I was on my walk this morning and there was this moment where I caught myself thinking about an email I needed to send first thing when I got home. Sound familiar? It might sound familiar and seem even normal, but is it really?

It might be worth looking a little deeper into this conundrum – this split between the body and the mind. Age-old it may be, the common experience it may be, the norm it may be called – but what are we taking for granted, putting up with and actually condoning and accepting?

There I was walking along, the body was doing its thing, my legs were faithfully taking me from A to B and my mind was not only in another place, it was actually in a different time zone. My feet as part of my body were on my walk, putting one step in front of another and my mind had catapulted me onto my seat in front of the computer and right into an imagined future event.

To be even more precise, I was in two time zones (the present moment and the future) and in two places (on my walk and in my office) at once.

Shortly afterwards I walked past an empty house: it had been empty for months, a perfectly good house in a great and very quiet location, just standing empty. And the words ‘the absent landlord’ came to me. It felt a lot like what I had just experienced: my mind had been absent to the present moment, unavailable and otherwise engaged.

My body had been left to its physicality, bereft of my presence. I had checked out from the physical body and what it was doing and an obvious disconnection from my ears down had occurred.

Not only that, but I had also lost all those moments when I was elsewhere and in another time zone following my mind’s meanderings – I had actually squandered that time, I had no recollection of it and it was gone.

As I continued my walk, staying present with and enjoying what I was doing, it got me pondering … with the rates of dementia and mental health problems ever soaring, can we really afford to shrug our shoulders and keep thinking that this kind of body / mind split and absenteeism from our-selves is normal or even healthy?

Is it possible that the way we move and go about our everyday life is making us sick?

Is this escapism into our heads one of the cornerstones of ill health?

Is it really okay to live checked out from what we do? And what else does it lead to?

Up until about ten or so years ago, I would not have thought that there was anything wrong with my behaviour. I might have even felt a bit elated or slightly down afterwards, depending on how my thinking had affected me and depending on whether I would have been looking forward to the next task or not.

I would not have registered the disconnect between the body and the mind, quite to the contrary – I would have prided myself on my ability to be elsewhere from my body and be following several trains of thought in my head concurrently.

Or I would have thought, every so often and ever more infrequently, that I needed to empty my mind of all thoughts and achieve a state of vacuousness that would make me immune to the ups and downs as dictated by the quality of my thoughts.

This has all changed since I heard Serge Benhayon present on conscious presence – the ability to have the mind think what the body does and have the body do what the mind thinks, keeping both in the same place and in the same time zone.

This practice has been immensely liberating and totally put a stop to the wild ups and downs of being dependent on whether I find my thoughts exhilarating or depressing. (Sounds like a mental disorder? I am sure that over time it will be seen as such.)

With deep appreciation of Serge Benhayon and the teachings of the Ancient Wisdom, without whom and which I would not have discovered the joy and fulfillment of conscious presence.

By Gabriele Conrad, Goonellabah NSW

Further Reading:
Connection To Self Through Conscious Presence
Leaving It Up To God
Mental Awareness Vs Conscious Awareness