Aliveness and the Art of Noticing: How Presence Becomes a Practice

Written by Mary J Fourie PCC — Purpose, Money & Pleasure Coach

Aliveness and presence in South Africa — and across the world — are not experiences reserved for extraordinary moments. They’re available right now, in the ordinary texture of your day.

Most people are waiting for aliveness to arrive. Waiting for the holiday, the milestone, the cleared inbox, the relationship that finally works. But aliveness rarely announces itself. It appears in the pause between tasks, in the weight of a coffee mug, in the way afternoon light shifts across a wall. What changes is not the world. What changes is the quality of your attention toward it.

This is the art of noticing.

What Aliveness Actually Is

Aliveness is not a mood. It is not happiness, or excitement, or the absence of difficulty.

It’s the experience of being fully present in your own body and senses — genuinely here, rather than running on autopilot through your own life. It’s available in moments that are not conventionally significant. The taste of something you ate too fast for the last ten years. Rain on a window. The feeling at the end of a piece of work that came out right.

Like most things worth having, aliveness is a skill. It strengthens with practice and fades with neglect. And the practice is simpler than most self-development work asks of you: pause, and actually notice what’s here.

Why This Matters Beyond the Moment

Noticing isn’t just pleasant. It’s informative.

When you slow down enough to feel what genuinely lifts you — what makes your body lean in rather than contract — you start accumulating reliable data about yourself. You learn what actually matters to you, as distinct from what you’ve been told should matter. The gap between those two things is often where the quiet exhaustion lives.

This kind of self-knowledge is foundational. You can’t make aligned decisions — about work, relationships, money, how to spend your energy — without a working connection to your own experience. And that connection is built in exactly these small moments of noticing.

The S.O.L.O community exists around this same premise: that real growth is not purely intellectual. It is felt, embodied, lived.

Aliveness and Money

Most of us have experienced spending money and feeling nothing.

The purchase made out of obligation, comparison, or the vague hope that it would fill something. The subscription still running that you can’t quite remember signing up for. The upgrade you convinced yourself you needed.

When you practise noticing — when you develop a genuine felt sense of what lifts you and what doesn’t — your relationship to money shifts. You start spending on the things that genuinely bring you alive: experiences, relationships, work that matters. You start releasing what doesn’t.

This is not minimalism for its own sake. It’s something more interesting — it’s letting aliveness inform how energy, including financial energy, flows through your life.

Aliveness and Relationships

Some conversations leave you more energised than when they started. Others leave you flat, contracted, slightly less yourself.

Both are information.

Noticing which people light you up and which deplete you is not a judgement of those people — it’s a data point about alignment. The relationships where both people leave the encounter feeling more alive are the ones worth investing in. The ones where aliveness consistently drains are worth examining honestly.

This kind of discernment is one of the most practical gifts the art of noticing can offer.

A Daily Practice

Once a day, choose one moment and be fully in it.

It doesn’t need to be significant. A meal eaten without your phone. Sunlight on your face. The feeling of completing something. A conversation where you actually listened.

Give it your full sensory attention. Notice what’s there. Notice how you feel inside it.

That’s it.

It sounds almost embarrassingly simple. But done consistently, this practice changes your relationship to your own life — not because the world has changed, but because you have become more genuinely present within it.

Aliveness doesn’t require a new life. It requires a different quality of attention toward the life you already have.

Work with Mary

Mary J Fourie is a Professional Certified Coach (ICF PCC) and Registered Financial Practitioner who works at the intersection of Purpose, Money and Pleasure. Her work helps Change-Makers come alive in the fullest sense — in what they do, how they earn, and how they experience their lives.

She runs monthly Money Alchemy MasterClasses, a 7-Month Group Programme, and 1:1 coaching sessions for people ready to align their work and their lives with what genuinely matters.

View Mary’s profile on S.O.L.O and book a free discovery call →