Present Moment

Because the physical and mental tendencies of procedural learning manifest in present-moment time, in-the-moment trauma-related emotional reactions, thoughts, images, body sensations, and movements that emerge spontaneously in the therapy hour become the focal points of exploration and change.

Ogden argues that because trauma encodes as procedural learning that manifests only in the present moment, therapeutic transformation must target present-moment experience directly rather than narrative content.

Ogden, Pat, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006thesis

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Dogen describes the past, present, and future as all occurring in the present moment. This basic assumption lies behind the intensely experiential, personal, and practice-oriented nature of Zen training.

Cooper presents Dogen's ontological claim that all temporal dimensions are contained within the present moment as the foundational premise underlying Zen practice and its intersection with psychoanalytic work.

Cooper, Seiso Paul, Zen Insight, Psychoanalytic Action: Two Arrows Meeting, 2019thesis

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There is only this now. It does not come from anywhere; it is not going anywhere. It is not permanent, but it is not impermanent. Though moving, it is always still.

Watts articulates the Zen understanding of the eternal present as neither a fixed point nor a flowing stream, but as a non-dual condition that is inescapable and beyond the reach of any observing self.

Watts, Alan, The Way of Zen, 1957thesis

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Through this process, both therapist and client are mindful of the ebb and flow of the client's present moment experience. It's as if clients take the therapist with them into their inner world by describing their experience verbally as it unfolds rather than describing it after the immediacy of the moment passes.

Ogden describes embedded relational mindfulness as a dyadic clinical process in which present-moment experience is tracked and verbalised in real time, making the therapist a co-witness to unfolding somatic and emotional states.

Ogden, Pat, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015thesis

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By letting past and future dissolve into the present moment, I have opened the way for their gradual rediscovery — no longer as autonomous, mental realms, but now as aspects of the corporeal present, of this capacious terrain that bodily enfolds me.

Abram, following Merleau-Ponty, argues that the present moment is not the negation of past and future but their phenomenological ground, encountered through sensorial immersion in the living body.

Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996thesis

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The 'moment' as referred to by Eastern sages such as Dōgen is entirely without dimensions, and is thus 'simultaneously unmeasurably brief and everlasting, always present'. To quote Kierkegaard: the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity.

McGilchrist synthesises Dōgen and Kierkegaard to argue that the moment, precisely because it has no temporal extension, paradoxically partakes of eternity — challenging both atomistic and linearly sequential models of time.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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Le présent n'a donc de réalité que par rapport à ma conscience, à ma pensée, à mon initiative, à ma liberté, qui lui donnent une épaisseur, une durée, qui est liée à l'unité de sens du discours prononcé, à l'unité de mon intention morale, à l'intensité de mon attention.

Hadot, explicating Marcus Aurelius through Stoic logic, argues that the present moment possesses reality only insofar as consciousness, intention, and moral attention give it thickness — a durée that is constituted by the act of attending.

Hadot, Pierre, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, 2002thesis

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Le présent n'a donc de réalité que par rapport à ma conscience, à ma pensée, à mon initiative, à ma liberté, qui lui donnent une épaisseur, une durée.

This parallel edition passage repeats Hadot's core Stoic argument that the present moment's reality is constituted by the moral and attentional qualities the subject brings to it.

Hadot, Pierre, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, 1995supporting

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La vie n'est faite que d'une suite d'instants, que nous vivons successivement, et que l'on peut maîtriser d'autant plus que l'on sait les définir et les isoler exactement.

Hadot presents Marcus Aurelius's Stoic practice of circumscribing the present as a technique of existential mastery: life is composed only of successive instants, and one governs them by precisely defining and isolating each one.

Hadot, Pierre, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, 2002supporting

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La vie n'est faite que d'une suite d'instants, que nous vivons successivement, et que l'on peut maîtriser d'autant plus que l'on sait les définir et les isoler exactement.

Parallel to the 2002 edition, this passage grounds the Aureliean spiritual exercise of present-moment attention in an ontology of life as nothing more than a succession of isolable instants.

Hadot, Pierre, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, 1995supporting

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Dans cet instant présent, nous possédons toute la réalité. Comme dit Sénèque, à chaque moment présent nous pouvons dire avec Dieu: 'Tout est à moi.'

Hadot draws on Seneca to argue that each present moment, rightly inhabited, contains the whole of reality and constitutes the sufficient condition for happiness — a claim linking Stoic practice to a kind of temporal plenitude.

Hadot, Pierre, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, 2002supporting

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Dans cet instant présent, nous possédons toute la réalité. Comme dit Sénèque, à chaque moment présent nous pouvons dire avec Dieu: 'Tout est à moi.'

A parallel passage reaffirming the Stoic and Senecan claim that the present moment is not a privation of past and future but the full possession of reality.

Hadot, Pierre, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, 1995supporting

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Learning how to be mindful of the present moment is an especially difficult endeavor for dysregulated and dissociative clients, yet this is an essential skill for helping them recover from th

Ogden identifies present-moment mindfulness as both the central therapeutic goal and the primary difficulty for traumatised and dissociative clients, whose regulatory failures manifest precisely as an inability to remain in present time.

Ogden, Pat, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015supporting

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The feelings of the ongoing present moment can begin to accumulate in a new quantal storage unit. The feelings that had accumulated in the prior quantal storage unit are fixed, and that unit becomes the first unit of the sequence of quantal units that represents the immediate past.

Craig proposes a neurobiological 'cinemascopic model' in which the present moment is a quantal storage unit integrating all bodily feelings 'now,' with sequential units constituting the flow of experienced time.

Craig, A.D. (Bud), How Do You Feel? An Interoceptive Moment with Your Neurobiological Self, 2015supporting

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A new quantal storage unit begins to accumulate the ongoing feelings of the present global emotional moment, and the last unit of the sequence representing the future is incorporated into the integration mechanism of the ongoing present moment as part of present conditions.

Craig's model frames the present moment as a neurobiological integration mechanism that continuously incorporates anticipated future conditions, enabling comparison of feelings across time and generating surprise when expectations are violated.

Craig, A.D. Bud, How Do You Feel? An Interoceptive Moment with Your Neurobiological Self, 2014supporting

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Notice whatever negative thoughts and emotions you have that distract your awareness from the present moment. Use the space below to name them as occurring in the moment (e.g., Right now I'm having the thought that I'm not attractive; I'm feeling an emotion of sadness in this moment).

This clinical worksheet operationalises present-moment awareness as a naming practice in which thoughts and emotions are identified as occurring now, rather than as permanent conditions, with somatic effects tracked alongside.

Ogden, Pat, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015supporting

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It is in my 'field of presence' in the widest sense — this moment... eternity, it will be at the core of our experience of time, and not in some non-temporal subject whose function it is to conceive and posit it.

Merleau-Ponty argues that authentic contact with eternity is achievable only at the interior of temporally lived experience — the field of presence — not through a transcendent subject standing above time.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting

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The 'events' are shapes cut out by a finite observer from the spatio-temporal totality of the objective world.

Merleau-Ponty deconstructs the metaphor of time as a river, arguing that what we call events — and by extension, present moments — are perspectival constructions of an embodied, situated observer rather than features of an objective world.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting

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Thou precedest all things past, by the sublimity of an ever-present eternity; and surpassest all future because they are future, and when they come, they shall be past; but Thou art the Same, and Thy years fail not.

Augustine frames divine eternity as the ground of an ever-present 'now' that contains past and future without succession, a theological archetype for later psychological and phenomenological accounts of the present moment's plenitude.

Augustine, Confessions, 397supporting

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It is precisely those here-and-now states of consciousness that we must seek to understand before we can grasp how

Panksepp identifies moment-to-moment states of consciousness as the foundational datum for affective neuroscience, asserting that present-circumstance awareness is the prerequisite for understanding emotional life.

Panksepp, Jaak, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998supporting

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Core presentification pertains to a single situation, or at most a very limited range of contiguous situations. Extended presentification refers to the realization of far more elaborate strings of core presentifications.

Van der Hart introduces the concept of 'presentification' — the mental act of realising one's present situation — as a layered capacity whose failure in trauma survivors underlies their inability to inhabit the present moment.

Hart, Onno van der, The Haunted Self Structural Dissociation and the Treatmentsupporting

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A kṣaṇa is defined as the time it takes for an aṇu to move from one point in space to the next point... a moment is the time it takes for the aṇu to move to the space immediately adjacent to its previous location.

Bryant explicates the Yoga Sutra's atomistic ontology of time, in which the present moment (kṣaṇa) is defined as the smallest possible temporal unit, providing a classical Indian counterpart to Western philosophical and neurobiological accounts.

Bryant, Edwin F., The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, 2009aside

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The deictic 'now' offers a good starting point for this demonstration, since the assimilation of the act of language to a fact was also a result of characterizing the utterance as an event, or an instance of discourse.

Ricoeur uses the linguistic deictic 'now' as the entry point for analysing how utterance and self-reference intersect, situating the present moment within a philosophy of language rather than directly within depth-psychological discourse.

Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, 1992aside

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Total exertion both generates and is the experience of absolute reality as that reality manifests in one's lived experience. Total exertion requires full participation totally with nothing left out for opening to and fully experiencing this manifestation.

Cooper's account of Dogen's 'total exertion' describes a mode of radical present-moment engagement in which the practitioner becomes coextensive with the situation, leaving no residue of observation or withdrawal.

Cooper, Seiso Paul, Zen Insight, Psychoanalytic Action: Two Arrows Meeting, 2019aside

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