should say early winter. It’s coming out November 5. This has been a five year project. I am so excited about it, but holy cow, do I just feel like I’m in a pressure cooker of responsibility and projects and things to do right now. And it’s all beautiful. I love being there for my father. I love, obviously, having my child and being able to spend summer time with him. I love my business. I love the book. I feel so passionate about that, but holy cow, do I feel spread in a lot of directions.

Courtney Townley 4:13
And so this topic today, which is all about presence, is to help anchor me, and I hope it’s going to help anchor you too, because it’s really just a lot of reminders about what presence is, why it is so valuable to our health and well being, and what we can do to tap into it when we feel like we’ve really drifted away from it.

Courtney Townley 4:35
Before I get too heavy into the podcast, I do want to mention to you that I did. I we did mention this a couple episodes ago, but we started a resource center for podcast listeners, and basically what this resource center is is it’s just providing free resources for the types of things that we talk about on the podcast, for you, the listener for for no charge, it’s absolutely free. Yeah, but if you would like access to the resource that I’ve created for this episode today, all you have to do is head on over to graceandgrit.com/resources. Again, that’s graceandgrit.com/resources. You’ll enter your name and email address, and you won’t just get access to today’s little companion guide. You’ll actually get access to all of the resources that we have in there so far. So they’re pretty meaty resources. They’re just a lot of bullet points about the things that we talked about. But also to give you some other considerations beyond what we talk about in this show today, and also give you some things to think about about in terms of how you can apply what we talk about in this show today. So check that out. graceandgrit.com/resources and grab your companion guide for this episode today.

Courtney Townley 5:47
So what is presence really like? I think it’s important that we clarify that before we have a conversation about it. It seems kind of like a redundant question. Everybody knows what presence is, but let’s just really like call it out. So the way that I like to think about presence are a few different ways. I think they all kind of mean the same thing, like number one, mindfulness, right? Mindfulness is presence. It is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we are doing, and not being overly reactive or overwhelmed by what is going on around us. That is presence.

Courtney Townley 6:26
Presence is mindfulness. It is paying attention. It is also consciousness, the state of being awake and aware of your inner and outer worlds. Presence is also awareness. I talk a lot about awareness in the work that I do with my clients. It’s a big part of the book that I wrote. But awareness is really the knowledge and understanding that something is happening or existing, acknowledging how you specifically are moving through the world. And I also like to think of presence through the lens of all of that, mindfulness, consciousness, awareness as really being a practice of integrity. So integrity, in the way that I like to define it, is liking who you are, what you do, and why you do the things that you do, and it is impossible to have integrity with yourself if you are not present with yourself and your life.

Courtney Townley 7:26
So just to recap really quickly, presence, as we’re talking about it in this episode today, is mindfulness, consciousness, awareness and integrity. Now let’s make a case for more presence in our life. I don’t think I have to spend too much time making a strong case for this, because I think most of you listening would probably agree that we are living in such a fast and furious world, it is really easy to not be present. And on top of that, we are being sold all of these distractions, right? Like there’s Netflix and our cell phones and shopping and oh my gosh, there’s just so many things we could spend our time on that distract us from the things that matter most. So what I love about presence is that it’s simple. There’s nothing complicated about presence, because all presence is is a redirect. It’s a redirect to putting your focus on what is right in front of you or what is happening right now within you. So presence is simple and it’s free. You don’t need anything. You don’t need any special equipment. You don’t need any special training. I mean, training can help right like because for all of us, presence is a practice.

Courtney Townley 8:43
But the reality is, we get present by paying attention to this moment right now. We don’t think about the future, we don’t think about the past. We direct ourselves into this current moment. And it’s versatile. Presence is versatile, meaning I can do it anywhere at any time. Nobody even needs to know that I’m practicing presence. Somebody would know that I’m practicing bicep curls or squats, but no one’s going to really know if I’m practicing presence. So presence is absolutely simple. It is free and it is versatile. So it’s a great tool to be using right now as you’re listening to this show, like, are you all in or are you doing 10,000 other things right now? The other value, I think, of presence, another, I guess, argument for it, is that it invites us to engage rather than to escape. So if you think about life and experiencing your life fully, it requires that you pay attention.

Courtney Townley 9:49
I think of the example actually a lot of emotional eating. So often when I’m talking to a client about emotional eating, we talk about the fact that they are you. Eating so fast and furious they’re not even experiencing the food. Because, let’s be honest, emotional eating isn’t even about the food. It’s about numbing what you’re feeling. So one of the things I often encourage my clients to do if they struggle with emotional eating, no matter what the food choice is, let’s just say it’s a piece of chocolate cake. I want them to sit down and experience the chocolate cake. Now, to experience it, you gotta go slow. You gotta put the bite in your mouth. You’ve gotta chew slowly. You’ve gotta savor it. You’ve gotta notice it, right? And what is so fascinating about that is when we’re in the experience, we tend to take it less far because we’re tasting the food. We’re experiencing the experience. And that really is what presence affords us. It allows us to fully experience life.

Courtney Townley 10:53
There’s a book called The not so big life by Sarah Susanka that I read years ago, and she literally uses that phrase, life is the experience of experiencing. But most of us are missing our life because we’re missing the experiencing part. We’re going so fast, so furious, multitasking with so many things at all times, we’re missing all of it. So if you aren’t experiencing the experience, are you really living?

Courtney Townley 11:21
Well, I would argue no, or you’re not really living. You’re just going through the motions. You’re going through a lot of motions, but you’re not necessarily living. So you can be, you cannot be fully in an experience, if you are overly thinking about it, if you are judging it, if you are criticizing it, if you are thinking about the future, if you are thinking about the past. I can only be in the experience by being in the experience. I use this a lot with with the body, right? Because obviously in my work, we talk a lot about body image, and I’ve talked about this a lot on this show, this exact example, but it’s really relevant here, it is very difficult to judge and criticize your physiology while also experiencing your physiology. So I can be in the experience of my body right now. I’m sitting on a stool. I kind of feel my spine upright. I kind of feel my heart beating because I’m doing this podcast, I feel a little hot because it’s a little toasty in my office. That’s the experience.

Courtney Townley 12:29
But if I’m thinking about my body right now, I think, wow, I don’t know if I love the shirt that I have on right now, right? And I am kind of hot, and maybe it would be so great if I could turn the air conditioner on right now, right? Like that. That creates a whole different process. I’m missing the experience of the moment because I’m judging the moment right. I’m judging the moment. I’m criticizing the moment rather than experiencing it. So we have to in order to be present. What the invitation is of presence is we get to experience being fully human. We get to allow ourselves the full experience of being human, which means we allow ourselves to be fully immersed in the experience of being with people with emotions, with pleasure, with pain, with discomfort, without trying to escape it.

Courtney Townley 13:17
Now I’m not saying if you have a headache, don’t take ibuprofen, right? Like I mean, obviously that’s a personal choice, but it is interesting how when discomfort comes into our life, most of us have developed such an amazing habit of reacting with numbing it right away. I won’t feel sad, I won’t feel irritated, I won’t feel angry, I’ll just eat, I’ll shop, I’ll watch something, I’ll work. We’re constantly distracting rather than experiencing and there’s a lot of problems that come from that, right? Because if I’m not experiencing my emotions, I can’t learn from my emotions. I can’t listen to the intel that my emotional landscape has for me. The other beauty of presence is it allows us to really accept the current reality, rather than argue with reality. We are so good at arguing with reality we think everything should be different all the time, right? Because we’re projecting what things are supposed to look like. And man, do we get ourselves into a whole lot of unnecessary suffering.

Courtney Townley 14:20
But if you are truly present in your life, you are accepting what is. Doesn’t mean you’re not going to do some work to make things better, but in the moment of presence that demands a high level of acceptance for what is, what is right in front of you, it’s accepting that it’s raining today, rather than arguing that, oh, it shouldn’t be raining today. All right. The other thing I just want to mention really quickly, that presence allows us to do, of course, is it releases us from a whole lot of unnecessary stress, because when we aren’t living in the present moment, I. We are generating a lot of uncertainty, a lot of fear, a lot of worry, a lot of anxiety. When we are hyper focused on the past, we can also generate a lot of unnecessary stress because we’re generating some resentment, maybe, or guilt, or we’re making we’re making we’re just making things hard on ourselves, because, again, we often think things should have worked out differently, or things should have been different in the past, and we really can’t do that when we’re fully present in this moment right now.

Courtney Townley 15:35
So let’s talk now about thieves of presence, meaning, what are the things that are robbing us of our ability to be present as midlife women. Well, so many things. Number one, our schedules are way too full. We’re trying to take on way too many things for way too many people all at once. We are running our lives very low on resources, which makes us highly reactive. Plus, we have this whole, whole hormonal cascade that’s happening at midlife, which is also contributing to reactivity, and so we are often spinning out, generating a lot of overwhelm, generating a lot of anxiety, and never really fully being in the present moment. So I just want to offer, I think, like a few of the big thieves of presence, are number one jacked chemistry. So we’re not taking care of ourselves in a way that allows us to be present. We’re not sleeping enough at night. We’re not eating well, we’re not hydrating, we’re not parenting our brains. We’re not moving our bodies enough. And then that makes us, our physiology very agitated, and it’s hard to be present with agitated physiology. I’m not saying it’s impossible. I’m just saying it makes it a whole of a lot harder, a whole heck, a whole heck of a lot harder, is what I was trying to get out there.

Courtney Townley 16:54
I would also say the overflowing schedules, or not having any kind of schedule, both of those things can contribute to not really being fully present. Because I know for me right now in my life, like I opened this whole podcast today by telling you how unanchored I feel and how overwhelmed I feel by all the things that I’m taking part in right now. And I know for me, a part of that is I need an afternoon to sit down and get super organized on where my attention needs to be when, because then I don’t have to be thinking about those things every moment. They’ve already been pre decided. I already know what I’m doing next week. I already know what I’m doing three weeks from now, because I premeditated that thinking through things at that level actually helps us to be more present in this moment, because otherwise we spend the present moment trying to organize the future, but we’re not really doing it in a way that’s helping us to move forward. I hope that makes sense, because that is very, very relevant for me right now, I also think we rob ourselves of presence when we are always thinking. We’re overthinking. Man, ladies, we are overthinkers, right?

Courtney Townley 18:09
We love to overthink things, and it is an option to not think, and in fact, to be fully present, to be fully in an experience, you cannot be overthinking in a lot of a lot of situations, you can’t even be thinking. I’m either in my body or I’m thinking about my body. I can’t do both simultaneously. So what the next time you find yourself in a space of agitation because you know you’re overthinking, try dropping into the present moment, really acknowledging what’s right in front of you, what’s true in this very moment, and notice what that does to your energy. Notice what it does to your nervous system. Notice what it does to your emotional landscape.

Courtney Townley 18:55
I would also say when we are not able to sit with emotion. I kind of alluded to this earlier, that also robs us of presence. So it may be true in this moment that I am feeling discomfort, but if I am unwilling to feel discomfort, what am I going to do? I’m going to escape the present moment. I’m going to do something else to not feel uncomfortable, and we can spend our whole life trying to escape discomfort, which means we’re never fully in the moment, because there’s a lot of moments of life that are just going to require that we stand in the arena with discomfort or with sadness or with disappointment or with frustration, like fill in whatever the emotion is that you love to escape,

Courtney Townley 19:48
and what would it be like to just be present with it? Here’s what I’ve learned, because I spent a lot of my life running from certain emotions, is when I am fully present. Them, they tend to soften a lot sooner. I try to escape them. I tried to escape them for years because I thought they were going to stick around forever if I allowed myself to feel it. But the truth is, when I’m fully present with a difficult emotion, it doesn’t stick around for very long. So let’s talk now quickly about a few practices that can really help to reorient you to presence.

Courtney Townley 20:26
So number one, I think it’s really helpful to just do an attention audit, meaning you just start like noticing where your attention is going throughout the day. So when I’m in a meeting with a co worker, am I actually in the meeting, or am I somewhere else when I’m sitting at the table at night talking to my son? Am I actually present with him? Or am I thinking about something else when I’m doing the dishes, when I’m walking my dog, when I’m folding laundry, when I’m talking to a client, am I fully present? That’s all an audit is. Is just starting to name and notice what is true for you in the given moment. And you might notice that you’re never present, and that’s okay. There’s no judgment there. We don’t need to tell a big dramatic storyline. But just notice that, isn’t it interesting that I have a hard time staying tuned in to what is true for me in any given moment, because awareness is the way out. Awareness is how we heal anything. It’s how we improve anything. So I have to bring awareness to my inability to be present, first and foremost, or for me, like right now, I know I’m feeling overwhelmed. I know I’m feeling very unanchored, and that is my call to reorient myself to presence, and that’s how I’m using it, which is why we’re doing this podcast today. Okay?

Courtney Townley 21:51
And then I would say, second to that, so second to doing an attention audit, we also have to create some time, a little more space in our schedule for being present, right? Like just even five minutes, like after I hang up the phone with a client, right? Can I just take five minutes to be in that quiet space, to be with myself, to notice what’s true for me, to notice how I’m feeling? It doesn’t even have to be five minutes. It could be 30 seconds, but just taking a little time that you pollinate throughout the day to check in and notice what is true for you. It does take a little bit of time. Doesn’t have to be epic periods of time, but we do have to create some time and space for it. And just asking the question like, Am I awake right now? Am I fully present right now? Am I here right now? Am I conscious right now? Am I being intentional? Right now? There’s 1000 ways to ask that, but all of those questions can really show you quite quickly if you’re being if you’re present or not.

Courtney Townley 22:54
I would also say, and I put these all inside the companion guide that I created for you. So if you need these reminders, they are in there for you again. You can get those the companion guide by going to grace and grit.com, forward slash resources. But I do think that there is a lot of power in coming back into the body when we’re talking about presence. So your body always exists in the present moment. It doesn’t exist in the future and doesn’t exist in the past. It exists right now. So it is the most reliable anchor for presence. So just noticing your butt on whatever you’re sitting on right now, noticing if your shoulder like how you’re holding your shoulders, noticing your breath, noticing your feet, maybe pressing into the earth, right? All of those things have the capacity to bring you back into presence, because your body always exists in the present moment.

Courtney Townley 23:57
The other thing that I love to do when I’m feeling really scattered like right now, there’s so many projects, there’s so many things I’m working on. I have a to do list 20,000 miles long, which I know a lot of you listening probably do too. But a really easy practice to reorient myself to presence is creating intentional transitions between activities in my day. So the spaces between activities offers really powerful opportunities for presence. So instead of rushing from one task to the next, right, instead of jumping from client call to client call to client call, which I have been known to do, just having a minute to take three conscious breaths, to put my hand on my heart, to look out the window right, to feel my feet on the ground, to have gratitude for the work that I get to do in the world, to just anchor myself in a minute of presence. Can really work. Wonders for the rest of my day, and also make me more present with my next client.

Courtney Townley 25:06
And of course, this last one is going to be really obvious, but it’s worth saying because we are so bad at it, which is practice single tasking. I know we love the belief that we can multitask and that it saves us time, but really, what it does is it fragments our attention, and it reduces both performance and our satisfaction of life, because again, we’re not able to fully experience anything when we’re trying to focus on everything. So really, even if you’re just choosing a few periods of the day to just do one thing with all of your attention and let it be something really mundane. Maybe it’s just driving home from work today, right? Can you stay focused on just driving all the way home? My guess is, if you, if you took that exercise seriously, you’re going to find your attention drifting constantly and great the exercise of presence is just redirecting to what’s right in front of you and you’re you might have to redirect your attention 1000 times between the time you leave work and the time you get home. That’s what meditation is.

Courtney Townley 26:12
Meditation is redirecting our focus to whatever we said we were going to focus on. It’s a practice of presence. So somewhere today, somewhere in the next 24 hours, I would challenge you, the listener, to be all in for five minutes on something, reading a book, drinking a glass of water, walking your dog, cleaning the garage. It doesn’t matter what it is, but five minutes, and you’re going to notice how challenging it is to be all in with that thing in front of you. But if you can do more and more of that, throughout your day, throughout your week, throughout your lifetime, this I know for sure, you’re going to get to experience so much more of your life. And isn’t that what we’re here for is to experience life.

Courtney Townley 27:04
So the thing I want to end on is just to really convey to you that presence isn’t about adding more to an already full plate. It’s about showing up completely for the life you’re already living, for the things you’re already doing, and every moment that you choose to be fully here, fully engaged, fully present is a gift to you, and it has a ripple outwards, right? It has a ripple that goes beyond you. It enhances your health, but I truly believe it enhances the health of everything and everyone around you, because when we are more present, we are more considerate of how we show up and how we impact the things around us.

Courtney Townley 27:56
Again, if you would like to get your hands on the companion guide for this. It’s called fully here. Fully you a midlife one’s guide to presence head on over to graceandgrit.com/resources. And once you log into the Resource Library, you’re going to see it right at the top of the resources, but you’re also going to see a lot of other resources that we have there waiting for you. I hope it’s useful to you. I hope this was a good reminder for you again. I know I did this for selfish reasons. I needed this reminder today, but I’m hoping someone else benefited from it as well. All right, my friends, have a great day. Thank you so much for being here, and I will see you again next week. Take care.

Courtney Townley 28:40
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.