Becoming Divinely Human
by CC Leigh

Chapter 6: Presence

Our Story: Over time, we discovered a much greater ability to be fully in Presence with strong feelings, thoughts, and emotions, both our own and those of others. These strong feelings ran the full range of possibility, including sensual delights as well as more difficult feelings.

Holding self and others
“Holding” means staying fully present, warm, and responsive while attending to your inner self or another person. When you are in a state of Presence rather than reactivity, all parties are held in love, and you can be available without being blown away.
Much as the practice of Inseeing cultivates your ability to bring warm, interested curiosity to inner aspects of yourself that need some attention, by strengthening your ability to be in Presence you can bring that same kind of loving attention to other people, animals, or even plants, as well. This type of uncon- ditional Presence is the most loving gift you can give to another being, because it makes room for them to be all that they are. In that space, they can come into their full, embodied aliveness.

Emotions are not a sign of weakness
We are often given the message that emotions, especially fear and sadness, are a sign of weakness. This typically comes from people who are weak themselves, who dislike feeling emotions because they were never given enough support to come into their own emotional maturity. They will tend to use shaming to put others on the defensive. It is more true to say that emotional expression is a sign of strength and requires courage, especially in societies that do not have widespread acceptance of emotional expression.

Everyone needs to have their emotions seen and validated. If you feel an emotion but are told not to, or that what you’re feeling isn’t warranted in the situation, you can feel split or crazy, and come to doubt your inner experience.

Example: you’re upset and someone tells you, “There’s no reason to be upset. You’re being irrational.” This sort of response can cause you to doubt that what you’re feeling is valid, setting up a cognitive dissonance between your gut feeling that something is wrong and what you’re hearing with your ears. This can lead to confusion, inner conflict, or even shame that you might be feeling something inappropriate and unapproved by others.
We need to have our emotions acknowledged by others if we are to be healthy and fully functioning beings. When our feelings are met with mixed messages or negativity, we feel chaotic inside and distrust that our emotions can be good for us. We might conclude that emotions are just interior storms that make our lives more difficult.

The harm we do to self and others by avoiding feeling
Sadly, many, if not most, children are raised in situations where emotions are not well tolerated. They are threatened: “Stop crying this instant or I’ll give you something to really cry about!” Or they are shamed: “Don’t be a sissy.” Or overpowered: “Shut up!” or “Children should be seen and not heard.” Or they are told they ought to be feeling something different from what they are feeling: “Cheer up, it’s not so bad. Look on the bright side!” In some homes, children are neglected or ignored, providing a perhaps subtler but no less damaging effect of inhibiting the full development of their ability to feel appropriate emotions and trust themselves in their thoughts and opinions.

Sound familiar? Most of us can easily remember similar situations from our childhood.

Boys are especially repressed
Tragically, this type of repression seems to be especially aimed at boys, while girls are given somewhat greater lati- tude for expressing their feelings. All too many boys grow up unable to discriminate various feelings because they have been punished or ridiculed whenever they expressed strong emotions. It’s not that the emotions go away—they continue to show up in a sort of overwhelming rush, or uncomfortable mixture of feelings that are difficult to articulate. Then, in their desire to appear “together,” young men try even harder to suppress their feelings, leading to a vicious cycle of avoidance and overwhelm. When one day they fall in love, suddenly their partners want and expect them to be able to communicate their feelings but they’ve never learned the language.

Girls suffer too, even though they have more leeway to be emotional in our society. They are often expected to be “irrational,” as if they are helpless victims of emotions run amok. While they may be allowed to have emotional reactions, they are seldom taught how to bring discriminating awareness to their feelings in order to sort through or articulate them.

When kids’ feelings are shamed or repressed, they can become emotionally handicapped well into adult life. What everyone needs in order to be emotionally healthy and coherent is clear reflection and validation by others. This is even more true for children, who are just beginning to learn how to experience the emotional richness of life. When a child is sad, what helps most is someone sitting with them and saying, in effect, “Yes, I see you are sad, and that sad feeling is appropriate right now.” And the same applies to jubilation, fear, rage—the whole array of feeling-states. Although parents do need to set some boundaries on their children’s expression of strong emotion, so that they are not acting out in hurtful ways, what children most need is to be seen and welcomed in the full range of their feelings.

The other side of suppression: acting out
While many people suppress their emotions, keeping them mostly bottled up inside, others swing to the opposite extreme, expressing and acting out their reactions at every turn. Some might even say they “inflict” their emotions—they express them dramatically without regard for the people around them. It might seem at first glance that such expression is preferable to keeping emotions bottled up where they fester until something causes the top to blow off. However, acting out seldom provides anything more than a temporary release of pressure.

Recent research has shown that people can develop a kind of biochemical “addiction” to certain emotional states due to how their body adapts to their most predominant feelings. Someone who has been chronically depressed, or chronically angry, develops more biochemical receptors for those particular emotions. The “familiar” states are then more easily triggered than other states that have less biochemical signals available, and this accounts for why some people appear to be very stuck in repetitively acting out their particular dramas.

Neither suppression nor expression has the power to bring healing energy to the patterns that are driving the emotional reactions. Healing requires awareness.

Emotions and intuitions are your aliveness
Why would you want to feel emotions anyway? Emotions and their counterpart body sensations give color, depth, and fullness to your experience of life, bringing it into a vivid, 3-D richness that would be much shallower if you did not feel them. We all feel emotions even if we don’t know a lot about them. They bring us essential information about our lives and what we need in order to live consciously and be fulfilled. If your emotions are absent, as they can be with some kinds of depression or illness, you will feel very flat, as if something vital is missing from your life.

On the other hand, when you feel moved by beauty, touched by a poignant movie, heartbroken when you lose a loved one, swept away in the early throes of romance, or thrilled on a roller coaster, you feel especially alive. It is your ability to feel deeply that brings meaning into your life.

There are no right or wrong or good or bad feelings
Because some emotions, such as happiness or love, are more pleasurable in the body than others, we have formed the tendency to label—and oversimplify—emotions as being either “good” or “bad.” And we then tend to go for one of two options. One option is to try to increase what we perceive as “good” feelings and get rid of the so-called “bad” ones. There are many self-help gurus who promise you the keys to unending happiness—but the failure rate of these programs is high.
The other option is to try to get some distance from emotions, period. Some meditation or other spiritual practices teach people to pull back from emotions and simply witness them as if looking down from a mountain peak. The promise of these programs is equanimity and inner peace. Although they can bring some relief from the distress of chronic unhappiness, such programs often come at a price of reduced aliveness. We have the capacity to experience the full range of what is possible for us as humans. Why cut that off?

The shadow side of positive thinking
The tendency to prefer “good” over “bad” shows up in our thinking as well. Since thoughts and emotions can be highly correlated, many self-help programs encourage you to think only positive thoughts in order to create the life you want. While there is real merit in becoming able to notice your thoughts— and therefore your conditioned ways of thinking—a potential shadow side of such programs is that you become afraid of your so-called “negative thinking,” as if it would bring about a horrible outcome in your life. Or, should you experience a painful situation or disease, you might unduly blame yourself for creating your problem through “negative” thoughts.

We need to look below the surface level of teachings that tell us to change our thoughts in order to change how we feel and how our life will turn out. We are more complex than most self- help manuals would really acknowledge—just ask any therapist. And we actually have very little control over what pops up in our minds, or what emotions arise. They simply appear! And although we can draw some correlations between persistent attitudes we hold about the world and our current experience, for most people it is not possible to “decide” to think only positive thoughts and then succeed at it.

But you know what? In my experience, the vast majority of our thoughts do NOT create anything other than themselves in the moment. It is the deeper patterns of our conditioning that tend to create repetitious situations in our lives, where we feel stuck and disempowered.

Willingness to FEEL without FIXING
When someone is willing to feel without trying to fix, a very magical alchemy is unleashed. Such non-intrusive contact is one of the most powerful healing forces available to you. It not only gives you the opportunity to notice what you are feeling, but this positive attention also helps you focus long enough to get to the deeper layers and meaning of your experience, where buried feelings can be brought into the light. Again, once those deeper layers are seen and felt, the natural healing mechanism of your conscious inner body kicks in and moves the whole situation toward wholeness.

This happens without any need to try to make anything change. In fact, it is the very pressure to change that so often locks things in place. Whatever is arising in your internal experience has an important message for you, and until you receive that message in your conscious awareness it will persist in trying to get through, resisting all efforts to change it or make it go away. This is why so many people fail to achieve lasting success with affirmations that attempt to override negative thoughts by pasting positive thoughts over them. Or they fail to be able to maintain a peaceful equanimity, for much the same reason. What is arising in your mind and emotional body is relevant even when unpleasant, and it needs to be listened to from a state of Presence in order to create an environment where healing can occur. Then new possibilities open up spontaneously, without effort.

Freedom
Real freedom is the freedom to spontaneously experience the full range of life, including all feelings, all thoughts, all states of being, sickness and health, and failure and success. It is only in the play of opposites that we get to understand and value our experience. For instance, love is all the more sweet after we have experienced loss. And health is all the more appreciated after there has been illness. And for that matter, think of flavors: if sweet was the only flavor we encountered, we’d lose the ability to notice it. Sweetness is all the more special when it comes as a contrast to salty, bitter, sour, or savory. Therefore, it is to our ultimate benefit not to be cutting any of it off, since we never know what the next moment will bring.

Sensual delights
If your life has been overly-skewed to the side of pain, disappointment, and suffering, you will naturally seek RELIEF— some way to make the pain go away and stay gone. But dissociation from painful feelings means dissociation from pleasure as well, and that is a price you may not want to pay. The alternative is to do your interior work. As you heal and release the backlog of old pain from the past you will simultaneously open the door to more sensual pleasure in the here and now.
You can begin today. Make a practice of noticing the little things that make your body smile and say “Yes!”—and then experiment with doing them more often. It may be taking a walk on a mild day, listening to a favorite piece of music through headphones, eating a bowl of ice cream, or enjoying leisurely lovemaking. For those of you who’ve been told that spiritual progress requires self-discipline and a denial of the desires of the flesh, this recommendation may come as a surprise, but self-denial is of limited benefit. For awakening in an embodied fashion, you need to reconnect the impaired lines of communication between your head and your body. You will need to be able to hear your body’s healthy signals, learn from them, and respond appropriately. We’re not advocating becoming blind hedonists. What we have discovered, however, is that getting into the sensual delights of life will give you a more balanced perspective, open you to more pleasure, happiness, and joy, and help restore hope that life is more than endless suffering, sorrow, or defeat.

Emotional flow
When you are emotionally and mentally healthy, thoughts and feelings come and go easily. Think of children and how they are crying one minute in great distress and then laughing easily with delight in the next minute. This is the potential of green- lighting ALL of your feelings: they get freed up to flow more easily from one to the next and to the next. And you discover that it wasn’t so much that you needed to feel good all the time as that you had become stuck in uncomfortable states, such as inner confusion, chaos, self-doubt, or overwhelm.

Real change is possible—and has happened in many people just like you—but it takes time, persistence, and compassion for yourself in the process. It begins exactly where you are now in this moment, with the open encountering of whatever is showing up in a way that greenlights it both to be as it is, as well as to change and evolve. Remember, what is seen and felt moves. When you permit yourself to consciously experience the felt sense of whatever is up for you—not just thinking about and telling the story over and over—you create the optimum environment for backed up energy to dissipate, clarity to return, and new, creative responses to become available.

Three states: identifying (merging), exiling, and Presence
The best way to cope with being an emotional being is to develop a strong ability to be in Presence with your feelings, thoughts, and reactions. What usually happens instead is to automatically identify ourselves with particular emotions while automatically distancing ourselves from other emotions.
When you’re identified (merged) with an emotion, you’ll tend to state the feeling strongly: “I’m so pissed right now!” or “I’m scared!” or “I’m so sad I could lie down and die.”

On the other hand, if you’re dissociated from (exiling) an emotion you might say, “I’m NOT angry!” through your clenched teeth. Or you might permit yourself to feel an acceptable feeling but not a stronger underlying feeling.

Example: someone who thinks it’s not permissible to feel or express anger might report feeling very sad or even depressed, when underneath that they are actually quite angry but unable to allow themselves to acknowledge that feeling. They are denying the anger, and pretending it isn’t there.

When you are either merged with a part, or exiling some aspect of your makeup, you have little access to help that part of you grow, become integrated, or transform.
The third option, the one that has the greatest power to free up bound energy and bring integration, is to be in Presence with the broken zones and partial selves, seeing and feeling them without either assuming that they are all of who you are, or being in denial that you are having the feeling in the first place. Presence provides warm, interested attention, and is spacious enough to allow all of you to be here, without needing to force any aspect of yourself to change or go away.
Presence says, “I see you there. Welcome. I care and I am listening. You are a part of me, yet not all of what I am.” Presence provides just enough distance for you to fully experience whatever’s arising in you without being overwhelmed or lost in it.

Presence is being present, and something more. . .
When you begin learning how to observe your reactions and conditioned behaviors, you realize that there is a mysterious aspect of yourself that can watch in a dispassionate, though loving, manner. This something doesn’t take sides but instead has almost infinite capacity to simply register all the different aspects of what is going on in your life, both inner and outer, and be with them without pulling away, shutting down, or condemning.

Presence, as I’m defining the term, is that which gives you the ability to hold yourself with compassion. It is a natural state that is inherent in everyone, but it is often hidden from awareness when you are more attuned to the objects and events around you than to the subtle essence that is doing the observing. When you begin to notice and employ Presence in your life, its powerful light becomes more and more available.

What Presence actually is cannot really be known by the mind, but you can sense Presence in your body as spaciousness, flow, or aliveness. And it can be experienced as that which holds self and others, even in our/their most difficult places. Presence is infinite, unlimited, and spiritual, which is why I use a capital “P” when writing it.

Even more than a state of awareness, Presence is infinite Consciousness itself as it interacts with our human bodies. You can learn to use Presence no matter what your current stage of unfoldment, but it will be transient, like all states, until, with embodied awakening, the light of Presence is switched on in you, never to be turned off again.

Presence is associative, not dissociative
Presence is up close and personal, even though we are talking about an utterly intangible Mystery. It is related to, but different from, the transcendent, dissociated Witnessing that is described in much of spiritual literature. Presence does not watch from a distance and thereby remove the highs and lows from one’s experience; it is right here in the midst of it. “Presence” as I’m using the term is embodied Awareness, it is here-now, an aliveness that is intimately associated with all of the elements of our human experience. As the ultimate Observer of all experience, it is the aspect of our being that is not limited to our personal sphere but is actually unbounded and infinite, unable to be pinned down or described in any finite sort of way. And as such, it is this Presence that is our very connection with that which we call divine—that ineffable, infinite, all-pervasive Mystery of existence.

The cabinet minister analogy
I like to think of the host of inner voices and partial selves that surface into my awareness as allies. In the past, they were often petty tyrants that caused a lot of turmoil, chaos, agitation, and reactivity in my life. But when I awoke to my true and total Self, bit by bit something much greater began to occupy the central position of who I am, as if it were the President of the country of me. Instead of exiling all those formerly-petty tyrants, this President gave them seats in the cabinet—they became advisors. They give all sorts of advice that the President listens to respectfully. When all sides have weighed in, the President is free to take whatever action is appropriate in the moment. In this manner, all of the aspects of the total Self work together in a seamless unity that includes access to useful information from the past, assessment of the current situation, and freedom to take action that is informed, but not limited, by what was experienced in the past.

A messy process
Awakening is messy and unpredictable. In some ways, it’s like the pins and needles you get when a part of your body had “gone to sleep” and now circulation is returning: it can be a prickly process! In most cases, we’ve suppressed far more than our emo- tions—we’ve suppressed the most tender, true parts of ourselves as well. The process of inviting our innermost essence forward must necessarily involve inviting ALL of ourselves forward—the good, the bad, the ugly. The beautiful! All of what we are needs to feel welcome here in order to create the internal space for our divine Conscious nature to embody. The more open you are to your innermost thoughts, feelings, and attitudes, the more you will also be open to the tender authentic essence of yourself that is coming alive, as well as to the vastness of your divine nature.

It’s bound to be a messy process. It’s not possible to do it neatly. The Inseeing ProcessTM, and the power of Presence which is behind it, are useful tools to help you get a line on the parts of you that are coming into the light of your awareness. Inseeing is inherently greenlighting of whatever comes—welcoming it with interested curiosity.

But you will no doubt discover that you simply can’t, or don’t want to, welcome everything (including other people’s stuff) all the time. There will be times when you’re triggered and totally immersed in whatever emotion is happening, and unwilling or unable to do anything more than just be that. That’s all right!

It’s a natural part of this remarkable whole-being transformative process you’re engaging in. There will be times when Presence eludes you, and that’s okay.
It’s more than okay, even. By offering these techniques, I do not mean to suggest that you should be doing them all the time, or that you should be striving to do the “right” thing and be a good student of divinely human awakening. If you try to figure it out and always do it right, that very action will put a damper on the wild current that is switching on in you, and that would not be helpful. It is important to remember not to hold Presence as some ideal that you then make a fetish out of, or judge yourself for failing to accomplish when you are not experiencing it. Presence is fundamental to your nature, but your ability to be aware of it will come and go until that recognition becomes fully established and unshakable. Once this is the case, there will be no going back.

The bottom line is that you feel what you feel, and there is no need to try to fight your divinely human nature. Instead, when you greenlight and hold yourself in your experience—including when you are not in Presence—real transformation and healing take place. Huge amounts of backed-up energy from years of suppressing emotions begins to get released through the process of consciously allowing yourself to feel and speak what was left incomplete in the past. And as this energy is released, healing begins. Instead of being like a full balloon, ready to pop whenever pricked, you become more liked Play Dough—soft and stretchy, able to adapt to arising situations without losing your integrity of being.

Presence language
You invite Presence whenever you attend to what is going on in your inner life, and whenever you speak to your thoughts and feelings as if they are important members of your cabinet. When you send an inner acknowledgment to a feeling, letting it know that you are aware of it, it is Presence that is sending that acknowledgment. Similarly, when you let it know that you have heard its message, it is Presence that is doing the hearing. Even when you are fully immersed in strong feeling states, Presence is there registering all that is happening, and in time its light will help to bring about a healing of whatever trauma patterns were formed in the past. When you practice Inseeing, you will discover a means of articulating your experience that honors both the human and the divine aspects of what you are. No longer will you identify solely with your conditioned reactivity. By bringing patient, curious Presence to whatever is arising, you can’t help but realize that the totality of What You Are is greater than any of your parts. You begin not only to taste your divinely human nature, but to live it.

Try this: using Presence language
When practicing the steps of the Inseeing Process, begin using Presence language to help you remember that you are bigger than the issue you are investigating. For instance:
I’m sensing
I’m noticing
I’m aware of
I’m realizing
I’m recognizing
I’m seeing/hearing
I’m saying hello to it
I’m sensing how it feels
I’m letting it know I heard it
I’m thanking what’s come

And don’t forget those three magic words you learned in Chapter 4 that really make a difference in how you relate to what’s arising. They are “something in me.” When you identify an issue as “something in me,” you acknowledge it as a part of you, yet also acknowledge that it might not have the complete picture of your life. There is a bigger aspect of your whole- being self that is able to be aware of the issue and listen to it with interested curiosity. Try it out when you practice Inseeing and see the difference it can make when you say, “I’m sensing something in me that. ” It’s a distinction that will really help
bring Presence alive for you.

One step at a time
Learning to be in Presence with your feelings, thoughts, reactions, remembrances of past traumas, and anxieties for the future takes practice, patience, and a willingness to feel uncomfortable at times. Presence grows with practice. Although it is already a part of who you are, it cannot become a living force in your life until you begin tuning into it and welcoming it. Whenever you remember that you are more than your conditioned self, you strengthen Presence and its power in your life.
In this chapter we explored Presence as an active force for your own awakening process and for supporting others as well. People need this type of deep holding to be able to cope well with the strong feeling-states that accompany being divinely human. Contrary to popular spiritual lore, embodied awakening often brings greater intensity of feeling and more emotion, not less. In the absence of holding from others, we can feel lost, alone, separate, alienated, and often, hopeless. This step is about learning to really help ourselves and one another be here.

At first, you will probably want and need skillful helpers to model this for you. As you are held and greenlighted by others from Presence, you will gradually become more able to greenlight your own thoughts and feelings by yourself. And once you begin giving yourself this deep listening, you will naturally, in turn, begin doing it for others as well. When you offer the gift of your Presence, honesty, and authenticity to others, everyone is enriched in the process. This is a very real, tangible way to help bring about an end to violence while bringing more love into the world, person by person, body by body, heart by heart. We will explore the self/other dynamic more fully in the chapter on Mutuality. Meanwhile, our next chapter will discuss some ways you can get conscious support for your own awakening process.