presence – Jill Eng

April 19, 2018jilleng

The Present Tense

We are born into the present tense. It is then the present tense for the rest of our life. From our perspective, we live in one long moment because we cannot sense the shifts of what we think of as one moment changing into the next. We can only perceive this moment. Those incremental differences […]

April 10, 2018jilleng

Can “I” Be Somewhere My Body Is Not?

My work is based on the fact that “I” must be where my body is at all times. Is there a separate “me” from this organism called Jill Eng? Some might argue so in philosophic and religious circles, but I do not see a way around nondualism. When struggling with emotions of frustration, fear, worry, […]

March 28, 2018jilleng

Confronting Thought with Reality

It isn’t true that I should be doing things that are on my mind right now if I am not. It just seems that way. I really believe I need to be doing those things now though; they feel so pressing. Why isn’t this true? In my opinion, the issue is with our misunderstanding of […]

March 26, 2018jilleng

Always Present

Presence generally implies an attention or focus on our existence in our body here and now. But, presence can just mean our existence in the space our body is occupying regardless of anything we are paying attention to or thinking about. We cannot not be present in the space all the time. We are always […]

March 16, 2018jilleng

Thought Blobs

“The practice tells me the truth about how I should be spending my time.” This is my mantra in my work and what always makes me feel good when I recite it to myself. The reason this soothes me is because it is the opposite of what I otherwise believe. Without it, I am left […]

January 25, 2018January 25, 2018jilleng

Just Like Now

At any given time in the future, it will be just like now. My body will be where it is, in some specific activity, giving its weight to some specific surface (a piece of furniture, or directly to the ground), my body parts moving about in some busy-ness, attending to their immediate environment. My life […]

January 19, 2017March 3, 2018jilleng

Find Out What You Do

How do we know what we do? We see ourself in our action. Our body, a physical entity, giving its weight to some surface (a chair, couch, floor) simply because of its inherent relationship to gravity. We can look more closely and see the full activity we are engaged in (writing, typing, walking, cooking, etc.). So, the […]

January 17, 2017March 3, 2018jilleng

This (a poetic experiment)

Why this? It’s all there is. This is such a basic realization. Meanwhile, we spend our life negating it, doubting it, looking elsewhere. I have no choice but to be where my body is. I watch. Touch your face to see that you are here. You can see your face with your eyes, parts of […]

January 14, 2017March 3, 2018jilleng

The Things We Do

The things we do are the things we are supposed to do. There is no truth out there that holds the key to the information of how we should be living our life outside of exactly how we live our life. This entails every single move we make. When I say move, I mean move, […]

January 10, 2017March 3, 2018jilleng

One Action

Because we cannot divide time into segments, our body is really in one stream of physical movement from the moment it is conceived (and of course continuous with the moment before that). There is no beginning or end to our activities even though we identify them in our mind as specific individual actions. In the […]