Welcome back, friend.
Let's start again by taking a couple long, deep breaths together.
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Take your time.
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Bring 100% of your attention into this moment by listening to life.
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Listen to life with all your attention.
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Release any concerns you may be holding onto — and keep breathing deeply.
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Be fully in your space, living this experience we're sharing.
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Trust life.
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Trust silence.
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Nice.
I often pre-game a Presence Shift with a mini-shift like that, just to get started.
Once you’re more connected to presence, you can choose how you want to garden your mind and shift next.
Learning how to shift my stress in the middle of the night taught me that strategy.
The recurring nightmare that we Presence Shift out of using The Original Presence Shift reminded me of how badly I needed to learn to shift my state of mind years ago.
Fear of going to sleep is a serious issue and I wasn’t willing to live with it.
I remember the night I committed to figuring out how to shift fear.
There I was, lying awake in bed, wired and shaking from a nightmare — despite having been a therapist for years.
I was highly motivated to change, so I began experimenting with shifting strategies — tweaking them until The Original Presence Shift solidified.
I felt confident after The Original Presence Shift brought me into a peaceful state every time I used it.
It’s a formula that works.
My nightmares stopped after a couple weeks using The Original Presence Shift.
I was hooked on shifting.
Next, I wanted to learn how to navigate through ANY unwanted emotional experience and into ANY state of mind.
So I began exploring that — which is what we practice as a community at The Presence Shift every day.
That’s why you set your 7-Day Starter Program intention to learn to strategically shift your state of mind on demand — because it’s doable!
If you can teach yourself to shift from fear into peace, you can use the same principles to shift into other desirable states of mind — when and as you choose.
It’s a challenge, but it’s also achievable once you set your mind to it.
Now that you have some experience presence shifting, you can take another step — visiting your Mind Garden.
Let’s review some key presence shifting concepts first...
Inner World is the 24/7 activity occurring inside your mind and body.
Mind Garden is your inner world, imagined as a living garden.
Mind gardening is exploring, navigating and adjusting your Mind Garden.
Presence shifting is regulating your physical and emotional state, (i.e. self-regulation).
These concepts make sense because they emerge from contemporary brain science.
Brain cells that are used consistently in particular sequences learn to automatically reproduce those sequences.
That is an example of neuroplasticity.
It means that the neurons (the brain cells) that produce your mind state can be trained, (i.e., your Mind Garden can be cultivated).
What this means for you is if you repeatedly shift your mind in particular ways, you will more automatically produce the mind states you consistently shift into.
It also means that if you can identify emotional cues, (i.e., inner world cues), that mark moments when you want to shift, you can then make effective Presence Shifts to cultivate the states that you most want to inhabit.
For example, you can develop your own best ways to shift your state of mind and body strategically any time you want to.
When you can ‘see’ your Mind Garden well you can cultivate it more effectively.
You can begin ‘seeing’ your Mind Garden by using The Mind Garden Shift Into Flow that I’ve linked below.
To start cultivating my Mind Garden after The Original Presence Shift began working reliably for me, I committed to observing and mapping specific characteristics of my Mind Garden — particularly, whenever I encountered elevated stress.
I wanted to learn the characteristics surrounding my stress.
As a young therapist, I frequently encountered life stress and uncertainty,
There can be a lot of stress in becoming a psychologist and a therapist helping other people find peace as a living.
Ever since my final days of staring at the ceiling with nightmare terror coursing through my body years ago, I’ve been presence shifting, mind gardening, teaching, and creating Presence Shifts.
Once you learn the basics, mind gardening and presence shifting become fun.
After a while, I came to see mind gardening and presence shifting as basic skills that everyone is capable of learning and doing.
I especially love how mind gardening feels in the middle of the night because that’s when I addressed my challenging nightmare issue.
Now, if I’m ever awakened by a nightmare at 3 AM, I feel a wave of gratitude buzz through my body because I know I’ll be gardening my mind as I shift into presence for the next little while — and then peacefully falling back to sleep.
That’s a gift you can give yourself.
If you use those quiet moments to reconnect to life in the present moment when you’re lying in a warm bed in silence and observing your mind, shifting toward peace feels like finding heaven.
I actually look forward to it now.
That’s how mind gardening and presence shifting became my favorite hobbies.
And I don’t mean professional hobbies. I mean life hobbies.
I love consistently accessing the states of mind in which I feel best.
If you decide to keep at it, I bet you will too.
Once you can connect to a state of peace and presence with The Original Presence Shift whenever you choose, you can learn to see and shift your Mind Garden into a ‘flow’ state.
Flow is a state that people report when they are fully involved in an activity to the point of forgetting time, and forgetting their surroundings, except being focused on the activity itself. Flow corresponds to a state of presence, but it also entails a sense of being focused and absorbed in your current activity.
With your eyes closed, you’ll peer into your inner world — your Mind Garden — and then shift into a state of flow with…