Loving Presence: The Remedy for the Modern World

I’m going to show my hand from the outset and say that loving presence will do more for you, your clients, and your community than anything else.

I’ll also suggest that it’s more difficult than anything you’ve ever done.

Simpler, of course, but much more difficult.

Let’s think of love as something like non-directive receptivity.

In such a state we're available for whatever's there.

This a phenomenological move, harkening back to the roots of the word: phainein and logos. In other words it’s an attempt to listen to “the speech of that which shines forth.”

However, it extends further.

In such a state we’re not simply listening to those phenomena.

We’re attempting to meet those phenomena on their own terms - free from the shackles of our preexisting mental models, expectations, judgments and diagnoses. We don’t attempt to fit the phenomena into any particular box in a rushed attempt to understand them.

Loving presence asks us to suspend our own habits, not relying on our historically derived patterns. It demands that we meet each moment anew. It requires us to be available for the subtlest occurrences, becoming finely tuned instruments capable of perceiving what others gloss over.

Loving presence assumes that whatever occurs is meaningful - even if the meaning remains elusive. It allows the kind of time necessary for what occurs to reveal its own meaning.

Loving presence encourages us to risk what we know for the sake of deepening connection.

Loving presence is a paradox, both permissive and frustrating. It allows the Other to be as they are. There's no insistence on change. And yet it does insist that there is more available to the Other than is apparent. It clears a field, in which what is latent within the Other is called outward into fuller engagement with the environment. As a result, habits are both welcomed and revealed to be but one of many ways of relating to existence.

However, loving presence is difficult.

It’s an aimless aim.

It asks us to be changed by our interactions.

It encourages us to risk what we know for what we may yet learn.

It requires us to act not from a state of compulsion but of care, asking again and again: how great a sphere of concern can we sustain? Sustaining such care requires us to organize ourselves quite differently, treating ourselves and our world in a way that likely has no historical precedent.

After all, weren't you raised by people with wounds in a wounded world?

Didn't you learn early on how to adjust yourself to what you thought was expected of you?

And yet, if you could cultivate this loving presence, you'd find that your world changes - and the people in it. You'd find that others are drawn to you not by the facts you can rattle off, the letters after your name, or the tricks you can perform for them but by what they become in your presence.

Calm. Hopeful. Secure. Capable. Creative. Resourceful.

More of themselves.

From James Carse in Finite and Infinite Games,

"Healing requires no specialists, only those who can come to us out of their own center, and who are prepared to be healed themselves."

Are you prepared?

PS although people think I teach movement or work as a coach or therapist, it's all a ruse. *This* is the real move, as far as I'm concerned. Movement simply provides the most effective context to help somebody learn this stuff.

If you work (or want to work) as a coach, therapist, or teacher and yearn to connect mind/body practice to bigger issues in the broader world, the Ecosomatics Practitioner Training will show you how.

You'll develop the personal foundation to do transformative work with clients while creating incredible understanding of how body and mind operate in the modern world.

https://www.ecosomatics.institute/practitioner-training