Our capacity to engage with ourselves, others and the world around us has everything to do with our ability to be present. Engagement is the quality of attention we offer in any given moment. To be fully engaged is to be fully alive, to be able to receive and to give. It hinges on an awareness of attention, a cultivated focus, and a resistance to distraction. In our culture of constant doing and splitting our attention through multi-tasking, we have trained our minds to move constantly from thought to thought. We pride ourselves in days spent being productive, getting things done, checking off the to-do list. Our minds are busy with endless machinations and imaginings.
Engagement is our commitment to being here, to being the love that we are. It is a whole-being process—lived through our senses, our feelings, our ability to know with our heart the depth of our aliveness. We are able to listen, to be patient, to offer a spacious mind. Engagement rides the capacity to be present to what is and through that presence, to open completely to what is being offered. It is stepping into our intrinsic potential to experience the timeless being that we are, to live in the now, feeling the warmth of the sun, the radiating love of someone’s heart.
We live in the ocean of the Cosmos, a creature of this earth, both bound in this time and place and simultaneously free from it. It is in the timeless presence we unravel our complexities and simply exist. It is from this greater self, inclusive of the whole of existence, not bound by time or space, that we breathe in our true nature and nourish the gift of being a moving, sensing creature. As we embrace our aliveness, our spectrum of engagement deepens, allowing for pleasure and wonder, for true freedom and liberation.
