Meditation for Thursday 2 October 2025
According to US mindfulness teacher and author Caroline Welch during an average day, most of us speak around 16,000 words, but our thoughts, that internal chatterbox produces tens of thousands more, 95% of which are reruns.
No wonder it’s quite the chore to achieve stillness and silence our minds for meditation.
The hardest times to be in the Present moment are when things are not going well in our lives and yet that’s precisely the time when we need Presence the most. If you are like me, I sometimes catastrophise situations so much so that I have to work hard to be in the present.
Presence is a state of receptive awareness that enables us to pay attention to what is happening right now.
Presence is at the heart of meditation and mindfulness practices, but it doesn’t stop there.
Being Present in our day-to-day activities helps us to be in control and when in control we are happier.
Caroline Welch asks us to….
“Imagine that you’ve just visited a dear friend or family member who has been hospitalised unexpectantly. As you exit the hospital, Presence can make a difference between being overwhelmed with sadness and feeling slightly better by listening even for a few seconds to the birds chirping or noticing the first lilacs of spring.”#
As you are reading these words has your mind wandered off? If that’s the case, you are not alone. Most of us have a pretty high mind-wandering rate.
We know that when we are aware of what we are doing, when we are Present, we are the happiest, regardless of what we are doing. Of course, Presence is what we are seeking to achieve in our meditation practice, but it is complimented by us trying to be Present in all our activities. A wandering mind is very often an unhappy mind.
And now let us meditate in the Present remembering that we don’t need to be perfect or problem-free to be present for the moment.
Meditation
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# “The Gift of Presence.” Auth: Caroline Welch. Scribe Pub. 2020
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