Transformative Presence
“If you look too closely at the form, you'll miss the essence.” ~ Rumi
As part of the preparations for my 9 months immersive H.E.A.L. training commencing 10th November, I want to share a very important principle with far reaching implications for deepening relationships and leveraging healing results.
It’s late October, dawn is just breaking. As I head into the kitchen to get some water, I notice the red orange light of dawn and the colour of the leaves beginning to turn on the trees amidst the moody, expansive sky. My mood shifted a little from being caught up in my personal thinking, to a sense of openness and calm in my body felt sense.
Noticing the shift from mental elaboration and settling into the space between thoughts has been a practice that I have engaged with for a long time. Noticing without elaboration is what I ‘prescribe’ as a necessary step in becoming more conscious, present and alive. Although simple, it’s not so easy due to our incessant tendency to fill in the space. This tendency is understandable since it was necessary to our survival in the past. However, most of us do need to run away from actual and immediate danger but are hardwired into thinking that we are. The simple act of noticing without elaboration disrupts that tendency of getting caught up in mental elaboration. It shifts us back into the present and is very conducive for a life of greater ease, clarity and expansion.
The mind-body split, a persistent illusion
Since the age of 12, I have been immersed in studying with several great teachers of Buddhism and meditation, classical Chinese medicine, the martial arts and Daoist self-healing practices. I was so steeped in the formless dimensions of consciousness and energy of life that it became second nature to me. Although my early schooling was in the material sciences and medicine, materialism as an explanation for why things are did not make much sense to me. There were far too many contradictions in attempting to explain how consciousness is an emergent property of matter. Yet, despite my immersion in ‘non-dual’ traditions of self-cultivation, for a long time, I didn’t have an embodied understanding of the wholeness of life. For a while, I experienced a split between an inner ‘spiritual’ life and an outer ‘ordinary’ life. This mind-body split created much tension and anxiety in me as I had believed that both worlds were irreconcilable, until now.
The transformative effect of presence
Over the years, I have found the quality of presence most helpful in practice. Presence is a type of attentiveness when one is not pre-occupied with personal thoughts and emotions. At such moments one feels calm, aware and engaged; there is greater access to possibilities than usual. One is able to listen at a level that is empathic yet transpersonal. One is able to see and connect patterns and communicate new possibilities that are immediately applicable. And anything that we bring a level of attentiveness to creates a profound level of change. Presence is a level of relaxed, open and sustained attention. How can we bring presence into daily life in service of becoming well and whole?
Here’s the thing, presence is not something we need to work on but an aspect of our innate health and wisdom. Presence is a quality of consciousness, our essential nature, when it is not veiled by the cloud like elaborations of our personal, reactive and habituated patterns of thoughts and feelings. In other words, we can’t really think or will ourself into presence. Presence is not a variable but a constant quality of our wholeness. This is why all the ‘effort-ing’ and intellectualising will not make you become more present. Since presence is an aspect of who we are, we can’t work on becoming present; we can only notice and let go of the personal thinking that normally clouds it. Presence is what remains once the clouds of mental elaboration settle.
I had intuited and began emphasising the healing effect of presence in my work with patients as well as in my training programs for acupuncturists. However, exactly how and why presence should have such a lasting impact did not fully land for me until I came across the teachings of the late Sydney Banks. For the past few years, I have been immersed in three Principles (3P’s) that he taught and have worked with coaches and mentors who embody them.
I shall now share how presence catalyses transformative insights from my own experience.
Presence catalyses insights
My coach, Rachel, is a person who has embodied the quality of presence. I have been working with her to support me with aligning my services to facilitate my patients with their own healing breakthroughs. At the beginning of this project, she asked me to ponder the implications of the following premise,
The quality of feeling or energy vibration we inhabit is where we create our life from.
During one of these session, she pointed out what I had long intuited - that when a patient comes in for an acupuncture treatment, their energy is at a lower frequency or vibration. And from the lens of an energy based medicine such as acupuncture, symptoms indicate that they are misaligned in some way.
Following a session their energy vibration is higher because they are now aligned with wholeness. The patients would then be able to go back into the world at a higher frequency than the one that they came in with. In that state their thinking would slow down, their hearts become more open and receptive and they would have some sort of deeper understanding into how making changes in their life would improve their condition; for a while they felt whole. That was such a magical experience to see their sense of wellbeing and health improve following such a session.
From one point of view, what practitioners of energy based medicine are doing is bringing someone back into alignment with a ‘higher’ vibration. Back into resonance with wholeness, their innate wellbeing.
“Why do we do that?” Rachel asked rhetorically,
Because life is easier from there. Because life will flow from there. Because it all makes more sense from there. Because that's where our health is. Because that's where our wisdom is.
It naturally follows and totally makes sense that we too can cultivate the power of higher frequencies for ourselves.
I fell totally silent…
Something in the truth of that resonated with a deeper knowing inside me.
I had intuited that was the case, but it hadn’t landed for me with such clarity until that moment.
In fact, that’s what we’re all intuitively doing when we practice any form of self-cultivation or take herbal prescriptions, homeopathic, essential oils, flower remedies, sound healing etc. We’re aligning with a wholesome order of being.
During this conversation, whilst staying with one insight, I began to see the reason why many people do not heal as well as they and their practitioner had hoped. It became clear that following a treatment, the client feels better for a while, but then squander it shortly after. This is because they haven’t yet seen and embodied the quality of feeling or energy vibration we inhabit is where we create our life from.
Until we see the truth of the sanctity of life for ourselves, we do not experience much lasting or radical change. Through the process of being facilitated, I have experienced how the quality of presence of the practitioner is vital for catalysing transformative insights in the client. It does not require much exertion, elaborate tools and techniques and yet healing is more likely to happen for a client with a practitioner who has embodied presence.
I used to unknowingly assume that it was entirely on me to make my patients better. I’m sure this is the case for many physicians, acupuncturists, therapists, coaches and healers. I didn’t fully appreciate that it is principally our presence, through resonance, that raises the frequency of vibration of the client. While this is implicit in the philosophy of many complimentary therapies, spiritual practices and psychological approaches, what is often missing is that last decisive leap of trusting in the transformative power of presence. And that’s the difference that makes all the difference.
The practice of any medicine, therapy or healing modality is a synergistic blend between art and science. It is necessary to master our craft - that is to learn the theories and become proficient with the tools of the trade. However the effectiveness of our treatment is greatly catalysed and enhanced by our level of presence. Presence is the result of embodying and integrating our innate wholeness, which then becomes unequivocally transformative. It’s also much more simple than we think. In fact, the simplicity may well be insulting to our well honed intellect. Yet, as we steep in it, we shall be humbled by how profoundly healing it is. This was certainly my experience.
Through the process of immersing in this understanding, it will eventually land for us. As practitioners we will have more agency in facilitating healing. As a client we will have more agency in participating in our own healing; we will come to enjoy greater ease, freedom and wholeness as a result, even when we are sometimes physically unwell. The results are more enduring, liberating, and gratifying for both practitioner and client.