The Healing Power Of Presence

In this episode of The Future of Wellness, Keith Parker explores the power of presence and why being fully present is one of the most fundamental forces for healing. Presence is the common ground beneath all effective healing modalities. When attention is neutral, grounded, and non-judgmental, the system naturally begins to regulate, organise, and restore flow.

Rather than forcing change, this episode reveals how clarity, integration, and healing arise when the system returns to the present moment.

Transcript

Welcome to the future of wellness,

Exploring self-transformation and holistic healing to unlock your inner potential.

Hosted by Christabel Armstrong and Keith Parker.

Today we're going to talk about a topic that is near and dear to all of us,

And that is the present moment.

And specifically,

How does presence heal?

Quite literally,

How is it that the simplicity of being present is healing?

Sometimes this is called the power of the present moment.

I'm going to analyze this through three different lenses,

Three different ways to understand how presence is healing,

And hopefully it gives some insight as to the ways that this works.

Presence is a very interesting thing to consider.

Defining it is maybe more complicated than it initially seems.

On the one hand,

We can simply say presence is this moment.

On the one hand,

We can talk about it in terms of time and say it isn't the past and it isn't the future.

On the other hand,

We could say that there is an illusion of past and future,

That there is no past and future at all,

In that whatever the past was,

It only happened in the present,

And whatever the future will be,

It will only happen in the present.

So the present is actually the only aspect of time,

Or rather,

The language of time is a way of organizing our experience in relation to the present moment by creating things that point to what has happened or what will happen,

And yet it's still only the present.

I'm reminded of the teachings of Eckhart Tolle and the power of now.

So the power of the present moment is a big deal,

And the initial quality I just want to point out is that because it's always present,

There is something very free about that.

There's something very profound and deep about that we'll come back to later.

We're going to talk through the universality of presence in different healing modalities and why that is the case.

We're also going to look at how it is that the present moment provides a healing mechanism from the standpoint of processing things.

And then finally,

We're going to look at how presence works in a mechanical way in your energy field.

And this is a very interesting angle on understanding how presence works from a more,

Let's say,

Structural and energetic place.

Let's start by looking at the universality of presence in all healing work.

Here on The Future of Wellness,

We've spoken to many experts in various fields of healing,

And one thing it can be distilled from all practitioners,

And that is that presence is the ground upon which all healing happens.

It doesn't matter what modality,

What technique,

Presence is required as the foundational piece.

And that's really interesting.

It's a universal feature of healing.

You could say presence goes beyond technique.

In the most distilled sense,

Presence is about being with the moment without adding anything extra.

If you're looking at presence in the context of healing,

What are the qualities that are so important to achieve in order for healing to happen?

Neutrality and non-judgment are absolutely paramount.

Think about it for a moment.

Sometimes,

Therapeutically,

Being present is simply called holding space.

So in a sense,

The facilitator is holding space for the client or a group,

And that space that's being held is a particular quality.

Not only is there presence,

Meaning there's attention being placed there,

But there's also a quality that makes that presence the most clean,

The least distorted,

And that is attention without expectation,

Attention with neutrality and non-judgment,

Attention with an acceptance of whatever arises.

So think about it from the client standpoint or from the person who's looking to have something heal.

The patterns and blockages in ourselves that need healing,

That need looking at,

What they often are are coping mechanisms,

Energetic blocks that are born of some kind of a distortion or imbalance.

The perspectives within those distortions are striving to maintain themselves,

Like characters or sub-personalities,

As it is called,

And these are the kinds of conditioning that we take on.

Sometimes we can be aggressive.

Sometimes we can be insecure.

Sometimes we move towards things.

Sometimes we move away from things.

But these patterns,

Psychological,

Emotional,

Neurological,

And somatic patterns are interested in sticking around.

In order for them to be healed,

The pain or the suffering that has created those patterns in the first place need to be seen.

So the qualities that are most important are that whatever it is that's to come forward is not judged,

Because the fear of being seen is often the hurdle to those patterns from being worked with.

So when a space is set up,

When presence is properly attuned to being neutral and non-judgmental,

Our vulnerability can step forward.

We can feel safe to show ourselves.

We can feel safe and trusting that if we allow our vulnerability to come forward,

If we allow intimacy to take place,

Then our emotions,

Our feelings,

Our thoughts can be shared in a non-judgmental space,

In a non-aggressive space.

And that is the core therapeutic space,

A space of neutrality.

We need to be able to share and be in a space where we don't feel that we're going to be judged or criticized.

Whatever it is that is arising,

Not judging it,

Not criticizing it,

Allowing it,

And that enables things to move.

That enables stuck things to get flowing.

That enables and invites that which is scared to be seen,

That which is damaged or wounded or traumatized or fearful to feel safe enough to step forward into a space of acceptance.

In talking about it in this way,

I'm referencing a therapeutic orientation to presence.

At the same time,

It's important to note that the cultivation of presence in its most essential form has always been held by the meditation traditions.

And you could distill all meditation down to simply saying the cultivation of presence.

Now these very same qualities are being applied in meditation practice as I am describing them from a therapeutic standpoint.

And that is that meditation in one form or another is about settling attention into the present moment more and more fully,

More and more continuously.

And these qualities are required for oneself to deepen into the present moment.

Presence enables us a space to process things.

When we revisit the idea of the language of time and we talk about past and future,

The universality of the healing process takes place only in the present.

You don't heal by going to the past or going to the future.

Because even if you were to say that you had some kind of a technique where in this moment you were to revisit something that had happened in the past or imagine some kind of a fear,

A projection into the future,

You're doing that in the present.

Notice that the language of time is in some ways false or illusory.

So presence is the eternal still point,

We could call it.

So it becomes a space of processing.

Our conditioning traps us in loops of history in which we hold on to the past and we have this projection into the future.

And in a certain sense,

All of our conditioning,

All of our pain,

All of our suffering is the result of some inability to process or metabolize what has happened in the quote-unquote past.

There's some inability for us to have taken in that information,

To be present fully with that previous experience and to allow it to move through,

Process,

Compute,

Metabolize through our body-mind system.

And so that unmetabolized history is what stays with us and is asking for us to revisit it in the present moment to create some kind of therapeutic movement.

So there are words now that are used in the therapeutic community that are quite valuable to mention here.

One is re-regulation.

If you look into the language of trauma,

Re-regulation is about attending to dysregulation.

So our nervous systems,

When they become imbalanced,

They get into stress loops,

There is the creation or manifestation of a kind of nervous system dysregulation,

Where in the most simple sense,

We could just say that the nervous system goes a bit haywire,

Overloaded with stress response.

When we move out of that dysregulation,

We're moving towards a re-regulation.

Being present in a skillful manner naturally re-regulates the system.

It naturally steps down the presumed perception through the nervous system that there is stress or imminent danger,

Moves us from a fight or flight state into a rest and digest state.

So the present is an invitation for re-regulation.

The present is also an invitation for coherency.

This is another interesting word to look at.

Coherency is the highest level possible of organization.

And when we look out into the world,

What we see is that the world,

The universe,

Nature in particular shows us that coherency is very built upon certain kinds of aesthetics,

Certain kinds of proportions,

Like the Fibonacci sequence,

Like the golden mean spiral,

Like what is called fractals.

So fractal organization and the way nature is designed is highly,

Highly coherent.

When we become incoherent,

We're not able to understand things.

We're disorganized.

There is chaos rather than order.

So the ideal ordering system is coherency.

And the present moment naturally induces coherency.

A skillful engagement with the present moment naturally starts to reorganize things towards coherency.

In essence,

Being present enhances coherency,

Enhances the organization of yourself and the relationship you have and the perception and orientation you have of mind and body in time and space.

It upgrades that organization.

Also being present enables grounding and grounding is really,

Really important.

When we talk about healing,

What very often is happening to that which is fragmented or distorted within us,

A way of talking about that is that there is some kind of ungroundedness to it.

As we look at the distortions or fragmentations or energetic blocks within us,

The repressions or the suppressions or the dissociations,

Those things are connected to being ungrounded.

It keeps us away from being fully grounded,

Fully connected all the way down through the body,

Connected to the earth,

Fully connected to this moment.

So the present moment is a pathway towards being grounded as well,

And this is a really key point.

So re-regulation,

Coherency,

And grounding are parts of the ways in which processing happens in the moment.

I'd also like to add this a little more abstractly,

And that is that the present moment is in a sense a version of the infinite,

The eternal.

It is eternally present.

If you haven't heard this before,

It's important to know.

It's important to be reminded every day.

It's important to be reminded every moment that the moment is the infinite.

The moment is the eternal.

There is no such thing as capturing the moment and holding onto it,

Because every moment is followed by every other moment,

And so it is eternally now,

The power of now,

The power of the present.

So again,

In this language of time,

We have this illusion of past,

Present,

Future being separate things,

But there is only the present,

And it is a recapitulation of what we mean when we say the infinite.

And so the infinite is something that is imbued with tremendous amounts of potential and possibility.

It is only from this present moment that we can create a new reality,

That we can make new decisions,

That we have any and all action that we ever experience.

It happens here.

And now,

This is why the universality of presence is existent in all spiritual traditions and all healing traditions,

And that is because this is the only arena of action.

And what tends to happen is that our human experience displaces us.

We're fragmented in time and in space,

Particularly in the mental sense.

We're fragmented in the past and the future.

We're kind of stuck,

Kind of lost within our minds.

And healing is the process by which all of us,

All the fragments of us,

All the fragmentations come together into greater wholeness,

And we're able to experience more of ourselves through the present,

And to realize greater and greater levels of not only the finite components of ourselves,

But that infinite essence within.

And so this third component of how presence heals is a little more about the energy field and the mechanics.

I'll share with you my experience,

My direct perception of how the energy field relates to being more and more present.

There is an underlying mechanics to what happens as we settle more into the present.

Now it helps to know a little bit about the general structure of your energy field,

And that is that overall the field is shaped like a tube torus or a doughnut,

And then there is the doughnut hole,

Or the vertical axis,

Where there's energy flowing up and down the center vertically,

But also it's flowing around and rotating around the doughnut.

So the energy field is this very dynamic interplay of energy coming in and out of the system through the crown and the root from the top and the bottom,

But also rotating around the system and in and out of that central channel through the chakras.

So there's tremendous dynamism and angles of flow within the field,

I mean technically infinite angles of flow in the field,

But the archetypal flows are left and right and circulating around the center and then going up and down and in and out the very vertical axis.

So imagine that sitting in your center and being able to perceive this giant toroidal vortex,

This turbine of energy flowing around you.

At any given moment,

Our thoughts and our emotions are feeding into how that flow of energy is working.

The way our physiology is interfacing with the field is feeding into how that energy is flowing.

And this is what you can notice at any given moment.

There's always a particular flow,

And again it's representative of how the body and the mind and the emotions are having an interplay with one another.

When we drop into being more present,

What happens is the field starts to organize itself in a particular way.

When we get centered,

When we become grounded,

And when we drop in into that stillness,

The field starts to rotate in a more and more reliable and symmetrical way.

The central channel has a stronger vertical flow as well.

As I mentioned,

Presence is like the infinite still point.

When we talk about blocks,

These fragmentations in the past and into the future,

These are actually structures in the field.

So you can imagine that a section of your energy field contains a pocket of information about a particular trauma,

A particular pain,

And there's memory connected to that.

There's emotion connected to that.

What that does is it dysregulates or creates imbalance in the flow in your field.

But if you can up the flow of energy in your field,

And you can promote circulation through center,

Then that area that is blocked peripheral to center starts to get enough traction,

Starts to get enough friction,

Such that that area of blockage,

That network of information starts to erode,

Starts to be pulled apart.

And so quite literally,

When we learn to be present,

What we're doing at an energetic level is that the flow in our field is naturally becoming more coherent.

It's organizing to a higher degree.

It's re-patterning,

It's self-organizing to a more coherent state.

This is why presence alone is so healing,

Not only because of the qualities that we talked about,

Neutrality,

Non-judgment,

Compassion,

But it also has a mechanical function that underlies the flow of energy in your field.

And what it does is being really present pulls everything to center and circulates through your core,

Which promotes greater levels of coherency and naturally helps for blockage in areas of chaos,

Areas of disorder to be released.

And when this is further achieved,

All kinds of change can take place.

Now there is a still point at the very center,

As I mentioned,

The still point.

If you just imagine a bathtub and the water is held in the bathtub,

What happens when you pull the rubber stopper out of the base of the tub?

The water naturally drains at the base of the tub.

Stillness and presence and centeredness works in this way.

When we learn to be more centered and when we're still in that center point,

What happens is it attracts or it pulls all stuck energy into its center because it is the greatest circulation point to be organized around.

Now the simplest still point or center point to think of within our own system is our heart because it's the vertical axis,

But it's also the horizontal axis going across one another,

Creating a cross.

So when we really focus and get centered within our heart,

The whole field pulls into center.

Think of it as that bottom of the basin.

In some sense,

This is the deeper goal of healing and of awakening traditions to come into greater coherency through stillness in the present moment,

Through centeredness until bigger and bigger changes and realizations take place.

These can be very profound experiences,

And I certainly have found with my own experience that in learning to see the field in the way that I do,

That there is this unbelievable and very inspirational kind of mechanical operation behind being present.

It's not just about quality.

There's also this transformational action that takes place when we learn to be still.

So these are just a few ways to think about the present moment and how being present is healing.

This is a skill to cultivate.

I believe we all want to be more present.

It is the thing that imbues your life with greater vitality,

With greater vividness,

Is simply to be more present.

I'm always fascinated how this simplistic act of cultivating a present moment awareness improves and enhances everything else.

So you might say there's nothing more compelling than suggesting to be more present,

Whether we look at that as the qualities,

As the processes,

Or whether we look at it as a kind of more esoteric energetic movement.

Presence heals in these various ways,

And the power of it is truly unbounded.

Thanks for listening.