Being Here ( and Staying Here)

Alexa Medellin
May 1
7 min read

I used to think being present simply meant enjoying the moment.

Something along the lines of don’t forget to look up.

And for a long time, that felt… obvious. Almost too simple to take seriously. I remember thinking, why would anyone need a whole book to explain something like that? I enjoy my life. I enjoy my daydreams and I enjoy living one step ahead of where I actually am. So why would I need to be more present?

Let me add that I was also known as the girl who couldn't sit still in class, who lost her keys three times a week, and moved through life with a million different things constantly in her mind. If presence had anything to do with stillness, slowing down, some kind of quieting the mind, then clearly it was designed for someone without ADHD. I was built for motion. And I enjoyed my life.

Then I ate mushrooms in a museum garden and spent a few incredibly uncomfortable hours inside my own mind. And somehow, after that was over, I understood why presence was such powerful practice to have.

I'll get into that story. But first, let's talk about what we're actually dealing with.

Where We Actually Spend Most of our Time

Here is the slightly uncomfortable truth for most of us, and I say this as someone who has spent the better part of her life doing exactly this: most of us are almost never here.

We are in the future. Predicting, planning, worrying, hoping.

Or we are in the past. Replaying, regretting, re-arguing with people who aren't in the room.

Both are useful cognitive tools. The problem isn't that we visit those places.

The problem is that we live there, and then wonder why life feels like it's passing us by.

When you are worried about something that hasn't happened yet, you are suffering twice: once now in anticipation, and once if it actually happens.

And if it doesn't happen (which is mostly the case) you simply suffered for free.

So why do we keep drifting away?

What It Means

Being mentally present doesn't mean your mind goes quiet. It means you stop being swept away by what it's saying.

There is a difference between having a thought and becoming the thought. Most of us don't notice the gap between the two, but that gap is exactly where presence lives.

It's the flicker of awareness when you catch yourself staring at a wall, thinking about an argument from three years ago. That noticing — that small return — that is presence. Not the moment after the thought. The awareness of it.

Once you start catching those moments, you start catching them everywhere.

A Philosophical Detour (stay with me)

When we talk about being present, we assume the past and the future are real places we keep visiting. But are they?

The past exists only as memory — a story we retell, and edit a little each time.

The future exists only as imagination — a prediction often governed by fear more than by fact. Neither of them are happening somewhere, sometime. Only this, happening now.

And here is where it gets interesting: you cannot actually escape the present moment.

Even when you are thinking about a childhood memory, you are thinking about it now.

Even when you are anxious about tomorrow, that anxiety is occurring now.

There is no exit from now. There has never been.

The concept of a linear timeline — past, present, future — is exactly that: a concept.

A tool the mind uses to organize experience.

Some cultures have entire languages without it.

The Hopi, for example, have no grammatical tenses in the way most Western languages do.

No past or future ingrained into the structure of how they speak.

For most of us, that is genuinely hard to even imagine, which tells you something about how deeply language shapes the experience of reality.

We are not just shaped by our conception of time. We think inside it.

We are swimming in it without knowing it's water.

So what does it mean to be present, if the present is all there ever is?

You don't need to find the present. You've never left it.

What you're really practicing is noticing where your attention is, and deciding to be where you actually want to be.

You can spend your whole day thinking about something you've been looking forward to, and when it finally happens, you're not really there for it.

You've probably felt this on a trip somewhere. Or even something simpler, like eating a meal you were excited about, and by the time you sit down, your mind is already somewhere else.

Nothing went wrong. But something was missing.

That something is you.

Paying attention to life so that you can be there to wave at it when it passes you by.

For Those Who've Read the Books

If you've gone down this rabbit hole at all, you've probably come across The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, Ram Dass's Be Here Now, Jon Kabat-Zinn or some other influential voice. (And if you have a particular book in mind, leave a comment so other people can find them as well). These books exist because what they're pointing at is real, and because people keep needing to be pointed back to it.

The through-line in all of them is this:

The thinking mind is not the enemy, but it can be a terrible master.

And beneath all its commentary, there is a quieter layer of awareness that doesn't need to be anywhere other than where it is.

Most people who read those books feel something shift, even if just briefly. And then they close the cover and life resumes, mostly unchanged. The knowing was never really the hard part.

The Practice

I understood presence as a concept for years before I had any real relationship with it.

That gap — between knowing and embodying — is where most people quietly give up, often without admitting that's what they're doing.

You can understand all of this and still spend your entire day somewhere else. Like I sometimes do. The knowledge doesn't do the work. The doing does. Remembering. Returning. Now.

Try being here, now. You don't need to wait until tomorrow. You don't even need to finish reading this.

Just notice where your attention is.

And if you’re wondering what it feels like to be present, then that wondering is what’s here right now.

The Garden

This is not a story about psychedelics. It just happens to start with them.

As any curious explorer of the mind might at some point do, I decided to try mushrooms.

I never felt truly ready, but curiosity got the better of me — and the idea that this was a substance most people described as bringing forth love, connectedness, and deep introspection felt genuinely luring at the time.

I did my research, bought tickets to a museum with a beautiful garden, and I headed there with a friend. We weighed them, ate them and called an Uber.

I thought it would take a while for anything to happen.

It didn't.

By the time we were still in the car, my perception had already started shifting. I felt nauseous. Disoriented. My friend's face looked strange in a way I couldn't quite explain. I looked down at the palm of my hand and watched the skin begin to move with more intent the more I stared. With all the things that started to happen, my thoughts began feeding on each other at an accelerating rate. Was this a bad idea? Did I take too much? What if I throw up? What if I can't make it back?...

I was uncomfortable. Paranoid. Somewhere between overwhelmed and terrified, watching myself start to spiral into the kind of experience I had read about and hoped to avoid.

And then — one thought cut through all the noise.

Just breath.

I don't know why that thought landed. But it did. And thankfully, I followed it.

I started paying attention to my breath. Air moving in. Air moving out. The feeling of my lungs actually doing their thing. The nausea eventually stepped right back.

And when it did, I looked at my palm again. Not at the thoughts I was generating about it, just at the way that my skin was moving by itself. Strange, slow, almost gentle. I'd get pulled back into my head, resist, and the loop would start again. But in the moments I stopped resisting, allowing things to just be, thoughts to just pass, I felt something settle.

That became the pattern for the next couple of hours. A constant battle between returning to the present and letting fear pull me right back out. But I had found something I could return to. The breath. The palm of my hand. Whatever was actually in front of me. I didn't have to stay inside the story that was playing in my mind. I could just come back.

Note:

I want to be clear about the fact that you don't need a psychedelic experience to find what I found that day. You'll find your own version of that moment. A moment where your mind starts running faster than you can follow, where everything seems to be snowballing at once. Maybe it's a panic attack, or a hard conversation, or just an ordinary Tuesday that suddenly feels like too much.

And if you've practiced — even a little — there's a chance something in you remembers. Your breath. The palm of your hand. Whatever brings you back.

I don't believe we can choose our thoughts. But I do believe we can shape the patterns we return to.

We practice the noticing enough times that it becomes something that is available when we need it the most— and stays with us long enough to be there for the moments worth being there for.

Takeaways

Presence is not the absence of thought. It's the awareness of it.
You cannot escape the present moment, even thinking about the past is happening now. What you're really practicing is noticing where your attention is, and being able to bring it back.
Chronic distraction from the present is exhausting in a way that's easy to mistake for just how life feels.
Knowing about presence doesn't create it. Only practice does. And the practice is the goal.
You don't need a dramatic experience to discover this. But if a moment comes where your mind starts spiraling, and something in you remembers to breathe, that's not an accident. That's the practice working.
The breath is always here. Which means you always have a way back.