We collectively wander about wringing our hands or disassociating or bypassing, and very few of us have tried actively engaging. Very few of us move healthfully towards conflict. We have so many conflicts brought about by our lack of presence, and we keep trying to find new and fancy solutions to those individual problems. Yet, if we just worked on healing our sense of presence, many if not most of the most pressing problems we carry today ( both personally and as a society) would organically resolve.
Unless you develop the capacity to be present with suffering, you can never be fully present with anything else. Because your nervous system will always be holding you back from accepting the emotional risk of being alive.
This translates into disrespecting your boundaries and the boundaries of others to maintain a comfortable distance from the risk. This has an effect on our personal and social relationships. Over generations, this has an effect on culture. Dominant Culture today thrives on avoiding suffering, discomfort, and conflict.
We practice patience with suffering not to persist in a state of pain, but to access the clarity, creativity, and courage necessary for opening to healing and actions to alleviating suffering (compassion).
Can you genuinely be yourself?
Presence is allowing your mind, body, heart, and environment to freely communicate. Allowing your internal and external environments to communicate allows you to be part of the physiological experience of the world. To belong. To yourself, to another, to humanity, to Earth, to the universe. Some of belonging is the vulnerability and presence to show up, and another part is to be accepted. We must all be doing our part to be actively present on both sides of this reciprocal exchange.
Chronic Stress is what removes us from a natural state of presence but we won’t be able to access states of calm and relaxation without addressing the root cause. We need to heal our capacity to be present. There is no relaxing without presence. Presence requires we work physiologically with our nervous systems and how our nervous systems relate within our internal and external environments. We can’t just piecemeal the parts we like of this practice, because that only emboldens our current strengths and weaknesses. We need to be playing at the edges, start strengthening the capacities we have been compensating for. This will be uncomfortable! We need to practice with our capacity for suffering. We need to get comfortable with the risk of being alive.
Or we will miss our chance. And we will miss a lot of other beautiful things along the way.
SOUNDheart Zoom Lunch Dates, Mondays 1pm ET ZOOM beginning January 9th
Join Sherene for lunch over zoom on Mondays for discussion and practices regarding our ability to maintain emotional integrity, moral courage, and attunement while engaging with personal, social, political, economic, and ecological conflicts. Part of The Whole Health Center’s Membership Program
For the next several months we will be working with the concept of Presence. Each month we will focus on one of the 10 aspects of healing presence. Weekly discussion, meditation, and takeaway practices will be provided.
January: What is presence?
February: Non-Judging
March: Patience
April:Beginner’s Mind
May:Trust
June: Non-Striving
July:Acceptance
August:Gratitude
Sept:Generosity
October:Compassion
This program is also available in private sessions, please contact me for more info.