Contact with the Present Moment and Self-As-Context

How can we work with patients/clients who are easily distracted, disengaged, disconnected from thoughts and feelings, or appear stuck in the past or preoccupied with the future? The antidote to inflexible attention is contact with the present moment, or being present.

Contact with the present moment is understood as flexibly paying attention to our experience in the here and now, including what is going on in our outer and inner worlds. The aim is to enhance awareness and fully engage in what we are doing, increasing satisfaction and fulfillment in our lives. Fostering flexible attention is essential for self-awareness, adds richness to our lived experiences, and involves paying attention with lots of openness and curiosity. If you are thinking this sounds like mindfulness, you are right! Depending on the client, I may refer to this as mindfulness, being present, present-moment awareness, or focusing – same thing ☺

In counselling, I help teach clients to tend to their present moment by asking questions such as, “Do you notice what is happening in your body right now?” or “Where is the feeling most intense?”

Three present-moment skills are engaging, savouring, and focusing. 

Engaging skills aim to help clients fully engage with activities and connect deeply to whatever they are involved with. Examples include giving someone your full attention and paying full attention when you fold the laundry or brush your teeth. 

Savouring skills teach clients to enjoy and appreciate anything pleasurable. For example, slow down and truly savour your coffee or a warm shower. 

Focusing skills help clients focus fully on the task at hand, which includes flexible attention. Sometimes, we need a narrow focus (if there is worry or rumination), and sometimes, a broad focus. For example, if your patient is dealing with chronic pain, we would acknowledge, validate, and accept it and encourage a broader focus by asking them to engage with their five senses (what else can they see, hear, smell, taste, and touch). 

For some clients, this is where I would introduce meditation.

The next ACT pillar is self-as-context, which we refer to as the noticing self, observing self, or witnessing self; the part of us that does all the noticing. It’s the stable place inside you that can make space for difficult thoughts and feelings. 

Teaching clients to notice the noticer helps enhance defusion, acceptance, and contact with the present moment and supports the development of flexible perspective-taking.

To introduce this concept, I like using the sky and weather metaphor. The noticing self is the clear, open, unchanging, spacious sky that can withstand any type of weather no matter how bad it gets, with the weather representing difficult thoughts, feelings, or physical sensations. The sky is the safe space within that can observe any hurricane or thunderstorm (and the weather always changes!). No matter how bad it gets, the weather cannot hurt the sky, and the sky always has room for it. 

Clinical Example – Notice you are Noticing 

For a client who expresses feeling anxious, I will use the noticing exercise experientially within meditation or conversationally, using phrases like, “There is anxiety, and there is the part of you noticing anxiety,” and “As you notice anxiety, be aware that you are noticing.” For clients with pain, the language could be, “If you can notice the pain, you cannot be the pain, and there is so much more to you than the pain.”