Dear friends. Thank you to those of you who braved the bitter cold last Monday.
We focused on the practice of presence itself. What is it? Over the months we have explored the importance of coming back into the body to directly meet this moment of experience. The more embodied we are, the less we are caught in the stories that roam around in our mind. When we land and meet our embodied experience something new can unfold. Then feelings can morph into other feelings, memories can arise directly out of the felt sense, understanding can arise. In other words our experience becomes fluid, it unfolds and reveals more. Instead of the usual way we know ourselves --through the habitual figuring of the mind; or our judgements about our experience; or by all the ways we reject and push away our moment to moment experience-- we begin to discover that we are more that our usual, conditioned experience. We begin to know ourselves as a living tapestry of feelings, sensations, insights, deepening and most importantly a kind of expansion, a kind of clearing away the clutter that obscures our direct experiences and contracts us. This is the movement towards presence. The doorway is this moment of experience.
This is a practice because this movement into this embodied now, runs counter to the usual egoic way of knowing ourselves. So the practice of returning, arriving, deepening cultivates a of kind of essential muscle if you like. Some call this the muscle self remembering. What is that we are remembering? What is it that we have forgotten, ignored? A very long time ago, before we became able to reflect on our experience, we moved away and cut off from what some call True Nature, others call the Body of Christ, the Self, and what we are calling living presence. This process of self remembering and understanding begins to clear away the obscurations, the dullness, the usual clutter of our habitual experience (such as the superego and all our responses to it), and this organ of perception-- you!, your soul!-- becomes more transparent and what lies deeper in the unconscious begins to shine through.
All of you know what it is like to gaze into an infant's eyes. There is something amazingly lucid, limpid, clear, transparent, immediate about their gaze, their consciousness. It seems pure, open, pristine. And it touches us deeply. Its as though this gaze can pierce through all our worries, anxieties, frustrations and for a moment we shine too, we are still, we are open. Breathtaking and so attractive. This is living presence before the vicissitudes of life leave their mark on the infant. Slowly, or not so slowly in the case of trauma, an ego shell by necessity forms around this pristine consciousness and the personality forms gradually obscuring, our true source, and eventually cutting us off from living presence. This is not bad, it is simply a stage in the journey of the soul. The open, completely innocent soul slowly becomes an ego so that it can function in the world. At some point for some of us there is a hunger to rediscover this living presence. We think we lost it, or we think we sinned so that is why we lost contact with our divine nature; or we think we are too deficient, not worthy enough to deserve presence. But none of this is true. Presence lies hidden within us. Always! Never lost. Forgotten or obscured are better words.
So the practice of presence needs this itch or desire to recover what we are sure we lost. But there is some deep intuition, perhaps based on those moments in life when the moment opened up, or perhaps because we simply long for more realness, more immediacy in life, more intouchness. In my case it was an urgent need to know God that erupted in my early forties. (My midlife crisis) The practice of presence is a process of clearing, clarifying, opening our consciousness, our souls.
I find it very curious that this practice is showing up in many ways at the moment. The Christian Contemplative tradition calls this Welcoming Practice. In the mental health field the Buddhist practice of mindfulness and Focusing are both entering the main stream of clinical practice. We are participating in something bigger than our circle. Its quite mysterious how these new and old ways start appearing. A kind of synchronicity.
It looks like we are heading into rain on Monday. There is some warming trend coming our. Please check your email in case we need to cancel our session.
Warmly and in peace. Alison
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