This fall I am training psychospiritual therapist students how to be a spiritual counsellor and guide to their clients through the lens of the Diamond Approach. My starting point will be to teach them how to hold their client’s experience so that Presence can emerge within their sessions. Let me provide a framework to help you understand how this deepening to Presence arises. This will help you nurture the dynamics of Presence as you hold your own experience but also hold those people you care for in your life and ministry. There are essentially three levels to being present: basic awareness, holding, and presence. Lets explore each one. a. Basic Awareness. When we practice basic awareness, there is a boundary between me, the listener, and the person I am listening to. Through my five senses, conversations and interactions with them, I can get a sense of what they are experiencing, that is, thinking, feeling, doing, and sensing within their body and soul. We can also practice basic awareness with ourselves. Once we have developed the ability to be self aware, we become aware that there are two parts to us, our “witnessing I” and what our witnessing I is noticing. We can notice our thoughts in our mind; We can notice our feelings in our heart; We can notice our actions created by our will; We can notice sensations within our physical bodies (contraction, expansion, energy, pain, relaxation, tightness, etc.). When we are practicing basic awareness, there is clear boundary between us or our witnessing I and what we are noticing or are aware of. When we are aware in this way, we are present to our experience, but only in an external way. What happens if we move to the next level of being present, a deeper way of being present to ourselves and others? b. Holding our Experience When we hold another person’s experience, we are now bringing that experience into our soul and holding it within us. The words, feelings, actions, and body signs of who we are listening is no longer external to us. The dynamics of our client’s soul is now being held within our soul. Holding in this way allows us to get a better sense of what our client is experiencing, what they are thinking, feeling, doing, and sensing within their body. In some ways, we experiencing within ourselves a little of what the other person is experiencing. This holding of our experience can also happen internally. Once we have developed basic awareness and are able to notice our feelings from the position of our witnessing “I”, our sense of “I” or soul can actually hold our experience in a deeper way without losing awareness. Through this ability to hold internally our experience, we begin to develop skills that allow us to discriminate our feelings and experiences with more clarity. For example, we realize that there are different types of anger or anxiety. We notice that we carry our feelings in different parts of our soul/body. For example, we experience doubt and often hate in our heads. We experience anxiety in our belly area while fear causes our heart to tighten. As we learn the ability to hold our experiences in our soul, our soul develops a deeper sensitivity that allows our experiences to open up and reveal more of their subtle contents and insights. When we are deeply present through holding our client’s experience, we are in a place of grace, nonjudgement and have positive regard for them. While there is a shared experience happening between us, there is a clear sense of me and client (not merged) in the midst of our joint experience. In this place of deep holding, there is no sense of inner reactivity and no sense of managing ourselves or client. We can simply be with our client’s experience without efforting and are often curious about what they are experiencing. Now, this deeper level of holding and being present to ourselves and others is actually a difficult place to be. The reason for this is that when you seek to hold your and other people experiences, you will soon notice lots of resistance inside, internal dynamics that keep you from experiencing certain aspects of life in any significant way. You will notice beliefs, behaviors, feelings, thinking patterns, pain-avoidance and pleasure-seeking strategies, relationship patterns, body numbing, and many other historical conditionings that keep your soul from holding aspects of your experience in any deep way. Within psychology, these are all examples of ego structures that shape and manage the experience of our soul and our life. You will also notice that when you are being shaped by these ego structures that you are less aware, more judgemental and less gracious, have less freedom, etc. In other words, you lose your ability to be present to your experience and the experience of others in any significant way when you are under the influence of these ego structures. Our ego structures become a major challenge in our ministry of counselling and spiritual guidance. Our client’s experiences often trigger our ego structures causing us to manage their experience in the same way we manage our own experience. When our client expresses intense anger with us, we will try to manage their anger to keep it within our comfort zone. If our client is nervous, it may trigger our own anxiety, and so we will manage our client’s anxiety in the same way we manage our own anxiety. This is why in pastoral counselling training we spent a lot time working at the safe and effective use of self as a counsellor and guide. We are helping students explore all their internal relationships with sadness, anger, joy, hate, anxiety, fear, love, desire, powerlessness, neediness, etc. As we work at holding and becoming deeply present to these potentially ego-distorted relationships, spiritual transformation happens causing our souls to be more spacious and free of our historical conditioning. The possibility of soul transformation happens as we and our clients enter a third level of being present, what the Diamond Approach calls the experience of Presence. c. Presence When we learn to hold our soul’s experience in a deep way, we start noticing certain aspects of our experience that are beyond our creation. In this place, we are very much in the present moment, a place of timelessness where there is no past, present, or future, just Now. Experiences arising from this place feel very alive and real, more alive and real than ordinary awareness. They feel holy and sacred. Some or all of our five senses are amped up: colours have more brightness, sounds are richer, smells hit us more deeply, tastes are more nuanced, and our touch is more sensitized. Our awareness within our soul is also more heightened and fuller helping us to notice more the subtle movements within our soul.
It is here in this place of Presence that we also become more aware of the qualities of Essence flowing in our soul like compassion, strength, joy, truth, love, inner support, peacefulness, and the power to simply be. When this sense of Presence arises, I associate it with a sense of Beingness. Within the Christian tradition, we called this experience of Presence the presence of God. All the qualities of Essence would be seen as the many fruits or manifestations of God’s spirit. What is significant about this place of Presence is that in this holy place we discover that the dynamics of Essence are seeking to minister to or interact with our soul’s experience. The dynamics of Essence seek to help our soul/body move toward greater freedom, healing, wholeness, truth, and oneness with Essence. The relevance of this is significant for both our personal spiritual journey but also for our client in our counselling or visiting ministry. By simply enter this place of Presence and supporting the dynamics of Essence within our soul or our client’s soul, we make it possible for Essence to minister to and transform the ego structures within the soul being attended to. Much, much more could be said but that gives you a framework outlining the three levels of being present: basic awareness, holding, and presence. Let me provide some wondering questions to help you test these insights with your own experience. Questions to Ponder:
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