The Unbreakableness of Presence

Presence is the enemy of the attention economy. That alone makes it revolutionary. The world we’re living in is engineered to fracture your awareness, monetize your dopamine, and weaponize your thoughts. When you are not present, you become your thoughts. Not the thinker—the thoughts themselves. That’s when you get played. You start reacting to what you haven’t even processed. You fall for the ad, the algorithm, the asshole with the microphone. Without presence, you become a pawn in someone else's game—marketed to, manipulated, managed.

Presence is not a luxury. It’s not some self-help buzzword or a lifestyle trend you wear like linen pants in Tulum. Presence is the essential practice of being. It’s the inner stance that makes choice even possible. It reduces every moment to a single, sacred decision: get present. Not later. Not after the meeting. Not once you’re done scrolling. Now.

What is presence? Language buckles under that question. It’s not easily defined, and that’s part of its mystery. But presence, to me, is stillness in motion. It is observation without judgment. It is being fully where your feet are. I first learned it—not from a book—but from nature.

Presence is Primal

There’s a kind of presence that doesn’t come from meditation apps or yoga retreats. It’s older than language. It lives in the body. It doesn’t ask you to rise above your instincts—it asks you to remember them. This is primal presence. Raw. Grounded. Animal. It doesn’t float above life; it roots you in it.

Primal presence isn’t romantic. It’s not about serenity. It’s about awareness. It’s about learning to see without analyzing, to listen without reacting. It’s about sharpening the edge between alertness and surrender. And for me, it started in the mountains of eastern Oregon.

When I was younger, I used to hunt deer out there. But truthfully, I wasn’t hunting deer. I was hunting quiet. I was hunting space. I didn’t have the word “presence” back then. I just knew I wanted to be in places where silence was king and solitude was queen. 

The mountains gave me something different. They didn’t care who I was. They didn’t require anything from me except stillness. And in that stillness, I started to feel something ancient waking up inside me.

I remember one morning more than the rest. It was late September in the Wallowa Mountains, around the time when mornings started to arrive with frost. I hiked up a ridge line and found a spot under a stand of pine trees. Tucked in low, back against the trunk, rifle across my lap. It was maybe 5:30 in the morning. Cold in a way that got your attention with its details. The heaviness of the rifle. My fingers stiff in my gloves. The air thin and sharp.

The sun took its time. Just a faint thread of gold working its way between the trees. I didn’t move. I didn’t even think. I just listened. Every sound felt amplified as if I suddenly had mountain lion ears. A single twig snapping somewhere off to my right. The wind rolling over the ridge. The scampering of a chipmunk foraging for breakfast.

Looking back, that was the first time I actually noticed being present. Just a deep sense of being. The kind of being that doesn’t need to be explained or improved. I felt connected—not to some identity or human-made system, but to the actual earth beneath me. To the buck I never saw. To the blood in my veins. To the part of me that didn’t need words.

At that moment, the wild in me—whatever had been beaten down by noise and fear—stood up again. Not to fight. Just to be awake.

It was in these moments that I learned to love the taste of presence. Not the soft kind. Not the curated kind. The primal kind. The kind that makes you realize how much noise you’ve accepted as normal. The kind that strips you down until only the truth remains.

And that’s why I say presence is primal. Because it lives in us like an instinct. Because when the layers fall away—fear, shame, performance—what’s left is something true. Still. Holy. Not in a church way. In a bones and breath way.

Presence is Pragmatic Spirituality

Presence is practical consciousness. Think monk with muscles. Mystic with a mortgage. It doesn’t require robes or retreat centers. You can be fully present in a boardroom, at a stoplight, holding your child’s hand, or standing on a battlefield. It’s paradoxical that way—stillness in motion. Sometimes, presence is pausing and noticing the heat of the coffee mug in your hand. Other times, it’s catching your internal chaos while in the middle of a crowded airport, and choosing not to spiral.

And it starts with something so simple it’s almost embarrassing: the breath. No crystals. No chants. Just noticing your inhale and exhale. Air entering and leaving the nose. That’s it. Do that with full attention and you’ll feel something shift. It’s like the soul saying, “Oh, there you are. I’ve been waiting.”

It’s not dissimilar to Thomas Keating’s centering prayer, which he described as “consenting to God’s presence and action within.” That’s it. Not striving. Not achieving. Just consenting. It’s a radical act in a culture built on effort, ambition, and self-improvement. Keating’s invitation isn’t to fight your way into divinity but to surrender into it—to soften into the holy. It’s presence without performance. There’s nothing to prove. Only something to return to.

That same kind of surrender is practiced in one of the most intense crucibles of human training: Navy SEALs BUD/S. There, presence is stripped of its poetry and forged in pressure. In that environment, being present is no longer optional—it becomes survival. Amid freezing surf, sleep deprivation, and bone-deep fatigue, the mind wants to quit a thousand times. But the breath remains. So the SEALs are trained to anchor there. Breath, body, moment. One wave at a time. One breath at a time. It’s consent, yes—but consent with blood in its teeth. Both paths—Keating’s and the SEALs’—point to the same truth: presence is where the real strength lives.

"Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings." - Rumi

The Purpose Triangle

Why does this matter? Because without presence, the whole structure of a purposeful life collapses. I frame this through what I call the Purpose Triangle: moral clarity, talent, and impact. Each side of that triangle is stabilized by presence.

Without presence, your morality is just a script. You parrot values you haven’t wrestled with. You can’t hear the whisper of conscience beneath the roar of your ego. With presence, clarity comes—not as a rulebook, but as resonance. For me, that resonance is the clarity to live as a SWAM—a straight white American male—with a voice for justice and liberation. That’s not a hashtag or a savior complex. It’s a responsibility. It’s knowing that silence is complicity, and complicity is cowardice. Presence keeps me from turning away. It reminds me that my voice isn't just mine—it belongs to the work of repair.

Without presence, your talent stays locked in the prison of other people’s expectations. You confuse skill with worth. You hustle for approval. But in presence, you hear the quiet hum of your true voice. You recognize your inner genius—not the egoic “I’m better,” but the sacred “I am.” For me, that voice shows up as language and intuition. I’ve been called the Rick Rubin of branding because I can hear what others can’t yet say, feel what's trying to come through. That’s not something I learned—it’s something I remembered, in the stillness of presence. Without it, I’d be chasing trends. With it, I help people find the signal inside their noise.

Without presence, your impact is performative. It’s rooted in needing to be seen, validated, liked. But when you’re truly present, impact becomes a byproduct of alignment. You’re not trying to make a difference. You are the difference. For me, impact means two things at once: creating financial stability for my family, and reaching as many people as possible with my words. Those aren’t in conflict; they are in flow. But only when I’m present. When I forget to be here, I start measuring metrics instead of meaning. But when I’m present, I trust the words will land where they’re needed. That trust is the impact.

Presence as a Compass

Presence is also the only way to navigate complexity. The world we’re in doesn’t run on cause and effect anymore. It’s patterns within patterns. Interconnected systems. Political, ecological, social—everything’s tangled up. In complexity, there are no simple answers. There’s only awareness, responsiveness, and iteration. That requires presence.

Think of presence as a compass inside a wild and shifting landscape. In complexity, maps become obsolete the moment they’re printed. The terrain changes under your feet. What worked yesterday may fail tomorrow. But presence is a compass that keeps pointing true. It doesn’t tell you the whole path—it just keeps you aligned with what matters in each step. It allows you to move without being frantic, to adapt without abandoning yourself.

If you’re not grounded, you’ll get swept away by fear, false certainty, or the desperate urge to control. Presence is what slows you down just enough to notice the difference between reaction and response. It invites you to scan the field instead of charging into the fog. It helps you see not just what's happening—but what's emerging. And that’s the secret of navigating complexity: trusting something deeper than intellect. Trusting awareness. Trusting the inner compass of presence to orient you, again and again, toward what is true.

Presence as a Sword

And because of all this, presence makes you dangerous. Dangerous in the way a lighthouse is dangerous to a storm. Dangerous to tyrants, to manipulators, to marketers who profit off your distraction. You can’t be bought when you’re present. You can’t be baited. And even if they silence your voice or ruin your reputation, your presence lingers like a tuning fork—resonating in the hearts of others who have touched that same sacred ground.

Authoritarians, oppressors, and empire-builders have always feared presence. Because presence cannot be coerced. It doesn’t flinch under fear, and it doesn’t need applause. Presence is immune to propaganda because it sees clearly. It's why spiritual leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. were threats to a militarized state. Why Gandhi, standing barefoot with a spinning wheel, could undo an empire. Why Nelson Mandela emerged from decades in prison and dismantled apartheid not with vengeance, but with dignity. These leaders were not just charismatic or eloquent—they were present. Fully rooted. Fully aware. And because of that, they became immovable forces of conscience.

Presence also cuts through spectacle. In a media-saturated world, attention is the battlefield. But when you are truly present, you stop performing for the crowd. You stop needing the camera. You become a kind of quiet rebellion—a refusal to be reduced to a headline or a hashtag. That’s terrifying to systems that rely on control, distraction, and division.

That’s what makes true leaders so rare—and so necessary. Leaders who practice presence don’t rattle. They adapt. They listen deeply. They create without control. They inspire not because they demand attention, but because they embody attention. They aren’t playing chess with power—they’re playing an entirely different game: the long, slow, sacred game of transformation.

Presence is Already Yours

Presence is not found in a place, or a guru, or a new job, or a better relationship. You won’t stumble upon it in the Himalayas, in a pew, or in a promotion to that corner office. Presence lives inside you. It is not granted—it is claimed. Every time you look outside yourself for it, you wander further from it. The world will sell you a thousand ways to "feel better," to "become enlightened," to "get clarity." But presence doesn’t come with a receipt. It comes with remembrance. It comes the moment you stop looking elsewhere and come home to what is already breathing you.

Presence is not dispended out by some divine lottery. It’s not an anointing for the chosen few. It’s an awakening. A gift wired into the human spirit. You don’t earn it. You return to it. And like breath, it’s always been there—waiting for you to notice.

So notice.

Right now.

Select something mundane (like you’re breathing). 

Start there.