Effortless Presence

When we feel closed, is openness not still open, free, and present with us? Even when we feel cloistered and confined, are we not still in the room without walls?

The door is already open. What is present is always present. It does not rest on or rely on anything; therefore, it cannot be closed.

Openness is experienced as a lifting of the veil, the veneer, or the opening of the window. The inner experiencer comes to greet the outward experience. It is a direct engagement with life as it is, in the open. That means there is not a secondary filter concerned with identifying this or that, or proving itself with personal agendas. Instead, openness meets openness. Life meets life.

Life is there already. What you are is not other than the process of life. When one uncovers the quality of oneness, a psychological letting go occurs. 

Imagine you are a leaf on a branch in a storm. Your identity centres on being a leaf on a branch. That is all you have ever known. The storm comes, and the wind blows. It shakes you to your foundations, and you cling to the branch ever more. You want to remain as you are. Yet, somewhere a leaf is blown and lets go of the branch. It flies through the sky's open space: dancing, not falling. You see that leaf and say, “I wish I had the courage to do that too”—and then, sure enough, you fly.

The wind is passing over all of us. Leaves dance and change colour. The waves roll and dissolve. The stream ushers on. When we cling to life, we restrict that very life. Life itself is openness. We do not experience it entirely so long as we cling to our ideas of who we are and what life is.

***

Abiding in the present moment is abiding in the presence of the moment. It is a living and pulsating sort of radiance, a cascading vibrancy of trillions of frames unfurling to present this singular now: a now that can happen or exist nowhere else but right here. 

The only place where you will ever be alive is this present moment. It is your home. When you forget that, then where do you reside? So often in our forgetfulness we are like refugees on our own doorstep wandering in the lands of ‘what was’ or ‘what might be,’ exiled from the fullness of life unfolding right here. We drift because the mind clings to stories, to fears, to hopes. It busies itself with constructing identities, building a fortress of distractions, and charting a future that never arrives. In doing so, we abandon the simplicity of being.

Yet, the doorway back to presence is always open. It requires no map, no journey—only the willingness to pause, to soften, and to listen. The breath becomes a guide, the body becomes a sanctuary, and the stillness becomes a lighthouse.

Each time you return, it is as if the world is made new again. Colours grow brighter, sensations sharper, and life hums with a subtle music that is always playing. In this return, there is no analysis needed, no interpretation required—only grace unfurling like a flower, reminding us that home is found in the process of presence.

***

Take your hands, for example. To witness the hands, you do not have to run towards them. You do not have to catch them. To experience your own hands is to see them as they are.

You don’t need anyone to tell you how to look at them in order to see them. You don’t need to read a book, take a workshop, or use psychedelics to see them. Right now, you can look, right now you can feel, and see that sight and sensation is a mystery, it is a miracle. That having hands is a bewildering thing.

Look at your hands and forget what they are. Let astonishment take you by the heart and return you to the wonderment of life. Return to the mystery of being. Before words, before concepts, you are the unknown by which all else is known.

What effort is needed in that space? It is effortless presence. It is your own radiant and mysterious being that serves as a lighthouse for this cold, dark, and confused world. It is about evoking in oneself the wonderment not to become comfortable and complacent, thinking that all of this is anything other than a miracle.

What, then, do we do with it all? First, appreciate it. The mountain does not need your appreciation, but if you sincerely hold it in your heart and appreciate it—what a wonder! You don’t need to wait for an appropriate time—you can do it now. Appreciation is a key to joy.

Joy doesn’t need anything to be any other way. It has the ability to laugh, not in the face of, but in the great embrace of what is. Joy does not take effort; peace does not take effort. Rather, it takes one away from effort. It is an effortless resting in the openness of the very presence of life. That is how joy and peace can happen—naturally, like a leaf leaving a tree.

Investigating the natural mind is an effortless task. It is just to look, and look at what is looking. It should not strain. It should take away the strain and unbind the tension built up from always looking outward.

So much tension is added by our ideas about it. We become contracted because of contraction, and so much of our suffering is this psychological spiral. So begin by relaxing the mind. Just notice the sensations around the head, notice the sensation at the back of the head and let those sensations—like a knot—gently loosen and unravel. 

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When you are relaxed, you are receptive. In order to be receptive you must be relaxed. In allowing, everything arrives without the need to allow it. The sky does not try to accept the cloud, the ground does not brace itself to yield to the rain.

For some of us, relaxing is not so simple. We carry types of psychological scars, wounds, and traumas of attachment circumstance, situation, and experience. These burdens can make it difficult to allow life as it is. Sometimes we find ourselves bound by reservations, restrictions, and constrictions that pull us away and prevent us from the present. We want to control because of fear of the unknown or perhaps from fear of losing control over the little we think we know. 

And yet, the moment will be as it is regardless, with or without us. The cloud will still rain, the river will still run, the breeze will still blow over all of us. Our resistance or denial of the world does not colour the world, but only our perception of it. 

Resistance, by its nature, cannot accept acceptance—it pushes against it. Yet acceptance has already embraced it. Do you see? 

No matter how far you run, you are always carried by the ground beneath you. No matter how lost you feel, everything is found in everything. No matter how many lives you’ve had, they are all woven of one life. No matter how corrupt you have been, or it may seem you have been, truth is at the heart of all there is.

From this view, it is somewhat silly to think that nonduality needs your acceptance of it, or that your resistance makes any difference. On the one hand, you perceive the intimacy of allowing life in its totality: in its messy beauty, in its ugly wonder. On the other hand, you know that you do not allow life anything. The allowing just unwinds certain aspects of the psyche that are bound in tension. How could you allow reality? You only allow parts of yourself to be free from the need to allow or deny. The culmination is to be free—no tension, no release, no acceptance, no denial. Then what? 

You can rest. 

You can rest the time-bound mind from its relentless conquest.

You can rest this one body, just as it is.

In rest, there is no destination.

Resting where you are, you become where you are.

Taking rest is allowing the world to be completely free.

When you allow the world to be just as it is, it presents itself to you, and your rest becomes the presence of receiving that gift.

Rest in this presence because when you rest, you see that this presence has always rested in you.

When we are busy trying to go this way or that way, stirring the pot, wanting to get somewhere, wanting to achieve something, this presence becomes obscured. Quality rest is about clarity, and clarity is one of the most valuable currencies that you have. Because if you see clearer, if you see with a certain light, you see farther, you see the world as it is. And in that light, you come closer to who you are. 

Rest as who you are—nothing more and nothing less. Resting as who you are is not trivial. It's a simple process, and it's just to be.

If you've just come in your front door after a long journey, you put down your bags. Rest is the relief of finally coming home. You remove your travel-worn clothes to bathe, and rest in the nakedness of being. 

Whatever it is, wherever it comes from, whatever is here now, let it rest, lay it down, let it be in peace. 

***

Consider the fragrant aroma of the flower that gently rises, wafts, and carries its essence to your nostrils. But note that we cannot hold its scent. Like this flower, the presence of this moment is fragrant. It is holy and mysterious. To enter into its mystery, we cannot reach, we cannot grasp or cling; rather, we must relax, we must rest, and return to this, just this moment as it is. 

It is in this rest that we gently open like the flower towards the sun. It is in our resting that the peaceful aroma settles in us and instils the qualities of tranquillity and quietude. This gentle return is a turning away from the restlessness of the past and agitation of the future. It is a homecoming to and communion with the eternal refuge that is this moment. It takes slowing down to savour this aroma. When one is supremely touched by it, the aroma exudes from them as well and becomes like a healing balm of presence in this world.

Rest is receptivity to receive this presence.

Receive this presence now.

Invest in rest.

Rest in peace, rest in peacefulness.

Rest in peace while you are alive.

Wake up and rest in peace.

Rest in peace.