Why is it sometimes so hard to stay present,
Even when you've been meditating,
Practicing,
And doing the inner work for years?
Hi,
I'm John.
I'm an energy healing practitioner.
And presence has been part of my spiritual practice for a very long time.
But through my own healing,
I began to understand something I hadn't considered before.
I thought I needed to become better at presence.
And what I discovered was how much inside me had been making presence difficult.
And that completely changed my relationship with it.
For years,
I practiced coming back.
Come back to the breath,
Come back to the body,
Come back to this moment.
And I understood the teachings.
I knew I was supposed to observe my thoughts rather than become completely identified with them.
I knew the present moment was where my life was actually happening.
And I could be present.
But I had to work at it.
For about five years as I moved more deeply into my own healing,
There were times when I quite literally made myself stay.
When I wanted to run from a feeling,
I stayed.
When I wanted to get lost in my thoughts,
I came back.
And when something uncomfortable arose in my body,
I practiced being with it again and again.
And at the time,
I thought I was learning how to become more present,
And I was.
But now I understand that something else was happening too.
I was building the capacity to stay with myself.
For much of my life,
My system had been organized around survival.
And underneath that survival were childhood wounds carrying emotional responses that I had never been able to fully feel and complete.
Fear.
Anger,
Grief.
Humiliation,
Abandonment.
I could understand these wounds intellectually.
I could know where they even came from.
I could even know that something happening in the present moment wasn't actually the past.
But that didn't stop my body from responding.
Something could happen today,
But my body might respond with something much older.
So while my mind might be saying,
Be here,
You're safe,
Stay present,
Right?
There could be fear moving through my body or anxiety or hypervigilance,
A feeling that something was wrong.
Or a pull to protect myself,
Figure something out or get away from what I was feeling.
And that's what I hadn't understood.
Presence was available,
But there was so much inside me of competing with it.
And eventually the presence I had been practicing became something more than a spiritual practice.
It became part of how I healed.
So when something difficult arose,
Instead of immediately trying to get rid of it,
I began learning how to be with it.
And not perfectly,
And not always peacefully.
Sometimes I had to make myself stay.
But I began bringing presence to what was actually happening inside me.
And feeling fear.
I'm feeling anger.
And feeling humiliation.
And I accept that this is what I'm feeling right now.
And then I listened to my body.
I wasn't using presence to make the feeling disappear.
I was learning how to be with what was there without immediately judging it,
Fixing it,
Analyzing it,
Numbing it,
Or leaving myself because of it.
And sometimes when I stayed,
Something deeper began to reveal itself.
An old memory or grief or a physical sensation.
A younger part of myself that had never been able to feel what he was feeling when the original experience happened.
And that's when presence became incredibly important to my completion work.
Because I had developed enough capacity to stay with what was arising.
And presence helped me meet what wasn't peaceful.
And that distinction matters to me.
Because presence wasn't simply about becoming calm.
Sometimes,
Presence allowed me to sit beside the very thing inside me that had never been given enough safety or space to finish.
And over several years,
I experienced the completion of five significant emotional responses connected to my childhood wounds.
And I didn't decide one morning that I was going to heal five wounds.
I didn't go digging for them.
They arose through my life,
Through triggers,
Through my healing practice,
And through my body.
And when they arose,
I stayed.
I listen.
I felt what was there.
I allowed my body to lead.
And then earlier this year,
After the last of those deeper completions,
I began noticing that something fundamental had changed.
That chronic survival state that had been.
Underneath so much of my experience wasn't there in the same way anymore.
And my first experience of that wasn't some enormous spiritual revelation.
It was almost more like.
Wow,
Look at all this space.
There was space inside me and less vigilance and less internal noise,
Less emotional charge constantly demanding my attention.
And less of that feeling that I needed to figure something out.
And in that space,
I discovered something I hadn't expected.
Presence was much more available.
I didn't have to keep dragging myself back to the present moment.
I was already here.
And then I noticed another change.
Something could happen in my life and an old pattern might appear or I might feel some anxiety.
I might recognize an old way of thinking or responding.
And sometimes now I can simply bring presence to it.
I notice it.
I feel what's happening in my body.
I see the pattern.
And I stay with it.
Sometimes it softens,
Sometimes it seems to dissolve on its own.
And that's very different from what I experienced when there was still a tremendous amount of emotional charge underneath some of my deeper wounds.
Back then I could understand something completely and still feel its force.
And awareness alone didn't necessarily make it disappear.
Sometimes awareness and presence were actually the doorway into something deeper that needed to be felt.
And sometimes for me,
Completed.
That's why I've come to hold these two ideas together.
Some things may need presence.
Some things may need completion.
And completion may make presence much more available.
And that's really why I wanted to share this.
Maybe you've been meditating for years.
Maybe you've read the spiritual books.
Maybe you understand presence,
And yet you still find yourself being pulled into fear or anxiety or old patterns or emotional reactions.
Maybe you've even wondered,
Why can't I just let this go?
Why can't I stay present?
Why am I still getting triggered after all the work I've done?
I can't tell you what's happening inside your system.
And I don't believe every wandering thought or difficult feeling means there's some enormous childhood wound waiting to be healed.
We don't need to go searching for wounds.
But I can tell you what I discovered in myself.
I wasn't failing at presents.
My system was carrying unfinished emotional material that was still asking for my attention.
And strangely enough.
.
.
The presence I had been spent years practicing became part of what finally allowed me to give it that attention.
And those five years weren't wasted.
I wasn't unsuccessfully forcing myself to be present.
I was learning how to stay.
And eventually,
Staying helped me meet what had been pulling me away.
And for years,
I thought presence was something I needed to get better at.
Something I needed to practice harder,
Something I would eventually become really good at if I just kept returning to the moment.
And practice mattered enormously,
Right?
It taught me how to return.
It taught me how to stay.
But healing mattered too.
Because as some of the old unfinished fear and anger and grief and emotional charge underneath my survival patterns completed,
They were simply less pulling me away.
So perhaps the question isn't always,
How do I become more present?
Sometimes another question might be worth exploring.
What's making presents so difficult?
Because what if present isn't something we're supposed to get better at and better at forcing?
What if healing remains,
Gradually removes much of what keeps pulling us away from it?
Spirituality taught me to remain,
To be present.
And my healing taught me how to stay there with what was difficult.
And completion helped me remove some of what had been pulling me away.
And now.
.
.
Presence feels like somewhere I'm trying to get to and more like something I'm discovering was already there.
Underneath everything.
Thank you for joining me.
I'm John.
Take good care of yourself,
And I'll see you next time.
