What is presence practice?

In a world full of obligations and distractions, how do you stay in the moment?

Today we are exploring what presence practice means and how it can improve your day to day life. Hall of Fame inspirational speaker, a Best Selling author, and a highly acclaimed comedic entertainer Patrick Combs joins us today to share about presence practice. He will explore what the practice means to him and how he shares it with others, giving them the reigns back on their brains. 

Have questions, thoughts, or stories you want to share? We would love to hear from you! Shoot us an email at brightminds@pawnee.org

Your mental health matters. While this podcast is meant to foster connection, understanding, and hope, we know that some conversations may bring up difficult or emotional moments. If you need support, help is available and you don’t have to navigate it alone.

If you or someone you know is in crisis or experiencing emotional distress, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Free, confidential support is available at any time.

To learn more about Pawnee Mental Health, visit us at https://www.pawnee.org

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:03

Welcome back. I'm Jonathan Saypal.

SPEAKER_02 0:05

And I'm Michelle Malieu, and this is Bright Minds and Brighter Days Podcast.

SPEAKER_03 0:09

Where every episode our goal is to bring you real conversations that meet real care. Today we have a very special guest. Patrick Combs is a Hall of Fame speaker, best-selling author of five books, and a highly acclaimed comedic entertainer. Patrick has been the invited speaker for more than 1,500 organizations and has been the star comedic entertainer on more than 400 stages around the world. And today we have the honor of having Patrick with us today. Patrick, welcome, my friend. Thank you very much, Jonathan.

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Nice to be here with you and Michelle.

SPEAKER_02 0:44

Thank you. I am, I will tell you, I am very excited to have you on. Um, when we were talking about upcoming podcasts and what we wanted to do, and Jonathan had mentioned this, and I think it's weird because I've never heard of this. So I am very excited to learn more about this because we talk a lot about self-care grounding techniques, but I've never heard of this. And I'm like, is this part of it? So what is presence practicing?

SPEAKER_00 1:08

Thank you for excitement because that excitement makes me extra excited. I tend to sometimes think that presence practice is obvious on its face, but I do remember it's not at all because when I dove into a presence practice 16 something years ago, it was alien territory to me. And there are a lot of promises involved with it. And it was all all this, all my lessons were informed by the book Power of Now by Eckertoly, which then Oprah Winfrey ran up the flagpole twice when she did his second book called Um called A New Earth. So Oprah was really into presence practice the way Eckhart Tolle taught it. She did that book club thing with it, only book she's done twice. And um just as a kind of for people that gather, like, what are we talking about here? You know, Jim Carrey went crazy for it too. And you and if you don't know that Jim Carrey went crazy for presence practice, you don't really know how to delineate the Jim Carrey before presence practice and after presence practice. You just a lot of people have seen Jim Carrey after presence practice. And although this sounds regrettable to say, they think, what happened to him? He's he talks very strange. Um, so you know, television edits people very weird. But those are kind of two benchmarks for people to just say, you know, what's the context here? Presence practice is an incredibly practical mental tool that can also be easily identified as a spiritual tool. It can easily be identified as a therapeutic tool. So it can fall into those categories, whichever world world you're in. For instance, my friend Heather is a therapist of 30 years. And whenever I speak about presence practice her, she's like, oh, that's exactly. And then she starts to give me all the therapeutic models. But if you're sitting with a monk, uh a monk will jump in and say, Well, this is why we meditate, this is why we practice mindfulness. And if you're just sitting with someone who is a fan of any control over their mind, you'll end up have being able to have a conversation with them too. So, with all that said, Michelle, I'll tell you what it is. It is the practice and discipline and target of keeping your mind in the present moment instead of letting your mind hallucinate you to any scenario in the past or hallucinate you to any scenario in the future. And when I use the word hallucinate, it's specific to jar our listeners to say, to at least contemplate the idea that you can't actually go to the past, but you can hallucinate your way there. You can daydream your way there, you can have memories that take you there, but you're you'll never go to the past. It is always a figment in your mind. And the same as the future. Now, it's nice to take sentimental trips to the past. That's beautiful. That's why we keep scrapbooks, that's why we have pleasant memories. And presence practice doesn't want to do away with those, but it is very unfortunate to be dragged into a past over and over by your mind that you'd rather not revisit something traumatic. Same with the future. It's pleasant and wonderful to envision a better future for yourself, to make plans for a wonderful vacation or just to see your dentist. And those are you're making little mental trips. But when your mind is dragging you there for ill purpose to make you feel afraid of the future, then what good is that? So presence practice really acknowledges that the mind, according to a university, and I'm not gonna try and say exactly, I bet it's the University of Miami. Okay, but I bet it is. But university, a university has measured that um these quote mental wanderings or mental time travel are occurring in 50% of our lives.

SPEAKER_03 5:16

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_00 5:17

50% of the time, if you check in on a person, they have mentally wandered into a past or into a future. And no one, what no one has estimated is of that 50% of the quantity of your life, how many times does that mental wandering cause you a good, a bad feeling? And that's why a presence practice matters, because for instance, if you could take back 50% of your life and say, instead of letting my mind, like a dog off a leash, drag me into a future I'm afraid of that hasn't happened yet, and which is often cataclysmic. The mind is very cataclysmic with us, or drag us into a past of regret, which I gosh, I can think of examples of people that suffer because they live that way in my circles. Absolutely. If you could just take that mental control back and say, wait a minute, instead of being dragged in the future of the past for a bad purpose, how about I come right here to right now and make my world small and ask myself a simple question what problems do I have in this instant? And the answer, 99% of the time, will be none. And that alone made me 90% happier in my life. 90% I am 90% of the time happier than I was before I started presence practice because I learned to put my mind on a leash.

SPEAKER_02 6:50

So do we tend to drift, whether it be the past or the present, because we're bored?

SPEAKER_00 6:56

No.

SPEAKER_02 6:57

So it's not me sitting in a meeting and just being like, okay, I've heard this over and over again, and then I just kind of drift.

SPEAKER_00 7:03

It would be nice if it only happened when we're bored. Um, scientists have named it, and on some days I know what it's called, and some days I don't like the oh, the DNS. The DNS. It's called the DNS. Um, what that stands for, I'm I'm failing to remember. But DNS means science has identified that it's just automatically fun, it's the way your brain automatically functions. It doesn't have to be bored. You could be very engaged in something, and suddenly your mind leaps out of the present, what you presently want to be focused on, that's real, and to some cataclysmic scenario. We all know this because, you know, let's say that you that something's kind of haunting you, and you'd rather be focused on the beautiful meal in front of you that you're having with a companion because that's real and that's lovely. And then suddenly your mind, your mind is tapping you on the shoulder and going, can we just think about this fearful thing for a second that might happen in the future and might not, but it might. So that's not boredom. That's would my brain please stop torturing me.

SPEAKER_03 8:06

So so, Patrick. So is there a difference between presence and you know, practicing things like meditation or mindfulness? Are there any anything distinct there?

SPEAKER_00 8:19

The answer is yes and no. So take it one at a time. Practicing meditation occurs usually in a pose at a specific time for an allocated amount of time. Now, when you're in that pose at that allocated time, you are trying to be, you are trying to be the observer of your mind. You're not trying to stop your mind from thinking about the past or thinking about the future. You're simply in good meditation, just trying to observe all the thoughts that happen automatically out of your control and not get attached to any of them. Just let them float by like clouds, because that's the discipline that's also behind presence practice. Where presence practice differs is it says, I'm not, it's not gonna, I'm not gonna try and be the observer of my mind when I'm on a mat at a certain time. I'm gonna try and be the observer of my mind throughout the day. Now, the reason why presence practice works so well for me is I'm not a meditator. I I'm not the guy that's gonna say, yeah, I sit for one hour every morning on a mat.

SPEAKER_01 9:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:42

Um it's wonderful. And then as Eckert Tolley puts it, and since I can't claim this from personal experience because I'm not a meditator. A lot of times meditators will be able to be the observer of their mind, but only on the mat. And then the next 23 hours of their day, they forget like to live that meditation state.

SPEAKER_02 10:08

So how do we actually do this? Like, is it deep breathing? Is it closing my eyes? Is it falling into someone in that meditation category? Or like, how do I go with that?

SPEAKER_00 10:17

There's so there's so many door. Oh, Michelle, you add you just you both asked fantastic questions. Thank you. I depend on them for this interview. There are many doorways in to being present. Um so we'll name a few because they all lead to exactly the same result. But my experience in going from a guy that was deeply unpresent to a guy that's deeply present is you want you want all the tools you can get in your toolbox because you are up against the greatest addiction known to mankind, which is 88,000 thoughts a day happening automatically out of your control. That's an addiction. An addiction to like I can't stop thinking. I know all my thinking's not good for me, but I can't stop. I keep doing it, I keep doing it.

SPEAKER_01 11:04

Never shuts off, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:06

Right. So that's the actual definition of an addiction. It's a behavior you've decided is not good for you or those around you, but you can't stop doing it. So I recognize that when I decided I was going to become present, I'm like, okay, this ain't gonna be easy. So here are the here are a couple, we'll we'll go with three doorways in. Number one, there's nothing like one deep conscious breath. And that means you take one breath in and one breath out, and the whole time, all you try to do is focus on the physical sensation of breathing, plus observing your mind interrupt you on that one breath, because it's gonna happen, which is amazing. It shows us all the level of the addiction, the level that the mind is out of our control. We go to take one breath, and it should be as simple as, hey, I'm gonna take a breath. I'm not gonna think a single thing, not one thought in my head. I'm just gonna breathe in and feel my body breathing and watch it. I'm gonna breathe out and watch my exhale. And good luck with that. Because the mind, if you're breathing in, the mind will go, hey, we're breathing in, like a narrator, like you needed that. Or you'll breathe in, you'll make it, and then on your exhale, you go, I gotta get milk from the store. And you'll be like, What?

SPEAKER_03 12:24

What?

SPEAKER_00 12:26

One conscious breath. If that's what someone gets out of this interview, listen, this is really something. If a person listening to this says, I want to be happier, I want more peace, I want more love, I want more joy. Um if they discipline themselves to taking one conscious breath in their day from here forward, their life will change a lot for the good. And that's surprising. But that is a promise that was given to me that turned out to be true. And what that tells us is if you can claim one moment, it's about five seconds, of I am here now, being the observer of my thoughts, in control of my mind, one time a day. That's like doing one push-up when you've never done none, and you will get stronger and it will lead into other areas of your life. And there'll be in no time at all. It could happen tomorrow. You'll take a breath and you'll go, my mind didn't go anywhere. And you are being present. And and people really got a kick out of the stoplight thing that I did because it's so practical. The next time you come to a stoplight, waiting for it to turn green, challenge yourself to think nothing while you sit at that stoplight. Just sit and just just be blank and watch the stoplight change. And you are going to hear your mind for the first time. And you it for the you'll have a reckoning, you'll say, How is it that I can't sit at a stoplight without my mind automatically racing when I didn't want it to? And then so if you make stoplights your discipline, there will come a day, and it was big for me, even though it sounds silly, where I pulled up to a stoplight and I didn't think one single thing until it turned red. But by the time that day had come, I had already achieved a very deep, constant peace in my everyday life, despite the circumstances happening around me. And that's what can happen, that's what a presence practice will do. It will give you an astounding level of peace, an astounding level of calm, absolute de stress, um, added joy. You'll just notice, like, I'm just always happier, and you'll feel love from nowhere. All no matter despite or no matter what the external circumstances of your life are, you will just be good, really good. Why? The answer is really simple because your thoughts, those 88,000 thoughts, are torturing you a lot of the time. They are causing you stress and anxiety that is unnecessary. If you if you climb the mountain, you know, the metaphoric, if you you climb the mountaintop to reach the guru on top, I know what he'll tell you. I used to think that he would say, love is the answer. But the guru on top of the mountain will not say love is the answer. If you climbed up there for the secret to life, the guru on the mountain will say, Stop thinking so much.

SPEAKER_03 16:02

What are the benefits of being present um and and how how can that affect um the way we communicate with other people?

SPEAKER_00 16:11

First of all, it'll it'll radically improve all your relationships. You know that thing that we all do when there's just the slight, well, someone's telling us a story and we don't hear part of it. Right. Because we started to think of what we were gonna say back to their story. Or the most annoying thing in the world is when you go, Hey my gosh, I just went to Kansas City and oh, and in Kansas, I went to the game, and you're about to tell someone your experience of the game, and they go, Oh, I went to the game in Kansas City, and they take over the conversation. That's all a lack of presence. That's all somebody, look, I want everybody in this call, I'm saying it for the third time, to think of your mind that thinks automatically like a dog that you're walking. Most people's dog is out of control and it drags them around on the walk and it kicks up other neighbors' yard and it does whatever it wants and it pulls the owner down the road. It is the dog walking the owner. But if you ever meet somebody who's deeply present as a practice, their dog is on a leash. They are walking the dog. When they want to think, they choose to think. If their dog starts barking, they recognize it and just say, um, oh, um, we're fine here, and I'm not going to listen to your parking. They're just radically in control of being the curator of which thoughts from their mind they want, and they have quieter minds. So the benefits that come from that is you have beautiful, like for instance, just now we accidentally stepped on each other's toes. So it was it's a result of me not being present enough to notice you had started talking. I was I was on the waterfall of my thoughts, right? So the deeper our presence, the more we're actually in tune to the person across from us.

SPEAKER_02 18:09

But help me with this because again, like I said, I feel like the dog most of the time. And I'm sure people listening all do because we kind of get stuck on a keyword, and then it's like squirrel, and then there we go.

SPEAKER_00 18:20

Right. Do you want do you want to know what happens when you have a presence practice?

SPEAKER_02 18:24

Yes, please.

SPEAKER_00 18:25

Your mind goes squirrel, and you go, um, yeah, that's not what we're gonna pay attention to right now. So it doesn't follow the thoughts. It doesn't presence practice says I still have the thoughts, but I don't follow them. Let me give you an example. Okay. My significant other and I, Polly, we're driving down the road the other day, and we're coming up on the intersection where I think that I'm supposed to turn to go to the restaurant. And she's never taken this route before. And right before I make the turn, she goes, I don't go this way to get to the restaurant, and I go, How do you go? And she goes, I go to the 56, and that's what I hear, and it and my mind goes, Don't turn the way you you were gonna go, Patrick. Polly's trying to tell you to go forward to the 56, so I do it. Okay, it was just a snap decision, but what happens next matters. The minute I go straight, it takes us another 15 seconds of driving to realize that that moment steered me in the wrong direction, that I got off course, and now we were gonna do a big detour to get back on course. Now, I instantly felt upset that Polly's remark in my mind, listen, my mind was saying her ill-timed remark, not trusting that I know where I'm going, just put us off course. In her mind, what her mind said is I didn't tell him to turn, which is true. I was telling him I go a different way. And he made the choice, and now we're off course. Now, without a presence practice, we will both believe the thought in our head and say it without any gap, without any space, without any observation and choice of whether it's productive to say that remark. We're both still human. We both get triggered over little things. And the mind wants to blame somebody else. It's a default. The mind would much rather blame you than take the blame for myself. But you know what a presence practice allowed? It allowed me to see the thought in slow motion with a gap, because it's my dog on a leash and I'm walking it. And hear another part of myself, my mind, say, Do I want to say that out loud? And the answer was no. Because if I say that out loud, we're going to start into an argument. What I want to do is just be quiet until I'm not angry anymore. Polly did the same thing exactly. We were both quiet until we got to the restaurant. And at the restaurant, we had both calmed down. None of us said any of the stuff our mind was demanding we say. And the first things we said to each other at the restaurant were light, fun, and charming. They were something like, um, hey, in the moment back there, I was pretending that you steered me off course, and I know I know you didn't. And she was like, Oh, well, in the moment back there, I was I was mad at you for this, and I recognize you didn't. And I go, What we both did right, and she said. Is we didn't say it out loud, we were being present.

SPEAKER_02 22:04

I like that.

SPEAKER_00 22:05

That's very real world. Without presence, you fight before you're going out for a nice restaurant, and maybe it maybe it stumbles into a bigger fight, and your whole dinner's runned. With presence practice, not one harmful word said to each other.

SPEAKER_03 22:21

So if someone says, I just don't have time to be present, how how would you respond to that?

SPEAKER_00 22:28

Presence is stepping out of time. Now that's really heady, but it's but it needs to be stated. Presence is the acknowledgement that when you become present, you don't need time to be present. That's the answer. You don't need time to be present, you need to step out of time. Time kind of keeps us on a conveyor belt where our minds are always moving. So you can almost relate time to the movement of your mind and all these thoughts. In presence is saying, stop, be here right now, in this instant, and make your world small. So look, I'm gonna let's be present right now. And I think we are, but let's deepen our presence right now. Everybody listening to this, come to your five senses, take a moment to see only what's in front of you. Now notice the colors. Look for one detail you hadn't noticed about this moment in your real life, and then you'll know your present. Oh yeah, this. If I'm looking at this, which is a tiny red paper clip, then I know that I'm not in the past and I'm not in the future because I'm seeing this. If I hear, let's listen. I hear that drip. I know I'm not in the past, I'm not in the future. You can't hear the drip and be somewhere else. If I taste the saliva in my mouth, I'm here, I'm present right now. If I do a conscious breath, I'm here, I'm right now, because I can feel the breath. If I pull on my hair a little bit as I run my hand through it, I can't be in the past or the future or a daydream. Because I'm feeling my hand move through my hair. That's how long it takes to get present. Only one of those moves. The bigger question is, how long can you keep that? Because 88,000 thoughts a day occurring automatically are going to try and interrupt that within seconds. So this is just a practice. It's a practice of saying, I mean, your entire life will change. And these are the guarantees. Great peace, great love from within, and great joy for no reason. Great peace no matter what circumstances you're under, great love, whether you're in a relationship or not, and great joy no matter what the circumstances. Those are the guarantees if you could only take control of your mind and become present more often.

SPEAKER_02 25:23

So the deep breath, the five senses, what's one practice that you personally never skip?

SPEAKER_00 25:30

I use them all now because they're there, you need a bag of, you're up against 88,000 thoughts occurring automatically. So you just use the you use what you have that you have the tools and you use the one that works best for you in that moment. You'll if you have the tools, you'll know which one you want to reach for. But if I want to be present, most of the time what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take a deep breath. It's gonna turn into three. Okay. And then after that deep breath, I'm almost totally grounded in a difficult moment. And then I'm gonna come to my five senses. And then I'm gonna ask myself, I'm gonna use a third technique. I'm gonna ask myself a simple question at the end of that. What problem do I have in this instant? Not five minutes from now, not what's waiting at my mailbox, not you know, 60 seconds from now. What problem do I have right now, in this instant, when my world is as small as what I can see and touch? And the answer will always be no, and it's deeply calming, will be none. You don't have a problem in this instant. And eventually the cumulative effect of that awareness is you feel very safe in the world and greatly at peace almost all the time. And when you're not at peace, it will always be because your mind dragged you into the past or the future when you weren't paying attention. Always, there's no exception except physical pain. The only thing anybody ever suffers on the negative emotion scale is their mind dragged them into the pat into an unpleasant future, hallucination of a future, or an unpleasant memory of the past as a hallucination or an unpleasant daydream and kept them there too long. That is the only thing that has ever upset you.

SPEAKER_02 27:40

So before we wrap up, is this something kids can do as well?

SPEAKER_00 27:44

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Kids are present, you know, that's why they play so well and they're so worry-free. You can see the age when they start acquiring uh this DNS system, you know, that starts all the automatic thinking about the past and the future. I'd be curious what age that starts. But from having two kids myself, it ain't going on at three, it's rarely going on at three years old.

SPEAKER_03 28:11

Well, all right, Patrick. I um I I end every podcast the same way, and that's what the question What gives you hope for the future? It's such an important question these days.

SPEAKER_00 28:30

People are really good. The majority of people are really wonderful, and we're never lacking for evidence that the vast majority of people, people like you and people like me, we're good people. We're not perfect people, but we're good people. So as long as the majority of humans are good people, and by good people, I just mean I most of us have the same things in common. We want our kids to be safe, you know, we want to have, we want to eat meals, we want to help our neighbor, we want to kind of live by the you know golden rule. That's who most of us are. We want to be have productive lives. So that gives me hope. Because in the end, you know, there in the end, the majority usually finds its way.

SPEAKER_02 29:21

Thank you so much. I like I said, I was very excited at the beginning. I think I am more excited than I was at the beginning to learn about this. And I Jonathan and I had a meeting about a week ago to discuss some things like what kind of questions do we want to? And I said, I'm I'm gonna let you roll with this because I have no idea what any of this is. And so I absolutely love hearing you break down bits and pieces. Obviously, it's not complicated, it's pretty simple. So hopefully everybody listening can take a moment and get present with themselves.

SPEAKER_00 29:48

One everybody have fun with one thing, okay? The next human being you see, look at them without thinking about their past. If you know, if they if they're really familiar to you, then look at them and say, I'm gonna look at you as if I've never seen you before and I know nothing about you. That's being present to another person.

SPEAKER_02 30:10

I love that.

SPEAKER_00 30:11

And you'll notice from that little thing, you will notice, and then and then notice how you feel. And I predict you'll feel a couple things. Calmer for some reason. Um, and the person in front of you will look more vivid. Perhaps you'll think they look more beautiful. And the last thing you are likely to feel is you'll say, Boy, that's almost a feeling of kindness or lovingness that I have inside of me. It'll be on a scale. If it's if it's someone that you're in a relationship with, you will, in that moment you're looking at them is if you've never seen them before and you know nothing about them, you'll feel more loving. That's not love you're getting from them, that's love that you are and that you're letting be free. Because the only thing that in or we don't need to go find love, we need to remove the obstacles to block it. So if we remove all of your thinking, you know what happens? You discover that you just kind of have a nuclear radiator of love inside you that's being been being blocked by a lot of negative thinking, even when you're a positive person. So that's why the promises are real, because if if I could reach in and turn off your brain, your your thinking, not your brain, if I could reach in and say, hey, I'm just gonna shut off all your thinking, I'm gonna give you one hour of no thinking, I know everybody, everybody, after one hour, I'd say, How do you feel? And everybody would say, the best I've ever felt in my life. Peace, love, and joy. So if that's true, and it is, then if we can just manufacture that through discipline a little bit through our days, I guarantee everybody listening, your life will be phenomenally better in a short amount of time because you took this up. There isn't. I've been studying personal development for 30 years. Nothing is more effective. Nothing. Thank you for giving us your time. That's my pleasure. My pleasure. You are both very wonderful, pleasant people. Go forth and be present. All right. I love it. Thank you so much. Good to see you, Jonathan. Nice to meet you, Michelle.

SPEAKER_02 32:35

A new day at Pawnee is here. It's about building a mental health system that's easier to access, more flexible, and supportive of our communities. For more than 70 years, Pawnee has been standing with people through challenges and change. Now, therapy, recovery, crisis, and medication services are even more connected, accessible, and ready to meet people where they are. Find out more at Pawnee.org.

SPEAKER_03 33:00

Michelle and I would like you to know pain is temporary, but giving up is permanent, and you don't have to face it alone.

SPEAKER_02 33:07

If you or someone you know is in need of care, hope is available. For local listeners, you can call Pawnee's Crisis Hotline at 1-800-609-2002.

SPEAKER_03 33:18

For our national listeners, you can call or text the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988.

SPEAKER_02 33:25

Other mental health resources can also be located on our website, Pawnee.org.

SPEAKER_03 33:30

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