Brother Lawrence, Sensing, Looking and Listening, and the Difference Between Practicing Attention and Practicing Presence
Sometime in the late 1970s, I read Brother Lawrence’s The Practice of the Presence of God (early edition). The little book stayed with me because its orientation was so simple and practical. Brother Lawrence worked in a monastery kitchen and treated ordinary activity as an opportunity for recollection. Washing dishes, preparing food, moving through the routines of the day, he repeatedly returned attention to the presence of God.
I would add one caution for anyone encountering The Practice of the Presence of God now: read an early edition or older translation if you can find one. Like many spiritual texts that survive by being continually repackaged, the book has been repeatedly modernized, paraphrased, simplified, and translated into contemporary spiritual language. Some of that makes the book easier to read, but something can also be lost. The language gradually shifts toward the familiar culture of “I do”: I practice Presence, I cultivate awareness, I develop mindfulness, I create a state.
The older language carries more of the sense of recollection, surrender, devotion, and being turned toward something already present. That difference is more than literary. It changes the implied direction of the work.
What Does It Mean to Practice Presence?
The word practice ordinarily refers to something we repeatedly do in order to develop capacity, skill, refinement, or continuity. We practice the piano, a language, a craft, an exercise, or a particular movement. Practice belongs to activity. That is why I have become increasingly reluctant to speak of “practicing Presence.”
Presence is not an activity performed by the psychological self. Presence is the actuality of Being. Saying that we practice Presence begins to sound a little like saying life can practice life. What we can practice are activities of attention that make us more available to immediate experience. For me, the most basic of these have been sensing, looking, and listening.
Sensing, Looking, and Listening Can Be Practiced
Sensing can be practiced because I can repeatedly bring attention into the body and become better at maintaining contact with physical sensation while thinking, speaking, walking, working, or interacting with another person. Looking can be practiced because I can learn to remain closer to color, shape, light, depth, movement, and space before recognition and interpretation completely take over. Listening can be practiced because I can stay with sound itself before it is swallowed by meaning, association, preference, and judgment.
These are genuine practices because repetition can refine and stabilize them. They also do something very specific: they interrupt the ordinary dominance of conceptual and psychological activity. Attention is usually absorbed in thought, memory, expectation, interpretation, emotional reaction, self-image, and internal commentary. Sensing, looking, and listening return attention to what is happening now.
That phrase, what is happening right now, became increasingly important to me.
From Conceptual Understanding to Phenomenological Experience
My orientation shifted decisively in the early 2000s, when I moved from a primarily conceptual approach to a phenomenological one. The question that began to matter most was no longer simply, “What do I understand about this?” The question became, “What is happening right now?” That shift changed the center of gravity of my work. Immediate experience became primary, and sensing, looking, and listening moved from being useful spiritual techniques to becoming the central way I approached experience.
A phenomenological orientation begins with what is actually appearing now: sensation, perception, thought, emotion, tension, movement, sound, visual experience, spaciousness, contraction, and the changing organization of attention. Instead of beginning with an interpretation about experience, phenomenology begins with the experience itself.
Sensing, looking, and listening became central because they repeatedly return attention to that immediacy.
At first, this was intentional. I would remember to sense the body, open the visual field, and listen more directly. I would notice when thought had carried attention away and deliberately return. In that sense, it was clearly a practice. There was repetition, effort, and the gradual development of capacity.
Over time, however, something changed.
When a Practice Becomes an Orientation
For roughly the last six to eight years, sensing, looking, and listening have been present almost continuously in my experience. I hesitate even to call this a practice now because the word still implies that I am intentionally doing something.
What I notice instead is that attention sometimes becomes absorbed in thought, conversation, reading, planning, or some other activity. Then I find myself back in sensing, looking, and listening with the recognition, “Oh, my attention was absorbed somewhere else.”
The return does not feel intentional. I do not decide to come back and then perform an act of attention. Sensing, looking, and listening seem to have developed a kind of gravity, and attention is drawn back toward them when its temporary absorption releases.
What began as a practice gradually became an orientation. And the orientation developed its own gravitational pull.
The Experience of Being Recalled
This is where the phrase being recalled becomes more accurate for me than the phrase remembering to be present.
Earlier in practice, I could reasonably say that I remembered to sense. Now the phenomenology is different. The return happens, and only afterward do I notice it. The movement precedes the mind’s claim of authorship.
That distinction is important because it changes how we understand spiritual practice. At first, we appear to be the one doing the practice. We remember to sense, remember to look, remember to listen, remember to return. With enough repetition, however, the practice can become so deeply established that returning no longer feels entirely dependent on intention.
Instead of repeatedly bringing attention back, we begin noticing that attention is being recalled. Sensing, looking, and listening have gravity.
Practice Can Bring Us to the Threshold
Practice can bring us to the threshold. That threshold is the point at which effort has done what effort can do. Sensing, looking, and listening can stabilize attention, interrupt habitual continuity, and make immediate experience more available. They can bring us to the edge of something that cannot be produced by the same activity that brought us there.
Presence may become apparent at that threshold, but the practice did not manufacture it. This distinction is central. Sensing does not produce Presence. Looking does not produce Presence. Listening does not produce Presence. They alter the organization of attention and reduce the degree to which experience is completely filtered through habitual mental activity.
Practice prepares the ground and brings us to the threshold. Presence is what may become apparent there.
Presence Is Not a Spiritual Achievement
The modern language of spiritual practice often assumes the individual self is the agent of transformation. I meditate, I become mindful, I cultivate Presence, I raise my awareness, I create greater consciousness. This is the language of what I think of as the “I do” culture.
Intentional practice is useful, but the language can quietly turn Presence into an achievement of the psychological self. Once that happens, spiritual work begins to resemble every other improvement project in contemporary culture. Presence becomes another thing to acquire.
Yet Presence is not acquired in the way a skill is acquired. If Presence is the actuality of Being, then it was already present during thought, distraction, identification, and forgetting. The entire movement of being lost and returning occurs within consciousness. Even the thought “I am not present” appears within Presence.
Who Is Remembering Whom?
This raises a deeper phenomenological question: who is remembering whom?
Psychologically, there is clearly a movement of forgetting and returning. Attention narrows, identification strengthens, immediate experience recedes, and then something opens again. The body becomes more apparent, the visual field opens, sound becomes immediate, and thought is once again seen rather than completely inhabited.
Ontologically, however, nothing has left Being; the apparent absence of Presence occurs within Presence.
This may be why genuine recollection can feel strangely familiar. It does not necessarily feel like acquiring something new. It often feels like recognizing what was already the case before recognition occurred. Practice may bring us to the threshold, but what is recognized there was not created by the practice.
Brother Lawrence and the Meaning of Recollection
Nearly fifty years after first reading Brother Lawrence, I find the older language of recollection increasingly important. Brother Lawrence was not practicing the production of God’s presence. In his understanding, God’s presence was already given. What he practiced was remembering.
He practiced turning toward what was already present while cooking, cleaning, working, and moving through ordinary life. This is very close to the function of sensing, looking, and listening.
- We can practice returning attention to the body.
- We can practice looking more directly.
- We can practice listening more directly.
- We can practice noticing how quickly attention disappears into thought.
- We can practice becoming available to what is happening right now.
However, over time something more interesting than improvement can occur. The practice becomes an orientation, the orientation develops its own gravity, and eventually the experience may shift from I remember to return toward I notice that I have been recalled. That difference changes the direction of the whole enterprise.
Life cannot practice life, and Presence cannot practice Presence. What we can practice are the movements of attention that bring us to the threshold. If those movements become deeply established, they may eventually cease to feel like something we are doing and begin to reveal themselves as the way attention is drawn back toward immediacy.
Perhaps that is the deeper meaning of Brother Lawrence’s little book: The practice is recollection; Presence is already here.