Presence has my back.
In spiritual circles, we often hear goofy things like “feel your feet,” or “follow your breath,” but it can seem kind of trite or insignificant to do so. Sure it’s nice to get a split second of relief from my neurotic thinking for one breath, but then what? There’s something important in this question. Why is it important to feel my body and where does that lead?
When we are actually inhabiting our bodies, we directly sense the aliveness present there (often as a tingling, flowing, or pulsing energy) Many people think they’re feeling their bodies but they’re not actually doing it! Instead, they’re thinking about their feet or visualizing the feet or having a mental construct or commentary about the feet. That’s not the same thing as feeling and inhabiting the feet through the sensations of the inner body. (There’s nothing special about the feet specifically. You could replace feet with hands, face, breath, etc.)
Doing presence practices in a more formal way help us deepen our awareness of sensation. At first most of us can only feel gross/obvious sensations like: hot, cold, itchy, sleepy, hungry, and tight/painful places in the body. Feeling the more subtle sensations takes more practice, but it’s in dropping into the deeper, more subtle layers of sensation that we start to reap the benefits of the body center’s wisdom and energy. If I’m really in my body, truly sensing it, getting a felt sense of the aliveness, there is an energy that comes online that feels like groundedness, strength, and the ability to initiate action and follow through. It feels like support— like I suddenly have some solid ground to stand on. We also get a sense of wholeness and sacredness from really inhabiting our bodies.
When those qualities of Presence can be directly contacted, Presence knows what to do in the moment. I don’t have to think about it, pre-plan, or rehearse some smart or kind thing to say or do in a difficult situation. There’s a development of trust that begins to build and be cultivated the more we can drop into our bodies, and we get a sense that Presence is trustworthy, that Presence has my back. It will help me know how to show up, what to say, what’s mine to do, what’s mine to let go of. Being connected to our bodies opens the way into skillful action or right action, which has a bodily intelligence onto itself, which our mind knows nothing about.
Our mind knows about planning, which is a useful skill to have at times. Foresight, preparedness, memory retention, and visioning are all good things. But that’s not the intelligence of the body. The body is always simply with what is here and now, and responds to the present moment in a more intuitive way. When I’m not present, my body is in a reactive state. Tension arises, and we can slide into fight/flight/freeze patterns. But when I’m breathing deeply, when my Attention is going In and Down into the body, there is access to this more spacious intelligence. It knows how to move through the world skillfully and with the right amount of energy- not overdoing it or underdoing it. Presence gets it “just right,” even if the unfolding of the situation feels a bit messy.
You can think of this process as something to develop a relationship with Presence. Like any relationship, it takes some time to build trust and to see if this entity of Presence is trustworthy. I can speak to you of it’s trustworthiness all day long, but your body is not going to believe that until it has had a direct experience itself.
Here’s where it requires a bit of a leap of faith, or what they call in Buddhism “borrowed faith.” If you can see that it has worked for other people, you can take their word for it and give it a try, until you’ve had enough experience with it and now the trust(faith) becomes yours— your own direct experience. Borrowing that faith from others can be the encouragement and inspiration that we need to get started on the path. Skepticism and doubt are normal. We’ve been hurt, betrayed, and let down, so building trust and befriending Presence is a process that takes time.
“Be patient with all that is unresolved in your heart, and learn to love the questions themselves.”- Rilke
