The Reason You Can't Stay Present Has Nothing to Do With Practice

As we wander through life, we constantly encounter changing circumstances. Different people. Different situations. Different experiences. If we're driving, we encounter different landscapes, different cityscapes, different neighbourhoods. If we're walking, different faces, different energies, different corners of a place that feel entirely unlike the corner we left a few moments prior. Even if we're sitting by ourselves at home, the light changes as the sun moves across the sky. Clouds cluster and fade. The room shifts around us without anyone doing anything.

And all of these changing circumstances do one thing: they shift our perceptual inputs. Constantly. Invisibly. Without our permission.

There's a psychological phenomenon called priming, and it's been proven to show that different atmospheric inputs — encounters, environments, even fleeting thoughts — cast an emotional pall over us that then affects and infects whatever comes next.

Here's my favourite priming example. In a well-known study, students who spent fifteen minutes thinking about life as a college professor performed significantly better on a trivia game than students who spent fifteen minutes thinking about being a soccer hooligan. Neither group knew the test was coming. The content of the trivia was identical. The only difference was what their attention had been marinating in for the fifteen minutes prior.

That's priming. A moment-by-moment, unconscious shift in your emotional and cognitive state that colours everything that follows. And the uncomfortable truth is that we have very little control over it. We can't control what life throws at us; we can't control the effect a random encounter, a piece of news, or a change in the weather is going to have on our internal state.

Priming is a monkey wrench in our ability to stay within ourselves, to stay grounded, to stay centred. And until this moment, maybe you weren't even aware of the effect and impact of priming on your moment to moment life.

Let's layer presuppositions on top of that.

There are two categories here, and they operate at very different depths.

The first is what I'd call a situational presupposition. You wake up with a bad feeling and think, "I'm going to have a bad day." That presupposition — that assumption about what's coming — affects and infects what follows. It doesn't guarantee a bad day, but it certainly doesn't help. You've primed yourself with a belief about the future, and now your perceptual system is actively looking for evidence to confirm it. And it will find it, because ambiguity is everywhere, and ambiguity bends toward whatever you expect to see.

The second category is deeper and more consequential. I call these fundamental presuppositions — or fundamental primes.

These are the beliefs that got baked into us as children. Not deliberately. Not maliciously, for the most part. But unconsciously, through repetition and modelling and the slow absorption of what the adults around us believed to be true about the world.

"University is for people not like us."

"Wealth is for other people."

"People like us don't get rich."

"You can't trust anyone."

"The world isn't safe."

These fundamental primes don't just colour a single morning. They colour an entire life. They sit beneath every perception, every interpretation, every reaction. They determine what you see, what you miss, what you expect, and what you believe is possible for you. And because they were installed before you had the cognitive tools to question them, they don't feel like beliefs. They feel like facts.

So what's the point of all this? Where does it lead?

It leads to presence. Or more precisely, it leads to why presence is so bloody difficult.

Eckhart Tolle does a beautiful job of articulating what presence is. The absence of inner dialogue. The absence of psychological time. Just here. Just now. I love that. I think it's a profoundly useful and powerful space to be in — for those who can get there.

But I think the work needs to start earlier.

Tolle had an extraordinary experience that brought him to his version of enlightenment, and I think it's wonderful and aspirational. But for the rest of us — for the dull normals wandering around with our unprocessed experiences and our inherited beliefs and our nervous systems that are constantly being primed by a world we can't control — the journey to presence has to begin before the yoga mat. Before the meditation cushion. Before the closing of the eyes and the quiet reeling-in of the wandering mind.

It has to begin with cleaning house.

Here is the reality: we are constantly being triggered by inputs from the world landing on our unresolved issues. Every experience we've ever had that produced a strong emotion, that wasn't fully processed, is a psychic open wound that we travel with. It's not always obvious. Most of the time it's dormant. But the right circumstances — the right bit of priming — and it will be revealed. To you and to everyone around you. Probably embarrassingly and almost certainly in a way that doesn't help.

And it doesn't matter how many reps you have on your yoga mat. It doesn't matter how many times you can close your eyes and bring your attention back to the breath. If your internal house isn't in order — if the wounds are still open, if the fundamental primes are still running unchallenged — presence will remain a fleeting state at best. Something you visit for a few minutes on a cushion and then lose the moment someone behind you coughs in a particular tone.

So here's what I want to offer.

First: forgive yourself.

If you can't achieve presence easily — if your mind won't stay still, if you keep getting hijacked by reactions that seem disproportionate, if you feel like you're failing at the simplest instruction in the history of spiritual practice — forgive yourself. Because every time life happened to you and you did not fully process that experience, it became baggage you've been carrying ever since. That's not a character flaw. That's being human.

Second: go digging.

Every time you get upset at something — even a minor thing — treat it as a signal. Not a problem. A signal. Go looking for the antecedents. Where did that reaction come from? Where did you learn to get angry or upset or afraid of that particular thing? See if you can isolate the incident, or the category of incidents, that resulted in you operating that way.

Because I can almost guarantee you that what you're reacting to isn't what's happening now. It's unresolved psychological baggage from your past that the present moment just happened to rhyme with.

That's the work. Not presence as a destination. Presence as a consequence of having done the homework.

Clean up the priming by becoming aware of it. Examine the fundamental presuppositions by naming them. Resolve the open wounds by going back and finishing what was never finished.

And when enough of that work has been done — when the house is clean enough, the primes are updated enough, the wounds are healed enough — presence isn't something you have to strive for anymore.

It's just where you are.

The Hümmo Method — Energy Healing for the Rest of Us arrives August 18, 2026. It's a practical guide to doing exactly this kind of housekeeping — without spiritual prerequisites or prior belief required. Reserve your copy here.